5:57 am: Up, God knows why. Athena and Daryl were up first, I’m waiting outside for my turn in the bathroom. Dick has joined us on the deck. It’s cool and rainy, everything is wet, all the stuff from yesterday, the blankets and pillows have a dampness to them. There was lighting last night, the moon must’ve been out as light still came in through the skylight in the room, despite the clouds. The sound is of rain and ceaseless dripping, one birdsong. Puddles stand in the ATV tracks in the lawn; I can’t imagine wearing anything but rubber boots.
    I keep thinking about the Amazon exhibit at the Aquarium, but you’d have to set all the poisonous animals free, lower the temperature, and increase the rain. “Well, we did sign up to go to a rainforest.” Hopefully we have a clear night to look at the stars while we’re here.

7:06 am: After breakfast. This book is falling apart. Breakfast was of gallo pinto (beans and rice mixed together this time, last night they were separate), scrambled eggs, white bread, good coffee with mucho azucar. We brush our teeth without rinsing with water to avoid getting anything (ie. amoebic dysentery). The shower curtain has a fleur-de-lis pattern for some reason. The eaves of the station are so wide that everything inside is in semi-darkness. Dick’s putting up a clothes line; nothing dries anyway.

11:06 am: Back after “orientation hike”, it insane rained, the other group is still missing. Ear flaps and a front pocket are good features in a rain poncho. Sharing binoculars when the strap is still around my neck is difficult. When the heavy rain started, Dick lead us and Petrona went to the back of the group to keep an eye on the last people; me, namely. It turned rather “slip’n’slide”, I lost my footing going uphill and did what you’re not supposed to do and grabbed a root to keep from falling, there was no snake lurking this time. My boots began to fill with the water running down my legs. Soon I could feel the water sloshing through my socks and over my feet with every step, rather like wading through warm tidal pools on the beach, not entirely unpleasant. I should invent a one way drain valve for rubber boots. I tried to pour the water out of my boots while wearing them, but most of it was absorbed into my socks. In the mud, you can see where other people have slipped, and you know not to step at the top of their skid marks, the bottom is usually better, but if you stay in one place too long, the soil underneath you liquefies. The ledges created by roots of trees are good places to get a foothold. This is a popular technique, as many roots are imperceptibly broken under the water, as you find out as the root gives way and you fall. Thunder was sounding as we made it back to the station.
    It was the cliché pouring-water-out-of-the-boots scene on the patio, with the wringing of water like weak tea out of the socks. I had a layer of soap on my glasses as an anti-fog measure, which worked until the rain washed the soap off. I’ll bring a fragment of soap along with next time to re-apply. I have a bug bite on the back of my right hand. Also, damn horsefly. (I had a horsefly attack my head early in the walk, I didn’t know what it was when it first came at me, I thought it was a large beetle, the kind you see bringing down small mammals in nature documentaries. Dick caught it and it was the largest fly I’d ever seen, a good inch long.)

    All biologists are morbid, we have a collection of dead bugs on our table and someone nailed a (long dead and mummified) frog to our door frame.

8:29 pm: Sitting in the “classroom” writing by flashlight and one distant compact fluorescent bulb. Had a lunch of gallo pinto, beef (might have been pork, meat attached to bones anyway), a salad of cabbage, tomato, and cilantro in a sweet vinaigrette, spaghetti, and fruit.
    We did the Palm Lab, I ran a 60m transect line into the forest under arching trees, major vines, and fallen logs. I got to the end and heard something moving through the undergrowth nearby, went back quickly. Worked with Athena and Sarah, we get distracted easily: “Oh, a damselfly!”, and a little brown 1-inch lizard hopping along. We saw another morpho butterfly and came across a lizard, Coryptophanes cristatus, on a tree trunk, changing colours like a chameleon. At the end of another 60m transect, the three of us were standing in the woods, having counted all the palm trees within 3m or so of our line, and Sarah helpfully rolls up the tape. I then ask “How do we find our way back to the path without the tape?” We head in the general direction we came from and are fine.
    We finished the lab late and walked back with Calixto and Petronas. Ran into Dick who recruited us to set up mist nets; it involved lots of standing in the forest holding poles while someone tries to untangle the net. The vertical poles were also tied to nearby trees or anchored to the ground. We decided to tie flagging tape to the string so we wouldn’t clothesline ourselves when walking by. Sarah then clotheslines herself. We closed the nets for the night and walked back to the station, having a conversation about superhero underpants. No rain.
    I showered when we got back to the station, wrote some of the lab, and had a dinner of gallo pinto, tortillas, tomatoes and cucumber, fried eggs with green beans which, in the dim light, we initially thought was some kind of meat.
        “Quel tipo de carne esta?”
        “Huevos.”
        “Ross, it’s not meat, it’s eggs.”
        “Oh, I like it a lot better now that I know what it is.”
We also had hot chocolate and coffee, I mixed the two.
    During dinner, we were talking about stupid animals, Dick shares a story about a bird that got its foot caught in its nictitating membrane, and subsequently drowned in its water dish, and how someone managed to publish a scientific paper on the subject.
    The boards that make up the floor of the station are thin, aging, and suspended over widely spaced rafters. Daryl has already broken through in one place, Chantal was next. We started to keep a running tally on the blackboard, along with how many times people fell down in the field. We’re up at 5:30 tomorrow morning to unroll the mist nets and start the bird lab.