This morning I got up early to bird again and saw a lot of similar birds to the day before. The scarlet macaws are still gorgeous and the Montezuma oropendola call is still really cool. We heard a few toucans but couldn’t see them.

This morning we had to pee into falcon tubes for an experiment. The first time I overfilled it, but then I poured too much out which was pretty tragic. I had to chug a liter and a half of water so that I could fill up the rest of the tube (chug team practice actually comes in handy?!). We placed the tubes along some of the trails along with water tubes to compare how many bugs we catch in a nitrogen-rich environment in the canopy and on the forest floor. Along the way, we saw a coral snake which was really cool and thankfully just slithered away from all of us.

This afternoon we went into the Las Cuevas cave. On the way in we saw a bunch of cave swallows. In the cave, we saw a few different bats and lots of tiny arthropods around the cave. A lot of the arthropods were white as you’d expect in a cave with no light. There were also a few smashed pots and other Mayan artifacts. The mix of biology and archaeology and geology found in these caves is really cool.

After caving, I sat and watched the birds. We saw a big king vulture as well as a bunch of turkey vultures. The social flycatchers were sitting on a rope and flying out to catch bugs and then returning to the branch which is a really cool behavior I read about before coming. Apparently, I didn’t care to actually take a picture of them though.

Veronica, Ceyda, and I walked back to where we found the colorful bugs to return them this evening. The bugs I work with are host specific, so it doesn’t seem impossible that these ones could be too. Sadly I can’t keep them in a jar forever and I definitely can’t take them out of Belize, so instead, we took them home. We did see an amazing sunset which was, as usual here, surprisingly early (6:30).