This week was research week! Our goal for the research is to investigate a possible correlation between bird abundance and the abundance of an invasive plant, the pink banana. Marin and I set out our study across four days. Every morning we would be on a new trail in a different part of the forest. Emphasis on the every morning—unfortunately, birds wake up incredibly early. Consequently, Marin and I got up every morning before sunrise at 4:45 am, stumbled around the room in the dark to get ready (apologies Lauren), and were at the trail by 5:30 am. Mind you, I have not gotten up before 7 am in years. But I am proud to say that we were not late a single morning. There is a certain magic to the forest when it’s that early; it feels like you are stepping into a different universe. Seeing the light bathe and filter through the trees each morning was special. It has a quiet and calming air to it. I would hear the Macaws fly over every dawn. Seeing them each morning was nothing short of awe-inspiring and I am so grateful that I got the opportunity to see their beauty every day.
It is easy to forget that you are deep in one of the most beautiful rainforests in the world when you are half delirious and exhausted. Your brain almost has to rationalize it in a way, but every once in a while the realization would hit me like a wall. We would have flies that would circle us incessantly. It drove me nuts. But one morning, amongst the usual buzzing, I heard a deeper thrum right behind my head. It was a hummingbird. As I froze, it snatched the fly right behind my head and flew off. Another “oh my God” moment occurred during one of the best soccer games of my life (I am being dead serious when I say that is the best I have ever played). During the middle of the soccer game I heard the macaw’s raucous calls. I looked up to see them fly over the field, a vision of loud color and size, just dumbstruck.
Those mornings and this entire week took a Herculean amount of effort but I will always remember those days with fondness. This past week was one of the most exhausting weeks I have had in a long time. I always thought it was impossible to fall asleep standing up but I have come very close. Multiple times. As Dr. Wasserman said, “Research is hard”. Going into this, I consider myself very lucky to have had some experience with this type of bird census and fieldwork. That was a lesson in exhaustion and hard work and this experience was a healthy reminder of that. It takes a village and I was incredibly grateful to have Marin by my side. She kept me awake, focused, and steady when it got difficult. Every day for those four days we would get up, fight through the brain fog to complete our respective censuses for two hours, eat breakfast, pass out, eat lunch, and go out again to map out the next trail. It went gratefully smoothly. The only hiccup was that we realized that the plant we were hoping to research along with the birds was almost nonexistent on the trails we had chosen. On Thursday, day three of our research, we came to the conclusion that we needed to add another trail to our study. So at 3:30 pm on Thursday, we went out to the road leading to La Selva to map out our transects. I have never sweated so much in my life. Just buckets of sweat. It looked like I got rained on. We pushed through our respective exhaustion and were out on that road for close to three hours mapping and collecting data. On Friday morning, we went out and did the whole thing over again. It’s safe to say that we killed it. We collected a lot of data that I am excited to sort through and draw conclusions from over the next week.
When reflecting on this week, Troy had an insightful commentary that stuck with me. It is hard not to get ahead of yourself and expect linear correlations and immediate answers from your data. But that’s just not how the world works. As a STEM major, I tend to lose sight of that. Everything is cut and dry, black and white. There is an answer for everything; choose A B C or D for your answer. I needed a reminder that research—life—is not like that. Your data will not always lead you to clear conclusions. Marin and I were getting frustrated because it seemed like our data was all over the place, not leading to the conclusions we expected. But, as the kids say, you just gotta go with the flow. This week was a lesson in hard work, patience, and resilience. Working through that exhaustion gave me a renewed respect for our planet’s researchers. Last year, one of Indiana University’s themes was Resilience. I tend to make fun of or outright ignore those themes but during this week, I found it to be an apt theme. I speak of seeing and hearing the Great Green Macaws every morning but that wasn’t always the case. Their numbers were terrifyingly low at the end of the twentieth century due to deforestation and poaching. The Costa Rican government quickly moved to protect an area called the Maquenque National Mixed Wildlife Refuge to preserve their habitat and provide a biological corridor of protected forest. That biological corridor is called the San Juan-La Selva Biological Corridor. Their numbers have slowly been recovering but they are only at numbers of about 500-1000. I found myself inspired by their strength and resilience and honored that I could see it first-hand. I had been standing amongst their history in La Selva without even knowing. Their history along with the hard work all of my classmates put in this week through long hours, devastating heat, and rainstorms made this week special. It is one I will not soon forget.
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