Tracking Ourselves!

For a second I thought to say “Oh I hope the weather is good for Sundays BBQ” but then decided, nah sure we are in Paraguay not Ireland any more of course it will be a beautiful day! But no......why when things are planned does something go awry, I have woken up this morning with the rain pounding on the roof and the front garden turning into a second lake. But on the up side I can now get some serious work done on my tadpole project and of course the frogs are going to be out in force later tonight. It is definitely true that whenever something doesn’t work something else good will come from it so I can’t really complain!
Our volunteer Stuart has joined us now. So we figured it would be cool to introduce him to the joys of searching for butterflies! The plan was to stay relatively close to the back of the house but the butterflies didn’t follow our plan and in the excitement of the chase (oh yes you may laugh now but wait until you try it and the little guys keep taunting you fluttering by your face) we went way off track and got very disorientated in the grass and tree’s of the cerrado. We tried to do a Ray Mears and track our footsteps back to the track but after seeing the same tree for the second time we figured we’d been tracking our footsteps in a nice big circle. (Maybe we should have been paying more close attention rather than chatting about caterpillars). With the sun setting I looked to the sky! No not to pray.......but figured I could use the position of the setting sun to get a grasp on the direction of the house and it worked, we were back at the house in jig time! I recon Mr. Mears would be impressed!
The intern’s projects are at the fun stages where they are really settling into the field work and getting some awesome work done. The brain cells are definitely in over drive!
We “harvested” our first home grown squash from our vegetable patch last night......chicken and squash soup. It’s nice to eat something that you helped grow....even if it wasn’t as ripe as it should have been......well it was green, but it still tasted good!! Next step is to collect some horse manure to mix with the compost we are making and get some melons growing!


Hasta la Proxima!


Loraine Grant: MSc, BSc