March 1---EARTH University

Another awesome day! They seem to get better and better! The day started early with a morning bird watching trip that ended up being more of a monkey watching trip!! Which is WAY cool!! This time we saw white-faced capuchins. . . and again it was a pretty large troop so we watched them for about 15 minutes as they traveled through the treetops! They are really fun to watch!!

The next neatest thing we saw was 2 toucans (you know. . .the Fruit Loops bird ) that were actually sharing food! It was really neat to see them passing whatever they had to each other! And we also saw a gray parrot just perched in a tree for a long time. And we kind of saw a macaw flying away but I just got a glimpse of it, unfortunately! It would be really neat to see one in the wild!! We saw a number of other small birds---lots of types of tanagers and grackles.

After breakfast we toured some of EARTH university and heard a little about some of the projects being done there. We visited their pig area (and the piglets were soooo cute!) where they were trying to determine if a larger, natural pen resulted in happier (and heavier) pigs vs. a small concrete bottomed pen. We also sow how they are treating and recycling the waste from the pigs. And we also heard a little about the work being done with buffalo.

In addition to the farm, we also visited the banana plantation and learned a lot about them. For one, they are a plant (not a tree) and you can easily chop one down with a sharp machete (as the plantation manager demonstrated---oh my, that guy knew how to use a machete!!!). Look for pictures of this over the next couple of days!! But it was really interesting to see how the bananas grow and are processed. I was amazed that a plant only takes a year to grow and produce and how it grows new shoots to become the next banana plant. It was pretty amazing!

One of the really neat things that they do at EARTH is recycle nearly everything and work hard to be eco-friendly and make the best use of all their resources! After they transport the bananas from the plantation to the packing area on this really cool tram thing (again—you will see pictures in a couple of days, I hope), they take the stems and recycle them! Although we didn’t get to see this in action, we got to see the plant and processing area for making banana paper from the stems. They use the banana stalks combined with recycled paper from the university and the area to make the paper.

It is amazing how they can recycle so many different things! This place was really incredible. Much of the food came from the University itself. I only wish we could have learned more about the different research projects!