The smell of sulphur, dust and insect repellent

So.
Like I said two weeks ago, I was in the field for ten days. This means I've been smelling like sulfur and dust and insect repellent for ten days. Insect repellent for the obvious reasons. There are a lot of mosquitoes in the forest.
Sulfur, because aside from the insects, there are also ticks, and apparently they hate sulfur or something, because people (including me) use this sulfur soap to wash every day to keep them away. And it works. I only found four ticks on me the entire time (and those were on a day I didn't even go out into the forest, which... I don't know). Four ticks is obviously four too many to be comfortable with, but it's a lot less than the dozens it would have probably otherwise been. So I'm incredibly happy about that, since I can still see where I got bit by ticks last time I had them, about two and a half months ago.
I actually stopped noticing the smell of the soap about half way through. Or I think I did. I think it's more likely that my brain started to ignore the smell than that suddenly I stopped smelling like it. But for the first half of the time, that's what the world smelled like.

And dust, because our campsite was in a white sand area. And when there's sand, there's dust, and it's everywhere. There were two buildings there. One two-story building, and a shelter with tables for eating and doing other things that require a table. Well, I guess the shelter can't be called a building, exactly. And the other building was more like a one-story building, just lifted one story off the ground for some reason. We hung our hammocks (to sleep in) on the first "floor" that had no floor.

There was electricity there, and running water (by which I mean a flushable toilet and a couple of sinks by the shelter for washing hands and dishes) that I think came from a huge tank on the roof that I think collected rain water, except it seems to me it wasn't that big and with more than thirty people there we should have ran out. So I don't know where the water came from.

Washing more than just hands and face in the sink happened in a creek (or igarapé, the bath place in the picture) nearby. I keep wondering just how much we increased the sulfur concentration of that stream while we were there.
What about the smell of sweat, you ask? Yes, there was a lot of sweat. Walking in a forest when it's almost 30 degrees outside does that. But the smell of sweat was pretty much covered under all the other smells, especially when you added a bit of sun lotion.

So what did we actually do?
For the first half of the ten days we did different things, counting plants and catching birds and fish and going out in the dark to see all the things that are out at night, and tried but failed to catch some bats. We also had some lectures, basically about what ever we were going to do next. With a projector and slide shows and everything. I was not expecting that.
And we walked a lot. The area that we used for the field exercises was actually maybe a kilometer away from the place where we camped. It was a 1km*5km area, with some permanent research plots and a small path running around it. So every time we went out to the actual forest we had to first walk to the are, and then however long it was to the place inside the are we actually wanted to go. The longest days were almost 15 km, which doesn't sound like that much for one day, but walking a forest path is a lot harder than walking on a road.
Ok, enough talk. Let's get to the pictures. They're a lot nicer than reading me talk anyway. And there are so many pictures. So many. There were almost 600 pictures in my camera after the ten days (I admit, that number could be higher), and while a lot of them aren't worth sharing, there are so many pictures I'd like to show you. Too many. I can't fit them all here. So here's the highlights of the highlights.

 As I said, we caught some birds.

And some fish. We blocked a portion of the stream with nets and then used hand nets to find them.

We also did some work on computers. I think here we're analysing some data on plants we had collected the day before.

 There were some pineapples growing nearby.

 And some relative of passion fruit's, I was told.

And this plant that had decided to grow in what I assume is the stub of a branch on a tree. Things growing on things is actually really common here. Like here:

There were a lot of these trees covered in these plants. I don't know what either the tree or the plant growing on it are. I just know there were a lot of them.

 This is where the world decided to put all the ferns.

 This is what a cashew-tree looks like. I did not know that.

Then there was this guy and a couple of its friends who I happened to see as I and one of my course mates as we were making our way to the area where the bird nets were that day, far away from the camp. I simply noticed some animals and obviously took a picture (though it ran away before I could get a good one, so sorry about the quality), and afterwards I found out that this is apparently a really rare animal to see, and no one knew they lived in the area, despite the fact that it was a permanent research area. So everyone was super-excited about it, and they told me it's called a cachorro-vinagre or a bush dog in English, although now that I'm at home and googled it, I'm not convinced that the animal that comes up there is the same animal I saw. The one in the photo there has longer legs and tail than what comes up from google, and the face is a bit different. But I don't know.

We also saw some monkeys when we were out trying to find frogs with my project partner (I'll get to the project we did in a bit). He actually took this picture instead of me, because it turns out he uses my camera better than I do. (obrigada pela foto, se você tá lendo isto!) And trying to take a picture of a small monkey hidden in the canopy some 15 meters above you is not easy at all.

We also went out during the night aka. after 6 PM, to see animals that could be found during the dark hours. Here's some of them:

This leaf-insect had clearly decided that it's not worth the effort to find a spot where it would actually be camouflaged when it's dark.

We were actually mostly looking for frogs and lizards, but we also found this marsupial, which, if I understood correctly, doesn't have a pouch, despite being a marsupial. I have no idea how that's supposed to work.

This is a frog that's about the size of my palm. By which I mean enormous.







Ok, one more. Not from the night, though.

This is probably the best photo I've taken the entire time here.

For the second half-ish of the ten days we did our own projects. We chose some question, and plan an experiment, and then spend three-four days collecting data from the forest and analysing it and making a small presentation to the others about what we found. We did the projects in pairs, and ours was about the camouflage of frogs. Basically we spent two days walking around the forest trying to find some frogs, took a picture of them, ranked them based on how complex their camouflage pattern was, and then showed the pictures to all the others to see how long it takes for them to find the frogs in the pictures. The idea was that a more complex pattern will make the frogs harder to find. So I ended up with a bunch of find-the-frog-photos. Here's some of them:

So all in all, what's my impression of the rain forest, now that I've actually spent some time there?

Ok, no.
Ok, yes. This image came to my mind at some point while walking through the woods, and I laughed at it silently in my mind for a few seconds until I realised that it's not actually that far off. (If you don't know what this is, you need to go watch Emperor's New Groove immediately after reading this blog. It is great. And completely underrated. I've seen it in Finnish, English and Portuguese, and I have to say, the English version is actually the worst of them.) There was a lot of mud (but I survived without rubber boots, with just my gore-tex sneakers! It was tricky getting around the muddiest places, though, and I did get my shoes wet more than once. Luckily this is a part of the world where even soaked shoes dry in a little over a half a day, if you just leave then in a sunny spot), and there was a lot of insects. The picture is an exaggeration, obviously, but especially when it was getting dark the only way to not have a mosquito constantly in your ear was to keep walking. The moment you stopped was the moment the sound started.
Then again, forests in Finland also have mud and mosquitoes, so maybe it's not that different after all. The ununfamiliarity of the forest was actually one of the weirdest things about the rain forest. You expect something that's completely different from everything you've ever known, and then you walk into the forest and you think "oh, it's just a forest". Sure, you don't recognise any of the species, and there are so many palm trees and zero pines ans birches, and the forest floor is covered in roots and leaf litter and palm saplings instead of moss and blueberries, but it still feels like a forest in the same way a Finnish forest feels like a forest.
And while it is one of the most biologically diverse places in the world, the animals are just as hidden as in Finnish forests. Most of what you see is ants and mosquitoes, and some spiders. And bats, once it starts to get dark. No stumbling upon sleeping panthers and almost running off a cliff. I did see a tiny alligator in one of the tiny streams, the night we we out after the dark. I don't have a picture of it, because it turns out that taking a picture of a thing underwater from above water when it's dark is not all that easy.
Despite being in a rain forest, I didn't need a raincoat. It only rained on a couple of days while we were out in the forest, and on one of those I was comfortably sitting in a shelter writing down bird measurements while others were doing the running to the nets to untangle the birds and back. It also turns out that even when it's raining, it doesn't really rain that much all the way to the forest floor. Most of the rain gets stuck in the canopy. Although this obviously means that even once it's stopped raining, there will be plenty of water dripping from the canopy down on the people on the forest floor. Either way, based on my current experience you're never completely soaked (I'm probably wrong). Unless you walk into a waist-deep stream fully clothed to capture fish, like basically everyone but me did that other time it was raining. I had my camera with me to take pictures of the fish, and I felt that excuse enough to keep myself mostly dry and comfortable. And by dry I mean not dry but significantly drier that anyone else.
It turns out that I am perfectly capable of sleeping in a hammock. I was sure I wouldn't be sleeping much, but I actually slept really well. Also, which is really rare, my sleeping bag is the perfect thickness for sleeping in a hammock in the tropics. Almost always when sleeping in a sleeping bag it's either too cold or too hot, but not this time. We had a few colder nights when it was a little cool, but never too cold. I'm seriously surprised.

The best moments were were at about six in the morning, when the sun was rising. Most people were still in their hammocks (usually there were a few already walking around, and actually the people doing bird research, who were sampling the entire stretch of the 5 km now that they were there, usually left so that they were at the nets already at sunrise or at least soon after). And it was quiet, and cool, and beautiful.

I think that's a good note to end on.

~matu