Introduction (January 2008)

Hola de Quito,
having only just arrived, this will be more of an introduction to my plans than a travelogue persay......

although arriving downtown last night at 10:30 was an experience to be sure.
burning effigies in bonfires on every street, fire works in every direction, dancing , drumming, the acrid smell of smoke ......

it was all a little much for my travel weary self

this morning i had breakfast with my friends Angelica and Rudy, she is a ecuadorian biologist and he is an american ornithologist.....
http://www.plumaverdetours.com/
good to have friends
fun to have bilingual conversations to help get my spanish legs back on.....
may be the possibility of some collaborative adventures at some point

so what am i doing?
i have a couple of main projects over the next couple of months:

the woman who was my honors thesis advisor at the U of O, Bitty Roy (http://evolution.uoregon.edu/Roy.html ), got a grant from National Geographic to come down here and study thes orchids that mimic fungi to attract fungus gnats for pollination!
These orchids just happen to grow in the cloud forest on the western slopes of the andes near the "choco" region which is widely regarded as a center of major biodiversity for most groups of organisms (birds, plants, etc).
Which roughly translates into me spending a month freaking out on the wonders of one of the most diverse cloud forests on the planet!
I could hardly turn down the invitation to tag along!!!!!!
stay tuned as we head out there on the 10th.....
http://www.reservaloscedros.org/en

The other organized project i am going to be working on, starting tomorrow, is putting together a series of color plates, roughly modeled oin the rapid color guides put out by The Field Museum in chicago.
http://fm2.fieldmuseum.org/plantguides/rcg_intro.asp?zone=tropical&guidetype=plant&country=ECUADOR&subject=&family=&btnsubmit=Go%21
This will be at a reserve called el monte in mindo, that i visited a couple of summers ago, when i was down here with Peter Wetherwax´s course......
http://www.ecuadorcloudforest.com/
Again the rough translation is me spending my days running around in the cloud forest looking for flowers to photograph.......

then depending on how a few other factors come together....we shall see......
mid february will take me through the end jof my "·commitments"
but there is a whole lifetime of amazing things to do down here
(a possible travel glitch is the fact that i am getting recruited for interviews by a handful of grad schools that i applied to.....not sure how this will come together)


we shall see

like i say, just an introduction

when i return from mindo i will have some real things to write about

adios
t

ps for those of you that missed my slideshow from last time, NIck posted some highlights at
http://www.seedambassadors.org/Images/Ecuador/presentation.htm