No, I have not been eaten by a bear

Hello faithful blog readers,

I'm sorry for being MIA for so long! I promise that this post will get you up to speed on what I've been doing for the past 3 weeks. The week before ISP started was our finals week and was full of exams, presentations, papers, and lots and lots of stress. That was when I hit my requisite "I'm-done-with-study-abroad-and-I-just-want-to-go-home" point, and I was not excited for ISP at all. Things started to look up once I actually got here and settled in, but it was really difficult to leave my host family and everything I've known for the past two months in Quito.

I'm staying at the Maquipucuna Reserve, which is owned by the Maquipucuna Foundation (www.maqui.org if you want to check it out), an NGO devoted to conservation and the like. The reserve is located about two hours to the northwest of Quito and is absolutely enormous and gorgeous. There is one small part that has the lodge and trails, but the majority of the reserve is protected, untouched forest. The reserve is located in the cloud forest ecosystem which is home to a lot of birds, plants, insects, and mammals including the spectacled (or Andean) bear, the only bear native to South America.

Spectacled bears have a mostly vegetarian diet, and they especially like this little fruit called an "aguacatillo" which means little avocado in Spanish. The forest around the reserve is full of these trees, and the bears will climb all the way up the tall, skinny trunk to get to the tiny little fruits at the top. My project is basically to try and figure out why the bears eat more in certain stands of trees than in others. To do this I'm making four 30 m x 30 m plots in different parts of the forest and measuring the DBH (diameter at breast height) of all the trees in the plot in order to figure out the density and basal area of trees in the area. I'm also measuring how much tree cover there is in the plot as well as assessing the understory vegetation.

I originally wasn't thrilled about measuring trees for an entire month, but it's actually pretty cool to be out in the field doing research completely on my own. Even if I don't get any significant results I'm already learning a lot from this, like how to properly use a machete, how to eyeball if a tree has a DBH of less than 10 cm (I don't measure ones that are less than that), and how to tell if a tree is an aguacatillo based on the smell of its bark alone. I'm also getting to help out with the camera traps, setting them up and revising them, and it's been cool learning how to do that as well.

I haven't seen any bears yet, but I do have some other fun anecdotes from my two weeks here:

1. My advisor, Santiago, drove me here from Quito on the first day of ISP both to introduce me to people here and help me get settled in and put up another camera. That meant that on my first day here we skipped lunch and walked 5 hours in order to set up the camera. Not exactly the introduction to ISP that I was expecting.

2. On Thursday and Friday of last week Santiago, Cristian (Santiago's assistant) and I were in Yunguilla, which is another reserve that borders Maquipucuna, to revise the two cameras there and set up a new one. We "camped out" on Thursday night in someone's house (a farmer who wasn't living there at the moment) and they taught me to play Cuarenta, an Ecuadorian card game that I still don't completely understand. On Friday we walked back to Maquipucuna on a trail created 500 years ago by the Yumbos, an indigenous people who acted as guides for people who wanted to cross the Andes between the sierra and the coast. The trails they made are called coluncos, and some parts of them were used so much that the actual trail is sunken and there are walls on either side of it. It was pretty cool to get to go on that trail, but it was a very long day of walking.

3. On Saturday this American couple, Todd and Nicole, showed up without a reservation and asked if they could camp here. Daniel (the manager here) let them camp in front of the biological station (where I live) which turned out to be a really great thing. They stayed for 5 days, and it was really awesome to get to know them. They also helped me make two of my plots, which was such a huge help. They also saved me from being alone on Sunday and Monday while Daniel (the only other person who lives here) was in Quito.

4. On Wednesday Daniel and four of the guys who work here were going to try and make a trail to this 60 m waterfall that is supposedly somewhere in the forest. Todd, Nicole, and I decided to tag along just for fun, and so we all set out in the morning with box lunches and machetes (well, we three Americans didn't get the machetes). We hiked along the river for a while and then the guys started chopping away and making their own trail through the forest while Todd, Nicole, and I followed carefully behind. After bushwhacking for about 3 hours the guys decided that it would be too hard to get to the waterfall from the trail we were making, so we turned around, had lunch, and then walked back to the reserve. Even though we didn't find the waterfall it was still really fun to get to walk through the primary forest on a newly created trail.

5. On Wednesday morning after I had felt like there was something in my bed for a few nights I asked Todd to look and see if there was actually something there. I was worried that it was a spider or a cockroach or something gross like that. Well, Todd pulled back the blankets and what did we find? A hole chewed through two of them and two baby rodents. Yes, apparently I was deemed an appropriate surrogate mother/source of body heat and some mama rodent (I think it was a mouse) decided to make a nest in my bed. For lack of a better idea Nicole and I put them in a toilet paper roll stuffed with newspaper and toilet paper and put that outside of my door in the hopes that mama rodent would come by and move the babies somewhere more appropriate. When we got back from the waterfall hike the tube was gone, and no babies have appeared in my bed since.

6. While we're on the topic of me playing host to creatures, I currently have more chiggers than any human being should ever have. There are chiggers here, and because of what I'm doing (spending all day traipsing around in the forest) it's pretty much impossible for me to avoid them. Right now I have an outline of my sports bra made of chiggers, as well as a line where my left backpack strap goes across my shoulder, and a sprinkling along the waistband of my pants. Let me tell you, it's a lot of fun. I'm also currently using about 500 times the recommended amount of DEET every time I go outside.

7. None of my plots have turned out to be a perfect 30m x 30m the first time around. With every single one I (or we, I've had help with three of them) have made three 30 m sides, but the fourth always ends up being wrong. Once it was 26m, once 28m, once 18m, and the last one was 50 m. It's a pretty easy mistake to fix, I just think it's funny that it's so hard to make a square in the forest.

8. I learned to play poker! Nicole and Todd taught me and Daniel how to play Texas Hold 'Em, which was pretty exciting because in all the times that people have tried to teach me poker I've never actually learned how to play. I'm absolutely terrible though, so nobody needs to worry about a gambling addiction in my future.

9. One of the most interesting things about being here has been seeing all the tourists who come through. So far there has been a group of birdwatchers from the UK, a group of tourists from Holland, a group of forty 10-year-olds (this was the day I tried to stay in the forest for as long as possible), and a sprinkling of Ecuadorians and Americans. It's also been really cool to get to know the tourists as well as the guides and drivers who come with them. That's probably one of the things I've enjoyed the most about this place, getting to see the behind the scenes parts and how they transition from one group to another, things like that.

So yeah, that's basically what I've been up to. This week I'll be doing more data collection, and then on Friday I'm going back to Quito to spend the weekend with my host family. After that we'll be going to Yunguilla again to check the cameras there and then I'll be here for a few more days before going back to Quito to write my paper. I'm not spending the full month here because it's pretty expensive to stay here, so I'm going back to Quito a little early. We receive $500 from the program for lodging, food, equipment, anything we need for ISP, which basically boils down to $17 per day. It costs $20 plus tax for me to spend one night here (including 3 meals), so my money is getting used up a little faster than most. Luckily I don't need a full four weeks to do my project, so going back to Quito a little early will be nice because I'll have reliable internet and other commodities to help me write my paper. I'll write another blog entry when I have time (and internet)! I hope everyone has a good Thanksgiving!

Hasta luego,
Caroline