6:29 am: Bird lab, woke up at 5:15 to a chorus of watch alarms going off, out in the field by 5:30, nets were up quickly and we were back at the station. We netted two birds in the 6:00 run, now sitting around. The weather is clear and sunny, although it felt cold this morning. My shoulder is ringed with bug bites, where the seam of my shirt falls, as I discovered last night. There was a lizard on the station today and I saw a column of termites making a deep tunnel in the ground. I took a photo of the sunrise and had a photo taken of me releasing one of the birds.

7:52 am: Had hot chocolate, coffee, Gallo Pinto and pancakes. Bees were swarming around the breakfast table and I didn’t have the sense to figure out they were attracted to the bottle of honey until after I put my hand over the lid, getting a fistful of bees. Luckily they were stingless. One bee found the dollop of honey on my pancakes, landed on it, and drowned in a quick and sticky death. I moved it aside and kept eating.
    Someone found a baby turtle. I processed a Sulphur-bellied Flycatcher, got all of its measurements, then noticed that it had already had its leftmost tail feather clipped, indicating that it had already been caught. Then it escaped from my hand. We also netted a Rufous Flycatcher. The weather’s holding, despite Diane’s prediction that it would rain within two hours. I put my pants out in the sun to dry anyway.

9:25 am: Found a butterfly, Lycorea cleobaea atergatis, male, got a photo, has fuzzy cerci-like appendages on posterior abdominal segment, indicating sex. Dick: “Want to see some interesting male organs?” They serve as dissipaters of a chemical attractant. It flew into the station and was making a racket as it tried to fly out through a plastic skylight. Dick was quick with the butterfly net.

12:02 pm: Came across a Central American Whiptail Lizard in the woods before the hill as we were walking up to close the bird nets. We also caught a fish.

7:00 pm: After dinner, had Gallo Pinto, cabbage and tomato salad, green bean omelette (again), chicken, rice, and a bread-pudding type dessert from Petrona. Lunch today was Gallo Pinto, chicken, potato salad containing beets, hardboiled eggs, and something we couldn’t identify. Lemonade at lunch, orange drink at dinner.
    We did the nested quadrat lab this afternoon; it’s been the worst so far. We measured off sections of forest 1 square meter in area, then 10 square meters, then 100 square meters and had to count every plant within that area. At least it wasn’t raining. Primary rainforest is incredibly dense. Vines, some with thorns, interlace everything, tripping you up and wrapping around you. We had to categorize everything we saw into “trees”, “shrubs” (anything with secondary growth and under 1m), “forbs” (herbaceous), and “graminoids” (grasses). Sarah was assigned to estimate percent coverage of graminoids on the ground, and of canopy coverage above us.
    In the madness of our suffering we came up with nicknames. Sarah is “Snakebait the Mathematician” as, when we were trying to add 13 and 17, she rationalized that it was like adding 14 and 16, which was like adding 15 and 15, and was therefore 30. I’m “Dragoncatcher the Magician”, from capturing dragonflies with my bare hands and pulling out “scrap” pieces of flagging tape from my pockets which turned out to be 10m long. Athena couldn’t think of a name.
    My arms are itchy; the entire forearm turned red, partly from bug bites, partly from being bathed in the chemical soup that washes off the forest during rainstorms.
    Our secondary forest plot was more dense than usual, but at least we could move through it as we repeated the procedure and counted every plant within 100 square meters. I found coral fungus, pink and peach. We also found a small Macrocybe titans, a mushroom that can grow to 1m in diameter.
    After returning I took a shower, actually being desperate enough from the itching to stand directly under the hard stream of cold water. I then smeared anti-itch cream on my calves, shoulders, and forearms. My arms then felt like they were burning, which is what happens when you put menthol into open wounds. I washed it off and went for dinner.
    This morning, during the periods in the bird lab when were waiting around, I sketched the station. Took pictures of the birds and the surrounding are, but forgot to get a photo inside the primary forest, might’ve been too dark anyway.

10:00 pm: We went out to look at the stars, Vega, Altere, we saw one shifting its colours. We were wide-eyed students in the middle of an open field, watching the night sky through a parting of the clouds, like curtains being drawn open on a stage. Flashlights were off to allow our eyes to get used to the dark, heads bent back, aware of each other only through the proximity of our voices, talking about memories of summer camp and snippets of star poems. Dick came to join us, using the beam of a flashlight pointed upwards as an interstellar pointer, showing us the constellations.
    The horses came back for the night, returning from wherever their wanderings had taken them. They were startling in their abruptness, large animals materializing from somewhere in the dark. We headed back into the station when our necks got too sore. The cockroaches are back in the dorm, including “George” with the distinctively broken carapace. Sarah switched to a top bunk away from the shelving unit they like to climb.
    As the deadline for turning in our lab write-up looms closer, everyone is feeling more concerned. There is much co-operation and information sharing, as well as a welcoming of distraction when it comes.