OTS course is done!

The final day of the OTS 11-3 course was Friday and after a nice goodbye dinner at Tin Jo in San Jose (a great Asian restaurant), we all said our goodbyes as most of the students continued on to Panama for a short visit to Barro Colorado Island (BCI) run by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). I am staying on in San Jose until 4 August to finish up accounting, post-course evaluations/reports, and finish making the course book.

I head back to DC on 4 August, spend the 5th catching up on things stateside, then leave again with Carlos on the 6th to head out to the Ecological Society of America (ESA) conference in Austin, Texas. I am excited to visit Austin -- it sounds like a really great and fun place to visit. I especially want to see the huge Mexican free-tailed bat colony fly out from under the Congress Street bridge at dusk!

Straight from Austin, I fly up to Portland, Maine for my college bud Christina's wedding. It will be great to catch up with most of the old UCSB gang!

The summer has been pretty busy with teaching so far and now I have to get to work planning for the next course that starts at the end of January!

Update from the field

I am currently at La Selva (my old thesis stomping grounds) and thought I would post a little update before heading out to the wilds once again. We have been here for about two weeks, but we leave in a couple of days, first for a night in San Jose, and then for a week in the mountains (the Mountain of Death actually -- Cerro de la Muerte).

We are a little over half-way done with the OTS course and things are going great! I have a fantastic group of students that are working hard and very interested in tropical field biology. We will finish the course at the end of July and after that I head out to Austin, TX followed by Portland, ME. Lots of traveling this summer!

I am really enjoying the OTS course rhythm again -- it is exhilarating to be in the field again and to be exposed to so many cool/new/interesting things in a variety of habitats! I will try to make another update before the end of the course, but with intermittent internet access and lots of papers to revise, it might not be possible~