We finally arrived at Las Cruces Biological Station yesterday after about 20 hours of travelling. Only about 8 hours of actual flying time, followed by a 5 hour drive south from San Jose to our field station. Costa Rica is known for its terrible roads (its hard to read a tour book without seeing complaints about massive ‘craters’ even on the Pan-American highway. The Government apparently reasoned that they would prefer to pay for education than roads and a military (Costa Rica doesn’t have one – sort of a neat idea to reduce a deficit eh?). But we were amazed to find that at least ½ of the road between San Jose and San Vito has been paved, which made for a smooth 3 am arrival rather than the anticipated 5 am.
As soon as we pulled up, we heard kinkajous in the treetops near our research cabins. Kinkajous are small nocturnal tree-living mammals related to raccoons and coatis (but cuter most would say). They also have some neat ‘super powers’: prehensile tails that allow them to grip branches (using only the tail). They wrap these around themselves at night to stay warm. This species can also turn its feet completely backwards which means that it can walk equally well backward and forwards along tree branches.
We spent yesterday getting our field and lab gear ready (hummingbird banding equipment, microscopes – for looking at pollen tubes [more on that later], radio-frequency identification devices [RFID; for monitoring hummingbirds – again more on that]. In total, we brought about 1 ton of equipment down (we calculated 1.4 tones including our own body weight!).
All research projects have rough days, and today was one of those. We learned around 10 am today – after much fiddling – that the RFID readers that Evan (Masters student) had painstakingly built over the past 4 months are not working properly. This is after having tested them all in the lab in Corvallis!
The RFID readers are pretty cool (in theory) because they will allow us to get a picture of where hummingbirds are across the landscape without us always having to be there. RFID tags are used by pet owners to keep track of their dogs and cats. Essentially, a very small chip is implanted under the first few layers of skin. When the chip gets near a reader the bird ‘checks in’ – tells us who it is, and when they visited. If we can get enough of these out across the tropical landscape, we will have the first picture of how far all of these species of hummingbirds travel each day to get nectar. We can also test conservation-types of questions such as which hummingbird species (if any) typically cross gaps in the jungle caused by agriculture.
At the moment, we are all optimistic that the problem with the RFIDs can be fixed, but the issue does stretch the mind a bit. It is highly unlikely they were ALL damaged in transit (none work). Our best guess is that because the relative humidity is so much higher in Costa Rica, this is playing havoc with the micro-computer, or the antennas…Hopefully I’ll have better news on this tomorrow. Time to go to bed as we’re up at 5:15 to continue a pollination experiment.
