Another week gone, and I hardly know where the time goes! Our new volunteer Rebecca, from England, arrived on Monday, and with her extrovert character and love of music, she has livened up the centre. On Tuesday we started another project, a phrenology study, of the trees that provide food for the localarrot species. This is an ongoing study, where 223 trees of around 12 different species have previously been tagged and their stage of flowering/fruiting, or not noted. We now had to repeat the rounds and update the information to learn about food availability for the birds in the wild. Nic and Rafa did the first day, and I did the second with Rafa ( he did the initial round and can identify the flowering/fruiting stages) - 7h walking through marshland and flooded forest with some drier paths, pretty tiring with water levels over the tops of our wellingtons so wet feet all day too. But I made it, and learnt a lot about the species of trees, and we saw some interesting birds, monkeys and insects, plus tadpoles, bright pink frog's eggs and an amazing spider. I've just come back from my second day and we finished the last trees, so very satisfying, having logged the last of the data in the computer.
Thursday it rained all day so it was a quiet day at the centre, as was Wednesday for me as the others all spent the day in
Trinidad at meetings and doing the weekly food shop, along with exciting things like visa renewals! So I communed with the macaws and gave them lots of fresh branches to chew their way through. Friday was my day off, time for a haircut and a good lunch at a fish restaurant, very tasty! And some exploring of parts of Trinidad I hadn't been to.
Tomorrow there's a possibility of a trip to see the pink river dolphins which would be great, but it depends on weather and availability of the boat. José is back on town after a week of meetings in La Paz, so we should be doing more field work this week with him, and see blue throated macaws in the wild. Looking forward to that!
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