On Wednesday, June 28, Drew, Chumi, and I drove down to La Ensenada (hotel/station) on the Nicoyo Peninsula at the southern (lowland) end of the Bellbird Biological Corridor. DukeEngage students/workers spent the week there and we did a day’s worth of filming on Thursday. Their project in the morning was to plant 200 trees (picked up from the lowland Guacimal nursery maintained by the Costa Rican Conservation Foundation) in a pasture where a rancher had his well that supplied his house and all of his cattle. This was quite hard physical labor!
In the afternoon they built a shadehouse for the Women’s Association in Coyolito. The women want to maintain the nursery and use the plants to do various community reforestation projects. DukeEngage folks put up the shadehouse and bagged soil into about 300 bags for seeds and seedlings. The women made a delicious refrigerio (snack) with potato & sausage empanadas.