Weekend Report

Sarah: Here’s one last blog entry before we leave the country. Yesterday we had a group of LASP students come visit us. There was one student, Shawn, who is a student at SNU so he had wanted to come visit his campus here in Costa Rica. Trevor, who is a professor at LASP, and his wife Laura came and brought Shawn and 3 other students. We had met Laura last week (we took a day trip into San Jose to switch cars with Anthony), but it was great getting to meet Trevor and spending some time with the two of them. They have a big house in San Jose and have offered to let us stay in their guest room when we make our trips into the city. With the group we hiked to the waterfall in the morning when they arrived, and then came back to hang out at QERC and have lunch together. In the afternoon we actually hiked La Quebrada trail so they could see even more of the property and get a good feel for the cloud forest. It was really fun to host some students and it was great to take a break from working and get back out on the trails.

Today we got an invitation from Efrain and Caridad and Maria Elena to have dinner with them. It was perfect timing, because the next month will be pretty busy for us. And I would have to say that Caridad definitely outdid my meal. We got spinach and egg soup (it was really good) and cooked veggies and bread and even fresh cooked trout straight from the nearby trout ponds. It was such a great meal and it was neat to continue to build the relationship with them.

Tomorrow we leave to go back into the city, and then EARLY Tuesday morning we leave for Nicaragua (we’re talking 5:30 in the morning departure). Every three months we need to leave the country to renew our visas, so it’s coming up on that time and is really hard to believe we’ve been here that long already. We’ll be staying 3 nights at a small lazy surf town and we’re excited to do some relaxing in the sun.

Happy Thanksgiving!

David: Happy Thanksgiving! Sarah and I just celebrated our first Thanksgiving outside of the U.S. Needless to say, the pilgrims didn’t make it to Costa Rica, just the conquistadors and Spanish imperialism, so there wasn’t much of a holiday. We would have gone to the beach or something but we leave really soon for Nicaragua to renew our visas so it didn’t seem like we needed to. We’ll spend our time in Nicaragua at a beach town called San Juan Del Sur. It is a sleepy surf town.

Well, we think we might have just made the turn toward summer. Our days switched from cloudy and rainy all day to having a lot of sun in the morning and rain in the afternoons. We are still getting quite a bit of rain, but it is slowing down. The sun is warmer and the nights are cooler and those are two signs of summer.

One of the projects we have been motivated to work on since we got here has been the room that is suppose to be the natural history museum. We have some exciting plans for it and when we shared those with Efrain a while ago we could see that he was excited about them. Since QERC was built in 2001 it has been a desire of the community to have the museum for their kids to explore and for tourists to be able to look at it. Efrain wants it to be an educational tool for everyone. So, it is very exciting for us that this week one of our ideas was completed. Laura, the Canadian woman who lives in the valley, just finished building and installing a really cool shelf system. It is made out of cypress and it has a lot of character to it. It is just a shelf, but it already adds a lot to the room and it will give us the space to display all kinds of fun things.

Today we had Liseth and two of her kids, Diego and Jeanette, over for pizza (Sarah's pizza is getting really good). Diego and Jeanette both are characters. I found out that Diego knows quite a bit about birds. He cruised through the bird book showing me everything that he sees here and it was impressive.

Dinner, connections, and beautiful birds

Sarah: We sure have had a couple of exciting days around here! Yesterday afternoon we spent putting things away and cleaning up some of our projects because Efrain and his wife, Caridad, and their daughter Maria Elena were going to come over for dinner. So, I have to admit I was a little stressed out with the idea of them coming to eat with us because I knew that the entire conversation would have to be in Spanish, and we would be entertaining them. But, out of respect we wanted to have Efrain over first before we invited any of his kids and their families over. So they arrived at 6:30 on the dot, and even brought me flowers! The whole evening was a success. We chatted for a bit while I was finishing putting everything on the table, and then sat down for a nice dinner. There were only a few times that the silence was long enough for David and I to rack our brains, trying to come up with another question, but overall it was great to have them here. After dinner we showed them some of the changes and progress we’ve made, and explained our vision for the museum, which we know is important to the community. They were very complimentary toward everything here. We feel like this was a big step in reaching out to the community and making more personal connections with the Chacones.

Today was another great day. We finally took advantage of having a car, and took off this morning to visit another biological research station nearby. We first drove to the top of Cerro de la Muerte (Mountain of Death), and put David’s driving skills and the 4WD car to the test. Both passed, but we did get quite the ride out of it—the “road” isn’t the easiest to drive on! At the top of Cerro de la Muerte there is a point where on a clear day you can actually see both the Caribbean and Pacific coasts. Today, however, we were engulfed by clouds. It was still beautiful—a completely different ecosystem. Soon we plan on starting at the top and hiking down, which ends up connecting to one of our trails here in the valley.

We reached the Cerro de la Muerte research station and met the owner, Fredrico. He showed us around their small facility—very rustic and only for the hardcore biologists. It was so cold there even midday! Fredrico actually lives in San Jose (I don’t blame him) and they don’t have groups during this time of year (I don’t blame them, either). However, their property is beautiful and they get a variety of animals—he’s even seen a puma and plenty of tapirs, plus some other mammals that I’d never heard of! Fredrico even told a story that he was hiking on his trails and a tapir was in the way so he hit it on the butt to move so he could continue hiking. David and I decided we definitely want to do some hiking there in the future!

Here are some neat things about Fredrico that show what a small world this is—he has a son who lives in Polk City, Iowa and attended Iowa State University, so he’s been to Des Moines many times. This son was just offered a job through Pioneer, the company David worked at when he lived in Iowa before we were married. Fredrico also has a brother who lived in San Jose, California, for about 50 years—so he’s very familiar with the Santa Cruz area, where we lived and worked the last two years. And to make things even better, when he found out David was from Washington, Fredrico found more common ground with David by voicing his interest in Sasquatch. They proceeded to discuss folklore, stories, and tales of sightings of Sasquatch, the Chupacabra, and the Viejo del Monte. It was great to meet him and we look forward to pursuing that relationship in the future.

After we left that research station, we headed down the road to another biological station that used to be owned by Fredrico until he sold it to new owners. We briefly met with Carlos, one of the owners, who gave us a tour and explained how their field station operates. He actually lives there, and on their land they have both a farm that they live off of, and also a lot of land that they work to conserve. Their property is very simple and a bit rustic as well, but very comfortable and we really enjoyed it.

Finally, as we headed down into our own valley, we stopped at a place that has piqued our interest before. We have noticed this small restaurant that often has tourist vans parked in front with lots of people stopping by. So we stopped and met the couple that lives there, and they serve typical Costa Rican food, which attracts lots of tourists. But one of the main attractions is the fact that they have an aguacatillo tree right behind their house that many quetzals feed off of. The tree has already begun to fruit, which none of ours have farther down in the valley. So, we saw a couple quetzals super close! I was thrilled. We also saw some toucanets, another beautiful bird. This couple lays out food for the birds and they know all kinds of different whistling calls, and many birds come and eat and hang out around their property. It was great to meet them and make that connection, so in the future we can stop by and hopefully see more quetzals up close and personal!

Upward and Onward

David : We never seem to run out of projects to be working on here at QERC. Sarah has been hard at work organizing and scanning the research papers written here from the past 20 years. The goal is to have digital copies of all papers so they can be accessed on the new and improved (and still uncreated) QERC website so students and researchers can view the work that has been done here. It will be a good online resource. Sarah has also been painting. Check out her handiwork on this sign that was already here but fairly unnoticeable. It looks much better now and as people come onto our property they will get a little better greeting than before.
I have been working on a smattering of projects. I have been working on my green thumb by sprucing up the landscaping on the grounds, hanging up newly acquired pictures, dry erase boards, and clocks (which is not easy because all of the wall are concrete), and starting the organization of the natural history museum. Sometimes a smattering of projects can be a problem for me. I see so many things I want to work on. I get many of them started and then there is a big mess of many uncompleted projects. My parents know all about this special characteristic of mine. Cassie, at Mission Springs, probably has an idea of it as well. The good news is that the projects always get finished. We have about three weeks to finish many of the small projects that we would like to get done and then the pace here at QERC is going to be changing drastically.
The month of December is going to full of friends and family visitors and then in January QERC is going to come to life with students. Southern Nazarene University is going to be sending 8-10 biology students down for the entire semester to work on research projects and take classes on this extension of their campus. Sarah and I are very excited and are happy that we have been able to be a part of making this happen. Because of our connection with LASP we have been able to help create a semester trial run of a LASP/SNU hybrid program. There is not much hope that it will continue how it will happen this next semester, but it is a good experiment to see in what capacity having students here will be the most successful. Needless to say, we are thrilled to be working with LASP as they are helping us at SNU out with this endeavor. It is going to be a victorious day for SNU when those students arrive and it marks a new era of usage of this facility. Everything is still in the works, of course, and we will see how all of it pans out, but for now there is a lot of excitement of what this means for QERC. All of our hard work so far is going to pay off big time. God has a unique way of bringing these types of things together.
It is still raining here for many hours throughout the day. But, we are still able to get out and find beautiful vistas, enchanting forests, and interesting critters. I thought we should share a few pictures of some these cool animals.

San Jose again

Sarah: Well we made it back from San Jose. Let me recap our trip. We got in fairly early on Wednesday and did some shopping with Dennis that he wanted to do before returning to the states, and then we made it out to PriceSmart (like Costco) to do some shopping ourselves too. I also need to mention that we now can stay at the sabbatical house that LASP owns anytime we come into the city. So, we enjoyed a free place to stay this time, and we really liked being so close to the LASP office.

Thursday was our day of errands. We had a long list of items to buy again, so we made the rounds to our normal places—a home store, a hardware store, and some random places downtown. We were even able to do some Christmas/birthday shopping! It was a joy to ride busses and taxis all over the city—always a cultural experience. We even made a stop to the National Museum to talk to a guy in the herbarium. There is a tree here in the valley that the quetzals are eating right now, and no one knows what kind of tree it is. There are only 2 trees in the valley of this species. David identified the genus and we went looking for help with the species. This statue was just built in San Jose about a couple months ago, and we saw many, many ticos stopping to take pictures of it.

Since we got most of our errands done on Thursday, Friday and Saturday was spent with people. Friday we went to the doctor. As many of you know, David was diagnosed with thyroiditis before we came down here to Costa Rica. Because of that, he’s not on medication but needs to get blood tests done every 6-8 weeks. The doctor that we saw is also the one that QERC has been using for a number of years, so we set up an appointment to chat with him and also to get David checked up. The doc sounded positive about David, and we’ll get the results of the blood tests in the next few weeks. For lunch we met Anthony Chamberlain (director of LASP). It was intended to be a casual get-to-know you lunch, since we don’t know him well, but we ended up talking about business for the most part. It was great to spend time with him and bounce ideas off him. We went to the University of Costa Rica (UCR) in the afternoon to meet with a professor who is looking to do some research here at QERC in the spring. It was exciting to get to know him and hear of his hopeful plans—he is waiting to see if he has received some grant money to do the research here, which would be catching quetzals and DNA testing them. He would also possibly put radio trackers on them to figure out their migrating habits. Finally on Friday night, we went to have dinner with David’s Costa Rican family. His sister Sophia had her boyfriend and another friend over to eat with us as well. The boyfriend, Pablo, was someone David knew and really liked while he studied here. They were all about our age, so it was fun to eat with them and share a lot of laughter. They will be fun to get together with in the future! It was great to have David’s tican mom cook for us too—she’s a professional chef.

Saturday we went to InBio, a National Biodiversity Institute. It had animal displays (a butterfly garden, snake tanks, frog tanks, etc.), and paths to walk through examples of the different ecosystems found here in Costa Rica. It was beautiful and we saw lots of neat wildlife—both in cages and in the wild (like this wild spider)! And Saturday evening we went out with Luis and Gabi, the couple that was out here at QERC a few weeks ago and who helps us out a lot with business and simple Costa Rican questions. We went to the bookstore where Gabi works, and then went to the mall to do some Christmas shopping with them. We ended the evening by going to a movie, which was a real treat. (We saw The Guardian, a very good movie.)

Sunday we got up and packed up and took off…driving a car! Anthony actually has a car that he’s fixing up and getting ready to sell soon, so while they have an extra car they are letting us borrow one of theirs for a cheap price for November and December. We are extremely grateful! After stopping at our Hipermas to do our monthly grocery shopping, we made it back safely to our home in the valley. We now have plenty of work to do, after a few key purchases and with some items that Dennis brought down and are excited to get back to work.