I’m writing this from my office at the university of Toronto, surrounded by the bits and pieces of field work detritus that I have yet to unpack. The last week of field work mirrored the first week in chaos—everyone was a little more sloppy, irritable and worn-out. As well, our field sites were a little more challenging--figuring out where to put them required bushwhacking up a mountain through razor grass. If you’re unfamiliar with razor grass, it is a tall (taller than me) grass-like plant that is sharp enough to rip through clothes and skin. At best it gives cuts that resemble paper cuts, at worst it can slice deep enough to require stitches. Plus it sticks to your clothes like velcro and requires a bit of a dance to walk through. The undergrads were a bit traumatized by this plot setup (also because I led them on an adventure up and over a ridge because I didn’t realize there was a short cut).
Our last field sites of the season were in El Yunque National Forest, like they were in the first week, but this time we were on the opposite side of the park, near the town of Luquillo. These last sites also had the highest diversity of the season—each survey site contained 4 or 5 species of anole. One even had Anolis cuvieri—the largest anole on Puerto Rico. It lives in the canopy of trees often 17m above the ground and due to this is often very challenging to find. Because of this diversity, we had more lizard catching to do this week than any other week—we needed to catch 30 individuals of the four most common species. The problem, however, is that two of these species are not very common and are very wily and hard to catch. We spent the last two days of field work focussing on catching these last two species. Lucky for me however, I love catching lizards and spending time in the forest, so I had a great time.
I also finally saw tarantulas this week (yay?). They are electric blue, fuzzy, perched at eye height,
and are about 2 inches across. Even I can admit they aren’t the worst. Distressingly however, these are only the babies… which leads to the big question: WHERE ARE THE ADULTS. This is also very carefully filed under “don’t think about this while doing a night survey”.
I continue to be in awe of how lucky I am to do this work—I got to sit in a forest for hours every day looking for lizards and then spraying
them with paint. No matter how hard the work was or how exhausted, hot, and sweaty I was, the work was incredibly rewarding. The hours of surveying almost always flew by—there is always something to see and listen to, even if the lizards are scarce.
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