Parasites and PC's

At long last...since it has been almost a month since the last post I suppose I will give a recap of, say, the last month! For starters, where's my search party? does anyone read this thing anyway? I could be long gone by now, trampled by peccary and turned into vulture food. But for real, the real reason behind the blog delay is primarily 2-fold (plus I'm a slacker, which I guess really makes it 3-fold). First, on our last trip into the Bladen I managed to contract a parasite. Nothing life-threatening (or flesh-eating, for that matter) but obnoxious none-the-less and incredibly itchy. I mean, when little things are burrowing under your skin, you are bound to feel them! Benadryl and Cortizone are being added to the jungle survival kit along with the ziplocs. I mastered the drugged-up, half-asleep (meaning eyes closed) application of cortizone. Slept with the stuff next to my pillow for a good week or so. Good times. Anyway, eventually I made it to the doctor who gave me some drugs and now my little itchy friends have died. Sorry, no good pictures of that...

Part two: Apparently the mold growing in my computer wasn't good for it. Who would of thought? The "L" key on the keyboard became permanently stuck and would not stop typing and typing...and typing. Makes it a little hard to do much of anything when you can't use the letter "L" and you never know when you will have an entire page of "L"s. Not to worry, after a brief visit to the computer store and a little online research I am now certified in back country computer repair. Ok, maybe not really but I did have to dismantle by computer to get everything to work and now have a sporty USB keyboard. Maybe not quite as portable, but hey, at least I can type what I want, when I want!

So, on to more exciting things...The trip into the Bladen following the last post didn't go exactly as planned, mostly because of the rain. We hiked up to Richardson Camp and did our banding. Caught some pretty sweet birds...













Red-capped Manakin



















Plain Xenops - very cute!

Rufous-tailed Jacamar



















Barred Forest Falcon - Hello!













The water possum that William ran/swam down one night.













When it came time to go up to the lookout it rained and poured and then got dark so that didn't so much happen. The next couple days we attempted to make it up to Oro, but again the rain kicked in. We ended up spending a lot of time sitting in our jungle hammocks and eventually decided we could be more productive back at BFREE. Once we were back at BFREE the rain stopped (classic) and we were able to do some banding up at Blue Pool (and snail searching, which can be quite lucrative).



















The guys, hard at work...looking for snails that is. Found a new species! Can't say we've done as much with the birds.













Slaty-tailed Trogon













The not-so-small tarantula we found while looking for snails.