Tico time.

"No shoes, no shirt, no problems." That does tend to be the general feel around here, even during midterms.

I mean, when you get to celebrate the 21st birthday of a fearless, travel-tried friend at the field station's dining table--

--take your second midterm of the day with your stomach anchored firmly to the cool, hardwood floor while classic rock tunes from your professor's itunes bounce around the corner to where you're writing furiously--

--listen to your peers trying to woo a mottled owl from its perch behind the laundry greenhouse and rescue two moths the size of your hands from the library--

--it's really hard to worry about the essay and two species reports you still have to write, or all the packing you have to do, or anything at all. Apologies for the lack of posting, but things certainly picked up academically this past week, and we've all been pretty busy. We head out at 8 AM tomorrow for another field trip, so it'll be a few weeks before I'm back here for my homestay with access to internet again.

Time ain't no thang here. No cell phones, early mornings: laughing and singing and studying late in to the nights.

 And with that, I suppose I'm off again. Cheers, people--updates in a few weeks when I'm 21!. 

Ciao, Monteverde. See you in a few...

Entomology, midges, and color.

Being a biologist means appreciating everything. 

Getting distracted by -everything-. 

Being endlessly curious and endlessly fascinated. 

This trip is certainly driving those tenets of field biology home for me. Everything we -do- (okay, minus some plant taxonomy) seems captivating: and the people that I find myself with are equally as enthralled. As equally quirky. 

Like this fellow who gave us a tour of the Monteverde Butterfly Garden. 

How can I not instantly like someone who started a business on the premise of "luring people in" with a butterfly facade and then preaching to them about misconceptions against cockroaches and spiders?

We went as a group for insect diversity day and saw some pretty awesome buggies. 

And got some pretty unexpected laughs. This guy was full of it. 

"These caterpillars are like fourteen-year-old boys: mouths with big sacs attached to them."

He showed us some pretty awesome Harry Potter Spiders, and how scorpions glow under blacklights. 

Tarantulas, jewel scarab beetles of solid silver, gold and copper: butterflies emerging from chrysalises. 

All of us squealing and smiling, bug-eyed (haaaa). 

There was the camouflage table. 

With a ton of walking sticks. There was one that was almost, if not more than a foot long. 

They had an impressive collection. And Mr.Bug Man had even caught some live velvet worms, which are super rare and equally as adorable. 

He had some fun butterfly lore to share.

(Sweet chrysalis.)

Butterfly lore like these "88" butterflies: when locals see them, they are guaranteed a win if they run to the nearest corner and buy lottery ticket number 88. Amazing wing patterns. 

Another tidbit was about the Aztecs, who thought that butterflies were the souls of their ancestors.
Every Aztec household kept a butterfly plant close for that reason, and there were certain codes of conduct for people around the plant. Mmmm butterflies. 

There were three gardens at the center: representing three different elevations. The lowest elevation garden was full of owl butterflies and blue morphos, and our guide (a previous CIEE student spending a year in Costa Rica after graduation!!) told us that they referred to it as the "party garden" because of the fermented fruit that comprises the majority of the butterflies' diet.  

The party garden had some pretty awesome, victreebel-like flowers called Dutchman's Pipes, too.  

Amber kissing a butterfly! 

This one was called a Julia. They're everywhere in Monteverde. 

Maricela!

Glass-winged butterflies exhibit LEKKING behavior. How cool is that?! Biologists??

There were one or two familiar faces. 

Cute. 

They had an entire, glass-covered leaf cutter ant colony that we could examine at our leisure. 

After ecology last year, I really wish that I had had ant farms as a kid. For all you California argentine-ant-dorm-invader sufferers...protect your big, native ants. Did you know that a bunch of ant species BURY THEIR DEAD? Crazy, right? These guys are so cool. 

And I just thought this was great. The vans we took to and from the garden had some sweet light settings. 

So all the bug stuff was Thursday. For the majority of yesterday and today, we've all been conducting field projects and gearing up for a presentation -on- the data we collected yesterday that's worth ten percent of our grade. Pretty legit. My project was on leaf galls in melastomataceae leaves. Which was not nearly as interesting as my friend and peer Janessa's sense of style. I love this girl. 

I couldn't help but take pictures of her water bottle. It's a tiny snapshot of the whole: this girl really knows how to get creative with color. She's got a number of fantastic tye-dye dresses and shirts, wears rings on every finger, necklaces, anklets, bracelets--stone, glass, metal, leather, ceramic, plastic, hemp: you name it, she's wearing it. And it all fits, all the time. She's a surprise every morning. Looking at whatever she's wearing makes me want to run to the nearest craft box and go to town. 

So that's that! And now there's another Saturday night waiting for me. 

Salsa maybe, night hike and movie definitely. 

Janessa ordered me to look at the fortune she had taped to the base of her bottle yesterday during our study, and reminded me yet again why I love young, crazy conservation biologists; and why I love counting myself among them. Optimism, passion, and appreciation really count for something here. People really give you a lot of respect for your spunk, your knowledge, and of course the quirk that drives you to spend hours picking apart rotting bark for beetle larvae. 

Write soon! We only have until Thursday of next week here: after that we'll be on the Caribbean slope, backpacking the days away. Can't wait. 

Cheers!

Rain, shade grown coffee, and quetzal fodder.

Happy one month anniversary in Costa Rica, CIEE! Did that go by quickly or what?

       Not a moment to lose. I plan on dragging people out of bed to come hiking at five; that leaves me a good half hour to check over my exam and finish this up before I head out. Certainly capitalizing on my early morning preferences here. 

       The last three days here have been increasingly homework-oriented, which is good, because I really feel like I haven't been in school since ochem ended last May, for various reasons. It's so easy to be motivated to work when you're studying topics like insect diversity, life zones, canopy layers (just like the good old days with Spin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CulERHkwsTo ), and more interestingly to a non-economics/non-social science major, coffee production and agriculture in global markets. 

The picture tour begins now. 

After a "standard"  day of lectures and Spanish on Monday, Tuesday hailed dark and rainy. We were told that we would be teaching lecture (different plant growth zones/types in the forest) and that we were to use our new-learned plant identification skills to go out and find samples to aid in our presentations. Some of us used this as an excuse to go crashing over mud-slick rocks and leaf-littered slopes to climb back inside the strangler fig. Finally got to use my "Rite in Rain" notebooks in the rain, and finished my 200 page journal that I started February 8th. Probably a record for me. 

After Tuesday's adventures, which included a long afternoon hike to the TV towers, Wednesday found us going on another field trip to coffee farms. We stopped to look down on San Luis and listen to Alan lecture for a bit. 

I hope to do my month homestay in this farming valley. You can't see it, but in the valley, there's a huge waterfall. It'll be an hour walk to the field station from here. Want want want. 

The first coffee farm we visited was a small, 4 ha, shade-grown coffee and inter-cropping venture owned by a man named Eugenio. I was particularly excited about these wild avocados: apparently they're quetzal and bellbird favorites. There are a few near the station, and Johel says the bellbirds should be arriving to breed soon. Excitement. 

Eugenio grows and harvests naranja, papaya, bananas, plantains, corn, tomatoes, lettuce, sugarcane, palmito, and of course, coffee. As a wannabe farmer girl with limited knowledge about organic California small farms and large factory operations or industrial farms in the midwest, I have to say that learning about sustainable farming in the tropics was a beautiful thing. 

Beautiful -and- delicious. The bananas here are so small and sweet. Omnomnom. 

Some life goals: make myself a leather journal, backpack, machete sheath, and belt. Also to be like Eugenio and try to impress upon the next generation the importance of staying close to the land.

 I hope I'll always have chickens and gardens. Planning on it. 

A coffee/corn grinder in front of a sugarcane bundle. Eugenio had this huge contraption for stripping the sugarcane of its pulp and outer lingin, leaving a sweet, thick juice behind. He produces a molasses-like sugar from the cane...it was delicious. 

And then there was the coffee. Shown here drying after de-fruiting. 

Coffee berries. Branko keyed us in on stripping the beans of their outer fruit and popping them in your mouth to taste the thin, gummy fruit layer before spitting them back out. 

Eugenio. Super shiny eyes. I love small farmers. 

Sugarcane!

Jealous cat is jealous of our bean, cheese, and chicken empanadas. 

Eugenio's mother served us some of their home-grown, fresh-roasted coffee. I've started drinking the coffee black down here because it's just too delicious to pollute with anything else. Mmmm. 

Farm hands. 

Fantastic mugs. 

After Eugenio, we spent the afternoon at the other CIEE location (for the Sustainability program) discussing the merits and setbacks of free market, fair-trade, organic, sustainable, and something I'd never heard of--direct trade--agriculture. Having never taken an economics class in my life, I really appreciated it. 

The other CIEE location. Vibrant, quirky place. 

With Taira, the lazy white wolf with piercing blue eyes. What a fierce and noble beast. 

She likes empanadas, too. 

Back to the discussion of coffee: many people are anti-fair-trade down here, saying that it's mostly a facade and an ineffective business model that doesn't make much of a difference for small farmers. To be certified organic or fair trade, small farmers in Costa Rica have to pay -thousands- of dollars, and maybe even hundreds more each year for inspections and the like. My view of feel-good-green labels has certainly changed after being down here: and I really encourage anyone who is really interested in social responsibility in agriculture to get out there and get to know the facts. 

This is Alan next to Ken Landers, an energetic entrepreneur and ex-lawyer who has started Thrive Farmers: a direct trade operation that splits profits with the farmer 50/50, and takes coffee directly from the farm to the consumer. Check him out at http://www.thrivefarmers.com/ : direct trade is certainly a great idea in principle, and an even better discussion-sparker. 

Thrive farmers does make -quite- delicious coffee. If you're in Monteverde, be sure to visit! 

And with that, I've given my friends an extra 20 minutes of sleep and must be off. The sky is starting to lighten.

Cheers, all.