Yesterday morning, I once again pondered these questions: If
the wind blows at 50 miles an hour all night long, and no snow is coming from
the sky, why doesn’t all the snow get where it belongs by morning? Is there an
infinite supply of snow in the world that just keeps drifting over the roads?
There were white-out conditions most of the way down Maxon Rd. I was behind a
Scion van and another car following the Scion too closely when we came to one
of the spots on Highway 14 where the wind blows all the way from DeKalb without
a tree to stop it. The Scion drove into a drift in the road and stopped dead.
The car behind was able to stop before crashing into it, but not in time to
leave any space to maneuver. When the oncoming traffic cleared, I was able to
drive around.
It seems that winter will never end. It’s been a bad one.
Snow with wind alternating with freezing rain followed by subzero temperatures
with more wind. I really want an electric car. Electric cars don’t come with
all wheel drive. At the beginning of winter, I started a tally of the number of
days that I absolutely needed all wheel drive. A priori¸ I thought it would be less than a dozen. I gave up
counting by the end of December. There’s no way I can live here and not have
all wheel drive.
This morning the temperature dropped 10°F between 6:00 and
9:00 (23° to 13°). It is supposed to be below zero again tonight. The snow did
stop blowing, but only because the snow we were supposed to get overnight came
as freezing rain, which put a shiny coat of ice over the drifts. Except next to
the garage, where there was a big drift of powder. How is that possible?
Drifts in the chicken run.
One thing I enjoy about snow is that the chickens love to
peck it off my boots. I never see them eat snow outside, but when I bring it to
them in the coop, it is the best thing ever! Chickens are like that, though. Whatever
is in front of them is the best thing ever. I’m trying to develop that attitudet.
Terry has been keeping busy shoveling snow and cutting
firewood to feed the wood stove in his shop. Making wood warms you twice, Louie
used to say. Last week, Terry was splitting some oak and found a beautiful bright orange fungus inside a knot. I looked all over the outside and could not find any
indication that the inside was infected. Nature can still amaze me, even in the
dead of winter.
Two sides of a fungus growing around a knot inside an oak tree
I was awake early. I took my camera and walked down to the
Sibun River to see if I could find any birds. There was a bananaquit flitting
about in the trees by the pool.
Bananaquit
I saw the sunrise through breaks in the clouds. It gave me
hope that today would be less wet and drizzly than yesterday.
Sunrise at the Sibun River
Today was when Dave’s students collected data for their
individual projects on stream sampling. Touch-sensitive mimosas were all along the river bank. The students were impressed with this plant, which defends itself by folding up its leaves to make it almost invisible. Here's a video.
There wasn’t much for Tony and I to do.
Tony collared one of the guides to take him for a walk up the Sibun River. When
they got back I joined them for a walk through an abandoned cacao plantation.
Hershey started a number of cacao plantations in Belize in the 1980’s but
pulled out a few years later when the price of cocoa dropped sharply. Most of
the cacao trees were torn out and replaced by orange groves, but this little
spot remained.
Cacao tree with unripe pods
Our guide found a ripe cacao pod and split it open by
whacking it against the trunk of a tree. He offered the seeds to us and told us
to suck the white part off the seeds and spit the seeds out. It was delicious!
The texture was a little off-putting, being slimy and stringy at the same time.
There was a tendency for it to wrap around one’s teeth. The seed is where the
bitter cocoa comes from. I split one seed open and saw that it was purple on
the inside. This is a classic seed dispersal strategy. The sweet covering of
the seed entices an animal to carry the seed off; the bitterness of the seed
itself causes the animal to leave that part alone. The seed survives and
sprouts in a new location.
Cacao pod with sweet, white goo around the seeds
While the students were finishing up with their samples in
the afternoon, we went for a walk with Neko, who was on a mission to get some
tea vine and jackass bitters for a medicinal plant demonstration after supper. Neko
taught us how to get water from the water vine, a species of grape. You have to
be fast with the second cut because the water is moving up the vine so quickly
that the piece of vine will be dry in short order. Once the vine is cut on both
ends, the water can drip out in either direction. At that point, it’s all about
gravity. We drank water from both the tea vine and the water vine. It really
came out. Neko said that if we had cut a bigger water vine, there would be much
more water in it.
Drinking from a vine
And a video:
We tasted a leaf of the jackass bitters. It was nasty. The
leaves are boiled to make a tea that is used to treat all sorts of ailments. I
suspected this practice was based on the general principle that anything that
tastes bad must be good for you. After supper, I heard one of the students say
the tea was ready. Somehow I never got around to finding out where it was.
Monday, January 6
Neko took us on a bird hike at 6:00 a.m. He promised that we
would identify 40 or 50 bird species. I didn’t count. Most of the birds were
identified by call. We saw hardly anything. Some of the birds were migrants
from back home, such as Baltimore orioles, orchard orioles, and turkey vulture.
I was able to get a picture of a black collared oriole, which I had never seen
before. Overall, this experience merely reinforced my opinion that birding is a
frustrating endeavor.
Black collared oriole
The day was pleasant. I was able to get a good picture of
the Sleeping Giant. If you stare at it long enough you can picture the giant
facing either way. An orange grove is in the foreground.
The mountain in the back looks like the face of a sleeping giant, or so they say.
We broke into smaller groups to do various activities today.
I wanted to check ziplining off my bucket list. You may or may not recall that
I was unable to zipline in Costa Rica because of a horrible sunburn on the back
of my legs from snorkeling.
We started our day at the Baboon Sanctuary. The name
confused me because baboons are apes that live in Africa. At the sanctuary, I
learned that the Kriol had traditionally called black howler monkeys baboons.
Belize was part of the slave trade. If you take people from a place where black
apes are called baboons and put them in a place where there are similar-sized
black monkeys, it is not surprising that they would call the monkeys baboons.
They weren’t taxonomists, after all. I can imagine them saying, “Isn’t it funny
that the baboons have tails here?”
Mom howler monkey with a baby on her back
We saw a troop of howler monkeys at the edge of the reserve.
In the video, the woman’s voice is our guide and the man’s voice is the guide
from another group. The most important things to note in the video are the cute
baby monkey and the howling of the alpha male, which (as the guide says) can be
heard for a mile.
One of the most spectacular and useful trees of this area is
the cohune palm. The fronds are enormous. They are used for thatched roofs. The
nuts are a source of oil, although our guide told us it is a lot of work to get
at it. She also explained that the cohune palms are important to the howler
monkeys, not as a source of food, but for shelter. When hurricanes come, the
howler monkeys hunker down among the leaves to ride out the storm.
Tony looking at one leaf of a cohune palm
The ziplining was not at all scary. Our guides were thorough
in their explanations of the safety precautions that would keep us from harm.
The only thing we had to do was pick up our feet at the end of the line to
avoid barking our shins on the landing platform. Unfortunately, I ended up
paying more attention to the upcoming landing platform than the jungle beneath
me. Oh well. Next time.
Geared up and ready to go!
The zipline
And a video of Tony:
Tuesday, January 7
We spent the morning at a green iguana breeding facility.
The green iguanas are endangered because females with eggs are considered a
delicacy. Selectively killing breeding females is never good for a population.
The social structure is such that the dominant male gets about 80% of the matings.
It would be much better to selectively kill the males. But old habits die hard.
Our guide, Bert, took us into the cage with the adult iguanas, several females
and a couple of males. As part of the experience, he put iguanas on our
shoulders. “It’s cold today,” Bert explained, “the iguanas will really like
you.”
It was cold, too. I had to wear a sweatshirt all day. To
date, I have not received any sympathy at all from my colleagues back in
northern Illinois, where the temperature was
19 below zero on Monday morning.
The iguanas, seeking the warmest part of our persons, soon
climbed on our heads. Having an iguana on my head was not on my bucket list,
but I’m checking it off anyway. Once was enough for that. They have sharp
little claws!
The one and only time I will ever have a lizard on my head, I hope.
I was not keen on holding a baby iguana when we moved to the
next room, even though they were much cuter than the adults. Bert passed the
little ones out to those who wanted them. When our time was up, he took them
back and stacked them in his hand. He told us that he always counted,
especially with school groups. There’s always some kid who wants to take one
home.
Bert with a handful of baby iguanas
After lunch, we visited the Mayan ruins at Cahal Pech (“Place
of the Ticks,” named by the archeologist who discovered it in 1950). Our guide,
Pedro, was Mayan and still spoke his traditional language at home. He looked
exactly like a Mayan carving. The sheer magnitude of the ruins was
mind-boggling. It is estimated that the site was occupied from 1200 BCE to 900
CE. How could people build such complex and magnificent buildings without metal
tools? I don’t even think they had wheels. Cahal Pech was part of a
far-reaching network of Mayan settlements that were connected only by
footpaths. Wow.
We saw the throne where the king would greet visitors in
Plaza A. The royal bedrooms had vaulted ceilings using the same arch
construction that we saw in the doorways. The king’s bed was a stone slab 20 feet
long and not very wide. It would have been padded with furs and palm leaves.
Finally, we saw the ball court. Pedro said that originally the game was played
for entertainment. The sacrifice of players at the end of the game came later
on. The ball court was not as big as I had imagined. Perhaps the courts got
bigger over time also. And all this stayed intact buried under the rainforest
for a thousand years.
Plaza A: The king sat on the bench in the break in the wall at the top of the stairs to receive guests.
Arched doorway in a wall
The king's bedroom, bed on the left
Our Mayan guide in the ball court
After we were done at the ruins, we went to San Ignacio to
do some shopping. It’s not a very big town. Some of the stores were obviously
aimed at tourists. I got a refrigerator magnet to add to my collection in a
store that claimed to have only items made in Belize. It says, “You better
Belize it” printed, oddly, on the colors of the Bolivian flag (horizontal
stripes of red, yellow, and green). Starts with B. Other stores seemed to have
a motto of “If you can’t find it here, you can get along without it.” Tony
bought a sports jersey for his son at a shop that also sold shoes, sexy
underwear, irons, blow dryers, washing machines, and stoves.
Something for everyone, from shoes to washers
My favorite sign advertised “Quality Home Made
Old Fashion Ice Cream Best in Town $2.00, Coke, Slush, Water, Candy & Cookies,
Snakes, Chips, Juice, Old Navy Slippers-Flipflops.” Really, what more could you want?
Ice cream and Old Navy slippers...
Wednesday, January 8
We went to the Belize zoo in the morning. Tony was not
looking forward to it. “I’m not a zoo guy,” he said. “All the animals look
depressed to me.”
At the end of the morning, I had to agree with him. I was
disappointed on this trip that we had seen no mammals that were truly wild. The
howler monkeys, while not exactly tame, were not exactly wild either.
It was hard to believe that our flights were right on time
in light of the fact that the entire United States was pretty much shut down on
Sunday and Monday. The flights were completely full with travelers who had been
rescheduled from cancelled flights. It was a scramble getting through
immigration and customs in Miami in time to catch our connecting flight. In the
end, however, we got back to Chicago right on time.
I have just returned from Belize. I was there visiting the Sleeping Giant Education and Adventure Lodge to see if the location would be suitable for a short-course in Ecology. Compared to what I experienced in Costa Rica last year, this place was tame and touristy. As I think about what we did, however, that does not necessarily mean that it wouldn't be a good experience for students. Rather than observe pristine old-growth rain forest, the educational opportunities run more along the lines of conservation and restoration. It is certainly more affordable.
I traveled with the college's chief academic officer, Tony, and a group of students and their instructors from another part of the state.
I'll just hit the highlights here, with this post covering the first two days.
It was raining in Belize City when we arrived. This is the view of a garden across the road from the outdoor waiting area for ground transportation.
Across from the airport
After riding for an hour and a half, we arrived at the lodge. The first floor had guest rooms. The second floor had the bar and kitchen. The third floor was where our meals were served buffet style. That is a genuine, honest-to-God thatched roof.
The lodge
A creek that ran through the grounds
As at La Paloma in Costa Rica, our rooms came furnished with towel art.
Towel art, plus a chocolate on the first day
There was also a pool. The fountains had lights at the bottom of the stream. When the flow was interrupted, the drop at the end lit up through the miracle of fiber optics. The video shows the daytime and nighttime view. It was very cool. I wished I had one at home.
On the first day, we visited St. Herman's Cave at Blue Hole National Park. Unlike caves at home, which are generally cool and dank, this cave was hot and humid. My t-shirt was drenched by the time we were done. We saw some beautiful formations as well as Mayan artifacts. The cave had been used for blood sacrifices. The royal family gave blood either by pulling thorns through their tongues or, in the case of males, slitting their foreskin. OUCH for both. The blood was collected in a pot; the pot was put on a fire to dry out, and the pot was broken. We saw ashes and broken pots, left from a thousand years ago.
The entrance to St. Herman's Cave
Shiny, tiny crystals in the ceiling (white specks, upper left)
Cave pillar
Another cave pillar
Ducking through a tunnel
The "jellyfish" stalactite
A broken pot from blood sacrifice
Besides being hot, the hike was strenuous and hard on the knees. I was so ready to get out of the cave by the time we saw the exit.
The very welcome view of the cave exit
In the afternoon, we had a long, muddy hike to a lookout tower on the top of a hill. The way down was more treacherous than the way up because of that gravity problem. It was an exhausting day.
2014 is beginning with cold and snowy day. Just about the
time we think the snow is letting up, here it comes again. Terry fired up the
snowblower at noon. I went out at 12:30 to clean up the remnants. Hilda had
shoveled most of what couldn’t be done with the snowblower before Terry
started. I could still be out there. I gave it up as hopeless at 1:10. We might
have to get out there again yet today. Will it ever stop snowing?
This little table had no snow on it 24 hours ago.
I made pecan caramel rolls for breakfast. It was a nice way
to start the new year. We will have the traditional pork and sauerkraut dinner tonight
to insure good luck in the coming year.
New Year's breakfast. Aren't you jealous?
I’m leaving for Belize on Friday. Correction: I’m supposed to leave for Belize
on Friday, if I’m not snowed in here for the remainder of winter. It might be
two weeks or more before my next post, but I’ll try to be sure I have some
awesome pictures to share with you.
