I actually held a lizard!

I heard about your snow day! I hope you all had a great day off from school. Here the weather has been very hot, but I am enjoying it. Last night was our first night on the farm and clearly we are not used to living with animals. There are two frogs that share a room with my roommates and I. We screamed the first time we saw one frog jump across the wall, but we quickly got used to having them around. In the middle of the night they decided to croak all night. Needless to say I did not get a lot of sleep!

We woke up early this morning to begin our first day of work. Today I worked on the reptile/amphibian project where I did some important work maintaining reptile traps. If you look at the pictures you will notice us tying large plastic bags to sticks in the ground. These bags run along the ground and there are several buckets buried at various points. The animals can not cross the bags, so they move their way alongside until they fall into the buckets. Later in the week we will collect samples of animals which have been trapped and bring them back to the laboratory here at the farm to have them weighed and measured. Today we found a lizard in one of the buckets and we brought it back to be examined.

Setting up reptile traps

To get to the traps we drove through the somewhat flooded grass to a selina (salt water lake). Ellen told us that scientists have no idea why these lakes exist in the Pantanal, as the Pantanal is landliocked (you should remember this word from Social Studies!). On the way we saw jariboo storks and a tucan.

Our work with the traps was not too hard, but we were definatley busy and dirty. I was happy to come back and have a nice meal of rice and beans with sausage. For dessert we have been eating this wonderful combonation of condensed milk and sugar. It tastes just like caramel. Maybe some of you from Brazil know this! Tomorrow I will be on the river searching for otters. I will let you know if I spot one!

Ms.Masella