Cerro de la Muerte (Oct 31-Nov 1)

The most striking thing about Cerro de la Muerte is how cold it is. It is hard to imagine a place this cold in Costa Rica, but then you have to think about how high this mountain is (the tallest one along the Inter-American Highway in Costa Rica at 11,322 ft). We went as part of the Environmental Science field trip, and so we had a professor and two assistants with us as well. We saw oak forests as they are in Costa Rica, a mountain bog, and paramo, all specialized niches in this mountain location.

Cerro de la Muerte is called Hill of the Dead. The story about the name is that people in the valley would make the 3- or 4-day trip to San Jose, often carrying their produce or products, with only their light t-shirts on, which would be wet from sweating. When they got to the top of Cerro de la Muerte they would lie down to sleep and would ultimately freeze to death. Cheery story, and even with long johns, pants, flannels, jacket, scarf, and gloves on I could definitely resonate to the experience of cold. Here are the students and Anna Ruth and Molly trying to stay warm:


The hummingbird research we did was about how the many sugar feeders put out to attract hummingbirds may affect pollination of the plants in the area. We first collected flowers that hummingbirds are normally attracted to, examined their pollen under the microscope, and sketched the pollen on paper so as to help us remember the various shapes. The next day we set up the hummingbird net, caught the hummingbirds briefly, touched their beaks and neck feathers with scotch tape which we affixed to glass, and then we assessed these for how much and what types of pollen could be found. Very little actually. This suggests that hummingbirds are returning to the feeders rather exclusively, and so pollination may be reduced, as at least these hummingbirds were not doing their job. To fully test this, however, we would need a sample of hummingbirds not caught near feeders to see what the pollination counts would be. The place we would go to do this, however, is even colder, so perhaps another class would be interested. . .