I’ve been back from Colombia a week now and there’s nothing like a week of English rain and chill to spark up a reflective mood. So on the day I head to Oman to join a cool project tracking the distribution of rare and endemic plants (more on that soon) here are some things I learnt during my two months of biological surveying in the Andes..
- After Brazil, Colombia is the most biodiverse country in the world.
- Hot chocolate with cheese is a thing. So is having ants for a snack. But put honey on your bread and you’ll get a looked at like a madman.
- Nowhere does false floors like the Andes. Seriously. Every twentieth step, you fall up to your knees in moss and soil.
- Kindness is correlated with altitude. The families we stayed with in the rural Andes were some of the most generous and interesting people I’ve met.
- Soil is very important but annoying to sample.
- Horseback is a fun mode of transport.
- Orchids are wicked and Colombia has over 4000 of them.
- Orchid taxonomists who have discovered 24 species of orchid new science, and use their identification skills to save endangered cloud forests are even more wicked.
Interview blog: How Colombia’s Orchid Hunter Is Saving Cloud Forest
- Nothing gets the nerves tingling more than a Skype PhD interview from a hotel where the internet might drop out at any second.
- Giant armadillos make giant armadillo burrows
- Measuring the diameter of tree trunks to find out the carbon profiles of cloud forests is just science-speak for wanting to hug plants.
- There’s a very large potential for forest regrowth on cow fields in the Andes…but it needs to be done right.
- Colombia’s tentative peace treaty, in treat of relapsing under the current government, has major consequences for the conservation on its wild environments.
- Taoist monks make good environmental stewards but bad neighbours.
- The high-altitude rosette fields of Colombia’s Paramo ecosystems play an important role in proving freshwater to several of its cities.
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