Our first full week in the rainforest...

(Note:This entry was meant to be posted on Friday the 20th, but was delayed due to technical difficulties at our local net-cafe!)

Hello everyone, we've now spent our first full week working in the rainforests of Trinidad, and it certainly feels like we've seen and done a lot in that time! Last weekend we visited an underground cave near the top of a place called Tamana hill. Inside the cave there is a colony of more than 5 million bats, of several different species, as well as lots of other weird subterranean creatures adapted to a life without light. The air was so thick with insects feeding off the bats' droppings that you couldn't open your mouth without breathing in bugs! When the sun set just before we left we saw the bats leave their roosts in the cave to go out hunting for the night. So many bats leaving a big hole in the ground at one time was an amazing sight, and it seemed like there will still thousands of bats coming out constantly even after we'd been watching them leave for about 20 minutes!

After a relaxing Sunday at a beautiful beach on the island's North coast (the heat was still exhausting then...) it was back to hard-work on Monday as our climbing team of Dan, Gail and Sean travelled to Morne Bleu, the third highest mountain in Trinidad. The climbers were beginning their work searching for the golden tree-frog, which only lives in Trinidad inside special plants called bromeliads that grow at the top of very tall trees, and only on very tall trees on very tall hills!

This video shows Dan setting up the climbing rig used to scale the trees at the top of the mountain with his sling-shot.

Meanwhile myself and the others got on with our other experiments elsewhere, collecting frogs' foam-nests whilst Susie worked on her project studying ticks link that suck the blood of the big, fat cane toads link that are all over the place here. If you look hard enough at this video you can make out some of the warty little guys getting released after Susie had examined them.

On Tuesday we visited the Asa Wright Nature Centre, which is the main headquarters for the foundation that owns the research station we are based at, called Simla. The Asa Wright Centre is in the middle of a large section of protected rainforest, and is a great place to spot amazing wildlife, particularly loads of different species of birds. It seemed like every time we looked we'd see a new type of bird fly past, and the experience was really cool - the birds here are all so colourful!

After a few more days of frog and nest collecting our plan was to take the whole team up the top of Aripo, the highest mountain in Trinidad, on Friday so that the climbers could continue looking for the golden tree frog, as it has only ever been found atop the two highest peaks on the island. We'd been hoping for wet weather since we arrived over a week ago as it's really important for the work that we're doing here that it rains a lot, we might not normally like the rain so much but frogs love it, so whilst we're here so do we! It just so happened that the weather we'd been hoping for arrived on the day that we didn't need it, so torrential rain all day on Friday meant that climbing the mountain had to be put off until next week, as it might have been dangerous to climb trees in such heavy rain. The rain really was heavy as well, it's as if all the rain you might get back in Scotland in a nasty February was dropped on us in one day! Instead of climbing we went for a walk through some amazing forest near the foot of the mountain, the thickest rainforest we'd been in yet.

That night we knew it would be perfect conditions for "frogging" so we went out to collect some Kermit look-a-likes at a place we'd been to the week before. The foundations of a building that had never been finished had just seemed like a dusty hole in the ground last week, but on Friday night the rain had turned it into a big pond alive with frogs!

There were so many frogs that you had to shout to be heard above the noise they were making!

It's been a really busy week, and although it feels like we've been here longer than that, I'm glad to say that there's still so much to do and see, and now that the rainy-season seems to have started, and it's nice weather for frogs we'll be getting even busier from here!
For now, see you later!