1 Community Down:
One community down, 135km covered on foot, 10hrs of interviews, 13 transects, 130 beetle traps, 130 cuadrats, 130 canopy photographs, 650 identified ferns, 250 frogs (or thereabouts), more 7500 beetles (conservative estimate) and roughly 350 GPS waypoints. So far so good after two months worth of work. Snake count: 20, 16 poisonous and a close encounter with one of them in our hut. And despite the fact that I work on issues related to conservation, I am happy to say that our relationship with that snake ended badly for the snake which left in pieces (courtesy of Nathan´s machete handwork). I also had a botfly (now bagged and tagged in alcohol) which as far as I am concerned has been the closest encounter with biodiversity (of which there seems to be to much on more than occasion...). The last month has been the most hectic we sampled a more remote sites and the logistics have difficult, particularly getting our guids organised and present. But all is well that ends well and I am happy with the amount of data we have managed to get. Now we are spending a couple of days in Coca, enjoying beer and food that is not rice and beans. We should start heading out to the next community next week, which should be interesting to see and hopefully the logistics should be easier since we will have a guide with us constantly. Nathan and I are also better at identifying things and now we are pretty sure we can work faster, doing two transects back to back with a day of rest afterwards. Yesterday was interesting, we visited a site impacted by an oil leak, which was interesting to see, how they were cleaned up, although it seems to me that in these cases it is more of a botching than an actually clean precise art. That´s it for now... more soon...

Oil worker

Oil