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).

We started the day early with birding and we saw so many birds. There were plumbeous kites, social flycatchers, Montezuma oropendolas, melodious blackbirds, and Red-lored parrots. This is a picture of the tree most of the birds chill in, or at least the one closest to the station.

We went out hiking before and after lunch to set up camera traps. We put half of them on trails and half of them off trail which was difficult, but also pretty fun. I spent a lot of the hike whistling at the birds. I had a great time imitating the calls often rather poorly and hearing them seem to whistle back even though they were just repeating their call regardless of me. It was amazing to see how quickly the forest became super difficult to get through. Along the way, we saw a bunch of these small red bugs that looked like the bugs I work with in my lab red-shouldered soapberry bugs). They were very small and bright red, but we had no clue what they were because we don’t have any books or someone in charge of knowing stuff about true bugs (Hemipterans – an order of insects).

At one of the camera traps, we saw this huge leaf cutter ant colony. It was maybe 20 feet long. We were busy gawking at it when all of the sudden we realized there was a giant boa constrictor behind us. We stood watching it for a while, it was definitely very uncomfortable.

At the last camera trap before lunch, we found these two big bugs on a leaf. They seem to be true bugs (like what I study in my lab at school) but they were way bigger than any bug I’d seen and super brightly colored. I asked everyone who works here if they knew what it was and they all said no which makes me very excited about how rare they are. Sadly the only insect book we have doesn’t even include the order these bugs are in and without internet, I have no way of finding out more about them. For the time being, I’ll just have to settle for measurements and pictures with Sam’s really nice camera. (I have been unofficially anointed as the Hemipteran taxon expert.)

Tonight we had a lecture from Raphael Montenaro, the head of FCD, the NGO that runs Las Cuevas. He talked to us a bunch about how they protect and monitor the forest. It was crazy how much work his group was doing that normally would be expected of the government. I also gave my lecture on tropical soils tonight which I felt better about than expected.