Last Saturday morning we left to spend a week at Yanayacu biological research center as a part of one of the biology course we are doing this semester. I mistakenly told people we were In the amazon, but that was untrue, Yanayacu (located near the bustling metropolis of Cosanga) is actually located in the cloud forest, a higher altitude ecosystem than the rainforest, meaning the weather is colder, less humid, and less malarial. We learned the hard way that "less malarial" does not mean "less mosquitos".
The station is run by a bird nut named Harold Greeney, Cosanga's local loco gringo who spends his free time wandering through the jungle looking for bird's nests. There was one occasion where we ended up lost on a hike in the forest because Harold ditched us to chase after a bird.
Getting lost included, the week was absolutely incredible. The diversity around Yanayacu was incredible - the area beats themselves in Audobahn bird count world record every single year. We spent our days hiking, collecting caterpillars, watching hummingbirds, finding frogs in the forest, and just playing cards around the station surrounded by more fucking unbelievable species of moths than I've ever seen in my life.
Unfortunately for you all my camera was on the fritz again, so Facebook stalk my classmates this week for pictures.
On Thursday, we were actually able to do a day trip into the amazon basin and holy fuck. It was humid and hot and we were all absolutely disgusting within the first ten minutes of our full day hike but it was absolutely worth it. The tropical rainforest was like nothing I'd ever experienced - it almost felt prehistoric. As we were traipsing through creek beds and mud pits and ducking under vines and bushes I couldn't help thinking back to my days with Morgan crawling through creek beds in Yost park pretending we were jungle explorers and now, that's real life. We ended the day stripping down to our underwear to swim in the Napo river.
Harold has given me several names of researchers who come to Yanayacu to study plant chemistry and I'm already in the process of trying to figure out how I can come back and do work that's really meaningful to me. I am so glad that there's a biology portion to this trip. It is absolutely reaffirming my choice of major, being here - I do miss chemistry a lot, and I think if there was no science at all on this trip I'd be going completely crazy. Even if watching caseik nesting behavior was a little more macroscopic than what I am used to, it was amazing to be RIGHT THERE in the middle of the forest watching science in action. It's an incredible world and there's so many exciting things to discover. I have never been a particularly outdoorsy person and I never would have thought that field research would appeal to me, but being out there cut off from everything except the people we were with and the jungle around us was absolutely addicting and other than the fact that every article of clothing I owned was soaking wet by the end of our stay, a week wasn't nearly enough.
