Dear all,
I am announcing (again) a field course I will be teaching in Panamá, in
Bocas del Toro, this July-August. Please check out our web pages:
http://www.itec-edu.org/
http://www.itec-edu.org/spanishbird.html
It will be a fun mixture of methods and theory to get at some ideas of
how the birds of the Bocas Archipelago got their current distribution
patterns. We will begin by birding in a variety of places on the island
of Colón until everybody is familiar with the birds, and then we will
use the techniques we standardized on Colón on as many of the other
islands as we can get to, to do fairly comprehensive sampling. With the
data we gather, we will then analyse them in a variety of ways to find
the best model to explain the island birds.
Also, the course is going to be an attempt at multicultural
interactions. I speak Spanish and Portuguese, and anybody that speaks
any of the three (including English) can take the course - I hope that
everybody has at least a modicum of English, and that some English
speakers will have a modicum of Spanish or Portuguese. I have already
had courses with Brazilians AND Spanish AND English speaking students
from a variety of countries, and they were great!
The course is open to anybody with the will to take it - it will be some
hard work, but will be fascinating and fun at the same time. If you
have any questions, please feel free to write. If you are unsure if you
are qualified to take the course, but would like to, please write me and
we can talk about it.
Sincerely,
Jim
