By Gabriela Rodriguez
I had the opportunity to take the Tropical Ecology course hosted in Costa Rica that is offered here at Delaware Valley University. This course, taught by Dr. Gregory George, is offered to upperclassmen here at DelVal. Throughout this course, students learned about components that make up a tropical environment, some background on the country’s history and the conservation and diversity of different biomes in Costa Rica. During spring break, students had the opportunity to go over to Costa Rica and visit lowlands and mid elevation tropical rainforests, all while seeing cloud forests, high elevation oak forests and dwarf bamboo forests during the trip.
One of the sites we stayed at is called Camaquiri Conservation Initiative (CCI), where we got to stay at a lowland tropical rainforest. There, we woke up to Howlers monkeys as they served as our alarms clock and, we had the chance to have home cooked traditional Costa Rican meals throughout our day. While at CCI we would participate in morning, afternoon and night walks, having the opportunity to try different trails that the site has to offered. At this site, we were able to identified and observed 3 out of the 4 monkeys that are found in Costa Rica, Howler, Spider and Capuchins monkeys.
Due to the good weather, we also good the opportunity to travel up a river called Rio Colorado, and see some of the biodiversity. We spotted Caimans, Americans Alligators and Amazon Kingfishers. After a nice morning boat ride, we at a restaurant near the river and go to learn more about some of the history and the communities that are found near the river. Additionally, this year we had the opportunity to stay at a hotel at the side of a volcano, walk on tree bridges, visit an active
volcano and a historical sight.
For more information about the CCI site, you can visit their website: https://www.camaquiri.com/
