By Rowan Etzel
I've always loved spending time outside.
As a budding scientist, I used to spend all my free time outdoors, sketching
animals, mimicking bird calls, collecting insects, or simply watching the
clouds change in the sky above me. In recent years, however, I've grown more
distant from that part of myself, more caught up in the daily business of
schoolwork and my various commitments and less connected to the world around
me. I miss those days of immersion in the natural world, and one of my reasons
for coming on this course was to regain that sense of immediacy and purpose.
On our first night at Palo Verde, I
decided to take a walk down the road. Alone in the darkness, with just my feeble
flashlight for guidance, I felt the forest come alive around me. Frogs were
calling, bats swooping to catch the insects disturbed by my steps. The forest
was teeming with life, and I felt present in a way that I hadn’t in a long
while. At home and at college I love going on walks alone in the woods on a
regular basis, but I’m so used to the woods of the northeast that they’ve lost
most of their novelty to me, instead seeming more like a second home. There was
such a distinct pleasure in walking outside to find a whole new ecosystem right
there, and to be able to go access it whenever as part of the work for this
course. I love writing field notebook entries, both for the simple
organizational pleasure of ordering my thoughts as well as a physical chronicle
of the creatures I see. Every day I’ve made it my goal to spend some time alone
outside, taking some time to focus in on the butterflies, the ants, the birds,
or just keeping my eyes open for whatever comes along.
The sheer number of the animals I see here
daily is astounding. There’s just so much going on in any tiny area of ground.
A couple of days ago I was sitting by the side of the road, watching and taking
notes. In just a few minutes’ time I saw so many things that it was hard to
keep up in writing them down. Several dung beetles rolled their cargo by my
feet, slowly zig-zagging their way across the road. A hummingbird whirred by to
dip its long beak into a hibiscus flower a few feet from my face, its colors
darkly shimmering in the sun. Two different types of wasp were digging into the
mud of a drying puddle, and several types of butterflies floated in and our of
the underbrush. A white-speckle-winged bird and I spent ten minutes watching
each other, with the bird alternating between rustling around in the underbrush
and jumping out to sit in the road and cock its head at me inquisitively, as if
I were the one being observed.
In conducting field
observations, I feel an unexpected return to my childhood, when I used to spend
hours watching the world around me. I've grown to realize that my study of
science and research is improved by cultivating that childlike sense of looking
at the world, of observation and inference without judgement. Such an
unfiltered outlook allows me to collect information more objectively, and
removes some of the inhibitions I've gained over the years. What drew me to
science in the first place was the joy of discovering the world we live in, and
there’s a lot to unearth here in Costa Rica.
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