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!

Today was another bird filled day but felt strangely slow and lethargic. Therefore I'll keep this post short with just a few of the day's highlights.

Tomorrow is our last full day of birding in Las Cruces so I hope that it's full of bright and lovely birdies!

The station we're currently staying at is one of the largest botanical gardens worldwide and is known far and wide! It's pretty expansive and absolutely gorgeous. Today we wandered around with Ellen learning the plants for our plant quiz tomorrow and it was actually enjoyable! Who knew sedentary organisms could be so interesting!? Here are some of my favorite pics:

Of course the morning was filled with birding and what a day we had! We caught 15 birds in one day (just as a reference point - we caught 17 birds over the entire stay at Palo Verde). Unfortunately 5 or 6 of these specimens were clay colored robins - a brown, non-descript robin with a quick temper and frequent bowel movements. Fortunately we were able to escape most of the latter characteristic.





We also caught a bunch of hummingbirds! This is a very good site for hummingbirds. Most of them were hermits of some kind (with a curved beak specialized for a curved flower).





My favorite catch of the day was a golden hooded tanager. They are such gorgeous little birds. I was lucky enough to free and hold this little friend. Sadly this made it impossible for me to take pictures myself and therefore i didn't get the picture I really wanted. Hopefully we get them again tomorrow so that I can give you all a better shot. For now, here I am proudly displaying (and NOT crushing) this beautiful tanager.





We also set some fruit out and had some real up close bird watching!







It's been an incredibly long day but it's been such a great time! I can't wait to hit the nets again tomorrow! Hopefully we'll get my motmot!!!