Sunday, March 13, 2011

Ants and trees excite us!

Dear family and friends,

Greetings from Belize!  We arrived safely and have spent the last three days at Hill Bank field station, located in the Orange Walk district of Belize.  Hill Bank is awesome!  It is almost completely powered by solar energy, utilizes composting toilets, and our accomodations are excellent.  In our short time, we have already seen about 70 species of birds, a wide variety of plants, and animals such as howler monkeys and coati's.





Here is a brief overview of what we have done so far:

Each morning we have woken up early and started our day off with a bird walk.   We began and finished our research projects on  Acacia ants and trees.  Many of us have learned that Acacia ants hurt when they bite!  We also went on a medicinal plant walk where we learned how many tropical plants can be used to treat problems such as arthrithus, colds, and even snake bites.  We have learned a lot!

While we have been busy learning, we have also had a lot of fun.  Today, we went to the town of Lamanai, where we got to see several ancient Mayan ruins.  We climbed up one of the pyramids (33 meters high) and celebrated by dancing once we reached the top. That's right, we danced.






 We also had an opportunity to try out our snorkel gear by snorkeling down a fresh water mangrove creek.  Tomorrow morning we will pack up our gear and head to our next destination: BFREE.  This blog will be updated by one of the other groups in about three days and you can hear about our further adventures.  Stay tuned.

-Team Tunkuruchu
Jon, Will, Erika, and Colleen

ps Dad the undershirts are insanely comfortable

Love William

1 comment:

  1. These howlers are amazing. Great blog. It feels like I'm watching Animal Planet.

    ReplyDelete