Farewell Barro Colorado Island

It has certainly been an adventure! I met gracious and brilliant people, learned about a new culture, enjoyed delicious local cuisine, and made memories tip-toeing around to catch brief glimpses of amazing rainforest plants and animals. The fascinating sights, sounds, and smells will also be with me. Goodbye Barro Colorado Island!

Smithsonian Research Institute from docks

Our dorm room

Stairs, stairs and more stairs!

Research Lab

Dining Hall

Welcome to the Island

60 of us shared 2 locations of bottled water.

Insects du Jour

Scientists place a bright light and large white plastic sheets onto this outdoor lab to see what types of interesting insects come to hang out. I found the moths to be very interesting. 

Beautiful Plants

I'm sitting here basking in the island's glorious greenness knowing soon I will hop on a plane back to winter's harsh browness. I wish I could take some of the warmth (not all of it!) and overwhelming lushness back with me. Here are my plant photos of the day.

   This is not a boa constrictor but a liana, woody vine, that has grown around a tree trunk.

Animal pics

Black and green spotted poison dart frogs jumped around our feet near a small stream our first morning here. Surprisingly these smooth skinned amphibians are only about an inch in size. Can you see it on the top of the rock?

Again, if you have the sharp eyes of a hawk, you'll see the blue morpho butterfly with its wings shut. The underside of its wings is brown and you can see eye spots. When blue morphos fly around, their scales are an iridescent blue. They are an amazing flutter of color. The bottom photo is of the great tinamou. 

On our night walk we saw cool nocturnal animals such as a flower eating kinkajou, a wooly opossum, bats, turnip tailed geckos, and the creepy hill of tarantulas! 

Animal Pics

 

What is the last thing that you want to see when you're walking around in sandals at night? Dr. Willis' husband shined his flashlight near the dining hall to reveal a hill full of tarantulas! Yikes! My toes may never recover! We found a gecko on the side of the building laughing at me. Before dinner, a troop of spider monkeys passed by our room.

Animals

You have to be quite stealthy to sneak up on rainforest animals using an iPhone! So far I've seen troops of loud howler monkeys, mischievous spider monkeys, a lazy tamandua anteater, two varieties of squaking toucans, large turkey-like birds called the great tinamou and crested guan, tiny black and green poisonous dart frogs, white geckos, brown agouti, bats, shimmering blue morpho and brilliant orange tiger wing butterflies, and a variety of lizards and small insects. I'm not quick enough to capture fantastic photos, but here are a few of my attempts.
 
Don't strike this punching bag look-alike or you'll be covered in termites! At the bottom of the log is a brown termite trail. 

Here's an agouti eating nuts for breakfast.

Tools Scientists Use

 

Here are some tools that scientists use in the rainforest to collect data. The basket captures a variety of materials that fall from above such as leaves, berries, seed pods, flowers, and small branches. Cameras are used to track the activities of both diurnal and nocturnal animals. Scientists check the photo feed from cameras every day. Yesterday we saw some very cool pictures of three large mother iguanas that were digging a nest to lay eggs. These cameras help Dr. Willis track the activities of her beloved ocelots.

There are scientists and research students here from all over the world. The BBC is here filming the ocelots for a documentary on wildcats.