Today, I returned home to find my kids (Ava (7), Miles (5) and Anna (2)) and the rest of the ‘neighborhood gang’ having a fair to raise money for nature conservation. Sounds suspiciously like a father put them up to this doesn’t it? Well, not directly at least. Let me explain…

The core of our neighborhood gang, made up of about 12-15 kids between the ages of 3 and 11, have been playing together for the best part of the last five years. We have been lucky enough to have some remnant oak savanna behind our house. Here, the kids have played hide-and-seek, knights and princesses, and caught butterflies, snakes (one particularly large bull snake I remember), newts, and beetles -and a host of other insects. They’ve seen life (a chickadee nest in our front yard) and death (sadly, the carcass of great horned owl that turned up one day – much to many parents’ chagrin). Three species of owls live back there, and one Christmas day some bobcats wandered into our tiny postage stamp back-yard from the savanna. At night, the coyotes howl – we think to trumpet their triumphs at catching the cottontails that take refuge in the hawthorns. Of course, the land is home to many Anna’s and rufous hummingbirds.

Three weeks ago, the machines started coming to turn the oak land into a housing development. First, they cut down the trees. Now they are building a road. Before long, there will be a multitude of new houses. This is affecting my own kids far in a far more profound way than I expected – particularly in a generation growing up with iPhones and video-games. I’m not even sure that they currently know how much they will lose once the lawns start being planted.

So, this was the motivation for the fair — to raise money for nature research and conservation! They set up vinegar and baking soda volcanoes, bead necklaces, bracelets, paper cranes, sand art along with other games. The neighborhood came in droves and paid out money to the gang in 20 cent increments that totaled $9! Not exactly a hefty research budget, but the most important funding that has been raised that I can remember. A symbol of how attachment to nature can motivate kids to do amazing things. Who knows, maybe this is the beginning of a neighborhood science & nature gang. $9 should buy quite a few hummingbird feeders! Maybe that will stop them from stealing my carrots…

MGB

Photo by Sarah Hadley

Species of the day –– Three-wattled Bellbird (Procnias tricarunculatus)

This was another exciting species we saw at Las Tablas, but we have seen it at one of our sampling sites in the past. The three long, wormlike ‘wattles’ hanging near its bill and its relatively bizarre behavior make it quite remarkable. The males perch in the canopy open their bills wide (It looks like their whole head opens up!) and then make a loud BENK call. They look really funny while they do this since there appears to be so much effort involved and they open so wide. The inside of their mouth (called a ‘gape’) is black and looks rather cavernous. We saw one male come and perch on the same branch as another one and then make the call directly into its face! It must have been really loud. The females were around inspecting them while they were calling.

Photo by Sarah Hadley

Species of the day –– Slaty Flowerpiercer, (Diglossa plumbea)

Hummingbirds are not the only species of birds that feed from flowers. Many other species eat insects from flowers and several are quite specialized for drinking nectar from flowers. The flowerpiercer is one of these. They have an upturned bill with a hooked upper mandible and pointed lower mandible. They hook their upper mandible over the base of the flower’s corolla and then pierce it with the lower mandible. Through this hole they can drink the nectar. Obviously they can’t hover like a hummingbird though and need to do all of this while perched.

Photo by Sarah Hadley

Species of the day –– White-throated Mountaingem (Lampornis castaneoventris)

This male hummingbird was a very sharp looking individual. We had caught several females at this site, but this was the first male of the season. The mountaingem is a territorial hummingbird that we only catch at some of our higher sites.

Photo by Karen Dewolfe

Research note – High biodiversity

Biodiversity is “the degree of variation of life forms within a given species, ecosystem, biome, or an entire planet”. Tropical systems tend to be among the most diverse.  While doing research in a diverse system such as tropical forest you are inevitably going to see a great number of extremely unique and exciting things. While some of the most noteworthy are usually those that make it onto this page as posts, there are often many more others that don’t make it. Often this could be because we didn’t get a photo or maybe we already had done up a post for that day. Whatever the reason, there are far more species deserving species of the day status than days we have to post! At the Las Cruces Station there are 113 species of mammals, over 400 species of birds, and seemly countless numbers of plant and insect species! Clearly this is an exciting place to visit, work or study.