Today was our last full day in Las Cruces which is quite sad. Although I am excited to move on to a new station, it has been such a pleasant stay in Las Cruces. The house and the common room our really comfortable, the birding has been exciting, and the food has actually been good. Okay so I need to clarify. I don't like the food here. Sorry. I'm not typically picky but I really don't like cilantro and here cilantro is used as freely as salt or butter. It's in EVERYTHING. So that makes most meals intolerable. The food here has actually been good - I haven't had to force myself to eat. With that said I am still desperately craving my favorite homefoods. But that's neither here nor there. Back to my last day...

We caught more birds - YAY BIG SURPRISE THERE RIGHT??? I mean I'm always excited to catch birds but I'm finding it hard to reword my birding exploits to be interesting to you all. So instead here are some pictures of our birding successes!

Now on to the highlight of the day: Mission Bird Scare Alpha!!! After 9 or so birding gets pretty slow here and us birders get pretty bored. We are a very creative bunch and have been having a good time coming up with time consuming activities. Today, since it was our last day, we concocted a plan. If the birds wouldn't fly into the net - we'd just have to "encourage" them. The idea was to scare the birds into the net by surprising them at the compost and then shaking the bamboo around them to keep the birds from flying off to the sides. It would make more sense if you had a diagram. I have one, we drew it up, it was exciting. We all had codenames and we divided into three squads, the scare-er, the gamma squad, and the delta squad. We executed the plan only to discover that no birds were at the compost at the time. SO the mission was a complete FAILURE. But it was fun and it did kill a good chunk of time.










We also went on an incredibly grueling hike, almost totally uphill, across two streams, that ended with us cramming onto an already full public bus that drove us back to the botanical garden. The really cool part of the trip was finding this incredible strangler fig. It was spectacular. I'll end this post with this phenomenal tree.

Good night all! It's off to Osa tomorrow!