Cuerrici- some vertebrates at long last!

The final long trip of the course was to a montane field station called Cuerrici (named after the turtle shaped mountain of the same name). The higher elevation means another change in vegetation, and we got treated to two types of very interesting habitat. The first was the very interesting oak-bamboo forest, which can feel surreally like walking through a kunfu movie. The tropical oaks have much rounder leaves than the wavy-edge oaks I’m used to in California, and are evergreen so they don’t lose their leaves in the winter. The bamboo grows in thick stands interspersed with the oaks, and sometimes it certainly feels like there should be pandas roaming around.

The second type of habitat we visited is called paramo- it’s the high elevation shrub-land of the tropics. All the vegetation is short and knarly, kind of reminiscent of the desert scrub you may have seen in the States. The dryer, higher paramo is really fun to walk around in, and it reminded me a lot of time I’ve spent at Red Rocks near Vegas. I kept seeing bouldering problems everywhere! It was a bit chillier though, and although I didn’t get to experience it, my friends felt some horizontal rain on their wanderings in the paramo. A truly Mars-esque landscape, very very different from the hot humid and loud greenery of La Selva and other lowland locales.

While at Cuerrici, we were joined by Bob Timm and Deedra McClearn, two faculty who have worked a lot on mammals. I was in their FFP group, and we got to capture mice for our project. It was a lot of fun working with vertebrates!  I even got to handle a couple of animals. You have to hold them by the scruff, like a mother cat picking up her kittens, and then you can mark them (hair-dye on the armpit, nailpolish on the toenails), measure them (tail and foot length) and weigh them (some as small as 20 grams)!

We also did some mist netting to catch birds, which reminded me a lot of my summer working with warblers in Ontario. I didn’t get to handle any birds because we didn’t catch many, but it was fun to see them up close when other people had them in hand. It really made me want to work with birds again- maybe I’ll try to get some time in at a banding station in the next year.

The third and final vertebrate we handled was fish. Cuerrici is a finca (farm) for truchas (trout) and mora (blackberries). The main owner, Don Carlos, was generous enough to serve us from his own trout stock on the last night. The trout are kept in a series of ponds and pools, moved from one to the other as they grow. We used some heavy nets to catch the fish, keeping only the bigger ones and throwing back the little guys. Once flopping around on the grass, the fish needed to be butchered, and I helped out. It is nice to know how to catch, kill, gut, and filet a fish, because I feel this is an essential survival skill. Although gruesome and sometimes gross, I prepared the fish from killing them through filet. (Well, I watched Don Carlos filet -so my colleagues wouldn’t have bone-filled fish- but I think I could do it on my own after watching him work on quite a few).

While watching Don Carlos filet, we also enjoyed petting the kittens at his house. They were super cute!

Of all the stations we visited, Cuerrici was one of my favorite, reminding me of time I’ve spent in the Sierras at friend’s cabins during the winter. It had the same cozy feeling, with fireplaces and good sleeps under warm blankets on cool nights. If I come back to Costa Rica, I will be sure to try to find time to come back to the oak-bamboo forests, and enjoy some more time rocking in rocking chairs and sipping hot chocolate.