Day 3

Banana tree

Bird feeding station

   

On Tuesday we had an early morning, well early to me I'm NOT a morning person at all and breakfast here at the station every day is at 6:30!! The breakfast is a little different than back home not the typical cereal/oatmeal/pancakes but it is still good I enjoy it. Rodo gave us a tour of the garden and showed us the plants and trees. It was pretty cool we seen some sting less bees in the trunk of a tree. Later that afternoon Jonathan and I met with our mentor Margaret to start our project. 

   For our project we'll be going out in the field and learning how to ID birds in different forest habitat types, learning how to use field guides, observe and record the birds behavior and strata. With our data we should be able to learn if certain birds are only found in certain habitat or are found in several different habitats. We are also supposed to be comparing our data with past data and hopefully also to traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of tribal members. Margaret showed me how to use a bird book to identify the birds, I was discouraged at first because it took me awhile at first to even see the birds with my naked eye and than to top it off  the birds kept moving too fast for me to ID when I finally found them 😂  We seen some pretty ones by the bird feeder station and around the garden. I finally got the hang of it after awhile and was able to ID some of them. I thought it was a successful first project day. 

  Jessica, Mike and the other students who missed their flights arrived at the station that afternoon. The Ngabe-Bugle also arrived, they're an indigenous tribe from Panama. They are going to be tagging along with different group projects to learn new stuff but also share their knowledge. They're pretty nice people I just wish I could understand them so I can get to know them more. We had a meeting that evening and had formal introduction of everyone but I am terrible with names and forgot half the names. It was nice to hear the different languages everyone spoke and it's awesome that they're keeping their culture alive woot woot!

-Lil' Kim 😜