Best Compliment Ever

On Saturday we stopped by my host grandmother's house and she had all of this great stuff for me to try: sugar cane and guaba.  To eat sugar cane you peel off the outer bark and chew on the inside so all the sugary juice ends up in your mouth and guaba you eat the white fuzzy part around the seeds and then spit out the seeds.  So while we were standing outside eating these wonderful but messy foods my host grandmother told me she thinks I'm part costa rican! My host mom's response to this was that she would find me a costa rican boyfriend to convince me to stay (sorry Carson).  These things were so great to hear from my Costa Rican family.

Sugar cane

Guaba (ignore the caption in the picture, guava is a different fruit)

Anyway, the rest of my weekend was uneventful cause of unfortunate rain.  My sisters decided I needed to be educated on the twilight movies so we watched all of them in one day.  Then we just hung out for the rest of the weekend.  I leave this family on Saturday and I'm really not looking forward to it. Hopefully I will get the chance to come back to Costa Rica in the near future.

This Week End

So Friday started off with everyone in my host family being sick, including me.  My eldest host sister had been sick earlier in the week and we all got it. Yay!  But runny noses didn't stop us, we all went to school, work, etc. like normal.

Then on Saturday we went to a farm that is owned by the scouts program that my middle sister is part of (it's like boy scouts only for both genders).

After leaving there we went to La Selva which is the biological reserve that my host dad works at.  When we were there, I found out that a bunch of other family members work there too.  So we went on a hike and got lost and then found our way back out!  I had a great time, my oldest sister was less than thrilled about walking through the forest and getting her hiking boots dirty (I thought hiking boots were supposed to get dirty, but what do I know).  The only little mishap was when I was taking a picture while standing on a bridge and the cap to the camera lens fell in the river and got swept away.  Oops (fingers crossed that I will be able to find another one online).

Blue jeaned poison dart frog.

These are everywhere. 

The macaw was hiding.

Howler monkey

I have been trying the whole time I've been here to get a picture of a hummingbird.  Finally had success!

Then Sunday was a lazy day, and we just hung out at the house.  For a while my host dad and I were sitting out on the front patio and I was taking pictures of birds while he told me what they all were (of course I don't really remember what they were, but the pictures came out good).

But I got a stomach bug Sunday afternoon so that was kinda a bad way to end the weekend.  Now I'm back at Tirimbina getting ready to analyze more bat calls.  I just found out the way I was doing the analysis was wrong and now I have to start over! Yay!

How to Analyze Bat Calls

1. Find a program to use.  Now there is a large selection: Avisoft, Bat Acoustics, Raven, Analook Batsounds etc. and the prices range from free to hundreds of dollars.  If you have PC the options are endless, for Mac's you are much more limited. I chose Raven, cause it is free and works on Mac.
2. Open the sound file in the program.  These files are huge (2GB for an hour and a half of sound).
3. Scroll through the file until you find something that is a different color than the background (you can change the colors on most programs).  I have been using a gray background with the calls are darker gray, because that is what is preset.
4. Use the program to measure the length of the calls and the peak frequency (the frequency when the call is the strongest).  Use these numbers to guess the species based off articles other people have written.  My guess for the one above is Lasiurus ega, in the family Vespertilionidae.
5. When you find something weird that doesn't remotely resemble a bat call, ignore it.
6. Count all of the calls for every species until you get through all of your recordings.  Right now I have done 11.5 hours out of 204 hours that I have on my computer.

Now you too can spend your days counting black dots on a computer screen.  In case you are curious the Lasiurus ega looks like this:

And now that I have wasted time making this blog post, I will go back to counting.  Wish me luck!

Rio Sarapiqui

There is this really rare bird called a Great Potoo, it looks kinda like an owl and its call sounds like a bark.  Any way, there is one that lives on the way to my host sister's school so we all went to look at.  My bird loving host parents were really excited, so I guess it was a really big deal.

I didn't have a zoom lens with my, but here it is.

This saturday we went and spend the day with my host dad's family.  He is one of 12 and I was told that there are 18 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren.  I only met about half of the family.  A bunch of them all live on the same street with the parents so people just wander from house to house.  They all live near the river so we all went down to cool off and have some fun.

Sol and Stephany all ready for the water.

One of the cousins jumping into the water.

Someone's dog, his name is Tigre (tiger in Spanish).

Heart shaped rock

What kind of picnic would it have been without fresh, hot coffee?

Tracks from an iguana

There were a ton of birds that my host dad pointed out to me.  I don't remember their names, but here are some pictures.

My New Career Plan

I have decided that I am now going to drop out of school and design t-shirts for a living just like the Life Is Good people.  Ok, so maybe not, but I am excited to share with you all the t-shirt I designed.  Every year the ACM Costa Rica students design a shirt for their group and some how I ended up in charge.  This happened after I drew a really bad sloth on the white board so I have no idea why everyone trusted me to figure this out, but I'm glad they did.  On Tuesday I shared the much better design with everyone from my group and they all loved it!

So this will be on the back of the t-shirt and the front will say ACM Costa Rica 2013.  Five of the pictures are mine and three are from other students and they were all taken within the first month of the program so each picture is special for everyone.  Now at least 19 people (more if our professors get t-shirts) will be wearing something that I designed!