Sloshing through different textures of mud from 6 am to 5:30 pm is beginning to take its toll on me. The hiking in jungle terrain portion is easy and exciting; however, it is the wet uphill and downhill knee-deep mud that literally drags me down. Despite this, I am definitely still enjoying myself. The sounds of toucans and parrots usually carry me along. Daily I am surprised by how much hard work my partner, Vivien, and I accomplish.

We have two projects: one about behavior and the other, conservation. The process for our behavior project took almost six days to develop, mostly because we were overwhelmed with every sound and feeling the jungle emitted. Animals we had hoped to research were not in abundance (Orb spiders for me), so we thought fast on our feet. Dragonflies. Dragonflies were in abundance. But, we knew absolutely nothing about the specific species on the property or basic dragonfly information in general.

Reading through the books provided, we found the species’ name. Without internet, though, we had difficulty developing a research project that was original. But then I came up with a perching site height concept that we evolved into perch site choice in regard to visual cues. We have fixed the methods and are currently in the process with completing trials. This experience has been exceedingly stressful, but I am glad that I am not the only group that feels this way. All groups have feared their projects would fail in some way, but the flexibility with shifting research focus has gotten us over a huge dismal hump.

Our conservation research project is definitely taking off; we are almost finished. We are comparing the water quality of the creeks disturbed by the field school against the undisturbed creeks throughout the forest. We want to see how animals (mostly aquatic) are affected by disturbed areas, especially with regard to human manipulation to the environment like dredging. We simply collect water samples from various portions of creeks and test them. We have seen significant differences in some! It is all very fascinating.

Even though we are all exhausted, working through the night on data entry and planning for the next day, my partner and I have high hopes. We know that we are pursuing our dreams of ecology fieldwork. And I will not stop pursuing it.