Bats

the first week of field work with the students was…in a word... slow. granted, they are just learning the research and for most of them, it is their first exposure to any type of field work – but the vegetation analysis took over twice the amount of the time that it normally does. then 2 of the girls scream when they see spiders...and we are in the tropics so there are a lot of spiders. hopefully this will be a good learning experience about field work for all them and not scare them off from it.

my hope that they would inject some energy into these last weeks of research and take some of the burden off of me unfortunately did not hold true as i find myself not only leading my field research team and doing the research, but also guiding these students and planning where they eat, their transportation, how they will spend their off days…i don’t know where my reserve energy is coming from, but somehow i keep putting one foot in front of the other! it is fun to have the students around though and share with them what i have been doing all these months. maybe it would have made more sense for them to come at the beginning of the research though rather than the end…

we did 2 sites at once and i spent most of my time at the site with my advisor and students. i missed my field team that was on the other site! they were very and said that it was boring without me over there. although we have definitely had our trials and tribulations, i have been lucky with the people that are on my team. it will be hard to say goodbye to some of them.

one night we did some bat netting and caught 4 bats – 3 false vampires and 1 horseshoe bat. basically, you set up what is called a mist net which is about 3 or 4 meters high and 20 meters in length. the netting in the bat is so fine that the bats are not able to echolocate it and fly into the net. then they have to be detangled to get them loose to take measurements and identify the species. in the one picture it looks like the bat is screaming, but it was just biting the cloth bag. don't worry, they weren't being hurt - but they are probably scared to death. it was really neat to see these little guys up close, but handling them is not something that i would like to attempt myself :)


we also had an interesting conversation with owner of the organic coffee farm which i think was quite eye-opening for the students. he is a younger guy that has married 3 times (“like you people do” says one of my field assistants – meaning they think americans get married and divorced all the time) once was to a german lady. he used to be a lawyer, but moved to his family farm 10 years ago to grow organic coffee. i asked him my series of 10 survey questions about their management practices (pesticides, herbicides, etc), thoughts on coffee certifications, mammal observations, etc. he was a bit belligerent wanting to know exactly why i wanted answers to these questions, what was the purpose of my research and how did these questions actually relate to that. then he started in on the certifications. a lot of the coffee certifications now are starting to incorporate a social consciousness element into their requirements. the laborer’s quarters are required to have access to clean water, they must be paid a certain amount, and they must have access to education among other criteria. “you people come here preaching education, but you have no idea about this society. if the laborers are educated, who will work in the farms? how many farmers do you have left in the united states? everyone cannot have an office job, then who would do the farm work? machines cannot do this work.” these people are basically slaves and oppressed by the society for cheap labor. unfortunately, this is not the first time that i have heard this argument from the farmers. and this farmer’s laborers quarters were appalling. they were outside of the long driveway to his beautiful gated house and almost on top of the oxen stables which smelled horrible. there were 3 little boys that lived there with their parents and worked in the farm. this coffee is sold as certified organic.


on a lighter note, we took the students to the tibetan buddhist temple which was again amazing. it is really a site to see. we happened to go on a day when there was some sort of event, so the temples were full of monks and visitors. we had lunch at the one of the places that serves food on the banana leaves that you have to wash with water. it was hilarious watching one of the students that is a germaphobe trying to figure out how to handle that one : )

well, this week is my last week of field research here! yay!!! i can see the finish line and i am definitely on the home stretch now.