Field trip to Tarcoles River and Cararra National Park

Crocodiles on the Tarcoles river

Yesterday, Thursday 23^rd, was a day full of FEX work. We had two brief lectures in the morning and then the rest of the day was devoted to finishing out TE FEX which was due at midnight. It was only slightly stressful considering how long it’s been since I’ve had to do a lab write up. But now it’s done and out of the way.



Scarlet Macaws



Garbage at the beach by the Tarcoles



It feels like we’re always getting up at the crack of dawn, but that’s not the case, as I found out today. It was a rough morning as we got up pre-crack of dawn for the field trip. We had breakfast at 5.30 am so we could leave by 6.30 for our trip to Tarcoles River and Cararra National Park. The first stop on this field trip was the Tarcoles River, where we took a boat tour and saw quite a few crocodiles, lots of birds (egrets, hawks, herons and scarlet macaws), a few basilisks and loads of trash. The Tarcoles River basin is known to be one of the most polluted areas, even though it serves as the watershed for almost half of Costa Rica. It was really sad to see all that trash, and we even heard that the beach had just been cleaned up. We had two field lectures in the morning when we were at the river, one for Tropical Ecology on mangroves and one for Natural Resource Management on the pollution of the Tarcoles River basin. While we were on the beach for our second lecture it started to rain, but luckily we were required to bring waterproof notebooks, so I kept taking notes as the rain came down. It got a bit hard to focus on the lecture when I was able to write on paper that was dripping wet without it warping and falling apart. This could be a problem since it is the rainy season and we’ll probably have to take notes in the rain quite often. We were all ready for lunch by the time we got to Cararra since we had eaten breakfast over six hours before. We then went on our standard orientation hike in the forest, which is a transitional wet to dry forest, although today it was more of a wet forest. Probably the best decision I made all day was to wear my rain boots for the hike, as we had to walk through small streams on the trail and muck through a bunch of deep mud. We saw some more white faced capuchin monkeys and a green and black dart frog. This field trip, unlike our others so far, was just a day trip so we got to go back to the center and take nice cold showers after our full day of activities.



Dragonfly at Cararra