In Iquitos, turning science into words

One of a series of blog posts written during the Field Museum's 2010 Yaguas rapid inventory of Yaguas, Peru, and published by the New York Times.

"There are no white-lipped peccaries in this post, a deficiency that makes things harder for writer and reader right off the bat. As Doug mentioned in his last entry, we’re now back in Iquitos and spending most of our waking hours in a room full of laptops. From around 8  in the morning to around 7 at night, the whole team sits tapping away at our keyboards, putting together technical reports and species lists and other bits of text that are going to come in handy sooner or later. Scattered around the room are stacks of books and papers, coffee cups, field notebooks and what must be a terabyte worth of memory sticks. Every few minutes, someone stops typing to ask a neighbor something in a quiet voice, like “What elevation are we using for that old terrace at Camp 1?” or “What’s the common name for giant anteaters in Peru?” or — if Bob is their neighbor — “How old did you say the Plio-Pleistocene was again?” When they’ve got the answer they need, they turn back to their laptop and the room falls silent again. Everyone misses the peccaries...."

Read the whole post here.

Photo by Álvaro del Campo