and rainless days at QERC in the middle of the rainy season and yet we can't help but catch ourselves sometimes thinking that we wish it was raining. I think that the rain somehow places us in context of the time of year and maybe we just feel like something is off.Despite the oddity of it we truly have enjoyed the "good" weather. For the month of August we have been able to get a lot of work done outside on both grounds-keeping projects and field biology projects. We had a backhoe on our property to help us level out a few spots that were causing some water runoff problems. The mass moving of all that dirt has given me the excuse to level off a few other areas on the lawn that will be good places for expanding our native botanical gardens, a project we hope to wrap up this fall. A little more rain would help us out with that.
I spent quite a bit of time in the field working
on the QERC aguacatillo phenology monitoring project. The aguacatillos are the trees that provide a good majority of food for our quetzal population. The name literally means little avocado and that is basically what they look like. QERC has been monitoring the flowering and fruiting cycles of hundreds of these trees for over a decade. The project needs a little revitalizing in order for us to continue properly monitoring the trees, so our work was to relocate all of these old trees that were once tagged and mapped. Once they were relocated, they were photographed, GPS coordinates were taken for their location, and they will be re-tagged with a more updated system.We have had an assistant helping us with some of these projects during the month of August. Aidan is a British high school student who set up an independent research experience with us here at QERC. He stayed with a host family in our community, worked with me in the mornings, and worked on his personal research in the afternoons. For the majority of our three years here we have enjoyed the mixture of people who have worked with us at QERC and the diversity of positive experiences that has brought us. Aidan turned out to be a little different story. Normally we wouldn't take the time to talk about a negative experience with someone we have worked with but these stories are just too bizarre and funny not to share. And it shows a little bit of the reality of our daily lives as well.
So one night around 8:30, Sarah and I popped some popcorn and were headed upstairs to put in a DVD. I went upstairs to get the DVD going while Sarah was getting the popcorn. All lights were off and I was rounding the corner from the stairs when I saw a flash of someone darting into one of the bedrooms. So naturally I frantically ran downstairs as fast as I could, came into the apartment, and slammed the door shut behind me.
I told Sarah that I thought someone was upstairs, and she thought I was kidding until she saw that my face was completely white. We were locked in our apartment, contemplating what to do, and figuring if it was indeed a robber he was probably gone off the balcony by then like any good tico who wants to steal but not get caught. So I grabbed a shovel that was outside our apartment door and we cautiously opened the door to the rest of the building. We systematically checked around downstairs and noticed the back lab door was still unlocked, which meant technically someone could have been in the building. We checked all closets, storage room, bathrooms, etc. downstairs before proceeding upstairs. Once upstairs we saw that the door to the bedroom I had thought I'd seen the guy run into was open, causing more reason to be alarmed - it was becoming more and more real that someone had been upstairs.
So I called out "IS ANYONE UP HERE?" and no answer. I walked into the bedroom, shovel ready, and at first glance didn't see anything. Then I noticed a blanket crumpled up inside one of the shelves (shelf size shown in reenactment photo) and upon a closer look I saw two legs through a hole in the blanket. I left the room and whispered to Sarah "Someone's in there. I can see them". So I called out again "IF ANYONE IS UP HERE YOU BETTER COME OUT NOW!" and still no answer. Finally, in one last hopeful thought, I yelled "AIDAN? IS THAT YOU?" All we heard was a whimpering "yeeeessssss".His excuse was that he couldn't sleep at the family's house he was at, so he somehow thought it would be a good idea to sneak over to QERC, sneak upstairs, and watch some movies on his computer using his headphones and keeping the lights out so we wouldn't notice. I told him he was lucky we didn't have a gun because we thought he was a robber! It turns out he actually crawled out the bedroom window at his host family's house. When he returned to the house and sneaked back through the window, he woke his family up and they thought it was a robber too. Well, in the end he lied to both us and the family about why he was out, how he got out, and what he was doing. Deceitfulness and lying were recurring themes with him during his time at QERC.
In the end, Aidan earned himself an early departure from QERC and San Gerardo de Dota when we discovered that he had been stealing from us. Based on what turned out to be accurate suspicions, we searched his bags at his house one morning while he was working. We found a slough of QERC lab equipment, souvenirs, and art supplies. It turns out he had been systematically stealing from us for weeks. I went back to QERC, told him he was leaving, and we had him on a bus to San Jose within two hours. This is why it's easier to work with quetzals. :)
