pineapples and fried bananas

ok, so now we're in Las Cruces OTS station. the giant house we're staying in is surrounded by botanical gardens. Some of the palm leaves here are bigger than I am. The flowers (ok everything) here are amazing and come in forms that are going to take over my camera space. We have a pickle jar with a dead bothrops asp (very poisonous snake) in our living room. I now know where pineapples come from. I'm finding that being a bug hater on a bug research trip is not working to my advantage, but I did catch a beetle off my dinner plate and put it in a kill jar for later study. We've seen a bunch of hummingbirds at the stations, and immense plant diversity by elevation and latitude and other more random circumstances...like the acidic bog. Ok, so you can comment on the blogs by clicking the "Comments" link at the lower right corner of the blogs. My mistake.