There were Plumbeous Kites mating on the tree in front of the main building this morning. It was kind of interesting to watch the ordeal. The male performed a mating dance where it would stand face to face with the female bird and spread its wings. When the started mating the female would actually hang upside down on the branch.

After breakfast we went out to collect our urine traps and counted the number of types of insects there were in the vials. We created some posters and presented our finding.

In the evening we had a guest lecture from Lauren the grad student that’s been here for 9 months. It was very interesting to hear about her research and perspective on being here. I was especially interested in the technology that she used to conduct her research. I tried to come with a couple of different ideas in my head that would potentially help her with her research, specially the data collection and or implementing machine learning in her data processing process. I thought about potentially using her camera trap stations themselves as a communication network and relay the images between stations and eventually onto her computer. I thought about maybe applying image recognition algorithms to help her sort false triggers from images that actually have animals in them. Maybe this could turn into a senior design project. We’ll just have to see.

After the talk we went on a night hike and saw some pretty amazing stuff. We found an interesting species of cockroach that can hiss and spray a sticky substance. There were a bunch of really larger spiders. But the thing that was the most exciting for me was at the end of the hike we found a mother Pauraque nesting on 2 eggs. That really made my night.

-Randy