Exhausted.
We climbed an enormous Carapa tree today and removed about twenty pounds of epiphytes from the lower part of the inner crown. The bags were lowered using thin, twiny banana plantation cord called cocaleca. It tangles too easily to be really useful, but it is cheap.
Rebecca and I are still getting over the fear of falling which plagues beginners in the canopy. Today was better than days past, but things are not running smoothly yet. Jumping off the tree is getting a little easier for me but not really for Rebecca, and moving around in the canopy over one hundred feet above the ground is usually neither straightforward nor simple. We're working on it. We've been climbing solo for a couple of days now, and I'm feeling pretty confident in my knot-tying abilities.
We are also overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work required for this project. Tonight is Andy's birthday party at a restaurant in town, so we will get a break from the endless lab work which consumes most of our evenings. We'll be leaving about six bags of work in the lab, though. Six bags, or about 15 hours of both of us meticulously sifting through moss mats in search of small plants, trimming leaves and running them through the machine which measures their surface area, cutting twigs and dropping them into bags which we number, entering numbers into our Excel sheet, setting up Berlese funnels to collect canopy arthropods, drying samples in the oven, weighing dried samples, and generally running around like startled geckos trying to figure out what, exactly, we're going to do next.
Our data, however, are looking quite lovely. We're really collecting some great information that will be useful and relevant for a long time. Cat is excited for our project and still providing a great deal of support. If we keep up the current pace it seems like we will have something of quality to show Jack at the end of the quarter, and possibly the foundations of a publishable study-one which will be worth the all the dirt and bugs I've eaten and the daily adrenaline rushes which keep me on my toes (or rope, as the case may be).
Right now, I'm going to take a nap.
We climbed an enormous Carapa tree today and removed about twenty pounds of epiphytes from the lower part of the inner crown. The bags were lowered using thin, twiny banana plantation cord called cocaleca. It tangles too easily to be really useful, but it is cheap.
Rebecca and I are still getting over the fear of falling which plagues beginners in the canopy. Today was better than days past, but things are not running smoothly yet. Jumping off the tree is getting a little easier for me but not really for Rebecca, and moving around in the canopy over one hundred feet above the ground is usually neither straightforward nor simple. We're working on it. We've been climbing solo for a couple of days now, and I'm feeling pretty confident in my knot-tying abilities.
We are also overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work required for this project. Tonight is Andy's birthday party at a restaurant in town, so we will get a break from the endless lab work which consumes most of our evenings. We'll be leaving about six bags of work in the lab, though. Six bags, or about 15 hours of both of us meticulously sifting through moss mats in search of small plants, trimming leaves and running them through the machine which measures their surface area, cutting twigs and dropping them into bags which we number, entering numbers into our Excel sheet, setting up Berlese funnels to collect canopy arthropods, drying samples in the oven, weighing dried samples, and generally running around like startled geckos trying to figure out what, exactly, we're going to do next.
Our data, however, are looking quite lovely. We're really collecting some great information that will be useful and relevant for a long time. Cat is excited for our project and still providing a great deal of support. If we keep up the current pace it seems like we will have something of quality to show Jack at the end of the quarter, and possibly the foundations of a publishable study-one which will be worth the all the dirt and bugs I've eaten and the daily adrenaline rushes which keep me on my toes (or rope, as the case may be).
Right now, I'm going to take a nap.
posted by cody @ 12:53 PM
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