This morning at bird watching we saw a lot of the same birds we’ve been seeing all week. We also finally saw a keel-billed which was beautiful. We saw one chachalaca and heard three in total. They kept calling loudly over and over again and we could hear them all across the Las Cuevas clearing. I also finally got a great picture of one of the scarlet macaws.

We designed an experiment to look into the effects of hurricane-caused tree falls on the diversity of plants in the understory. When we went out to the tree fall gap though, we found that the gap was too thick to do our original plan. We wound up testing the richness (number of species) of the undergrowth near the trail in the gap and in the normal forest. We didn’t find any difference between the richness of the two areas which was surprising because of the clearly observable difference in density of the plants in the two areas. Along the path, we did come across a really cool crowned iguana just chilling on a tree.

We went on a night hike last night. We didn’t go very far, but we saw lots of cool stuff. There were some turtles in a pond, tons of cool spiders and katydids and crickets. We also found a gecko and an anole which were both pretty cool. I kept looking in the trees to maybe see some mammals or birds but there were none. It seems that the only time to see my taxon is in the morning.

(These are the pictures I took on the night hike.)