As you read this I will be flying back to London and I will have filled up on greasy food in Newark airport on the way… I have had a wonderful time; an experience that I will never forget and I hope you have enjoyed the blog so thank you for reading it!

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It's Oscars time so please forgive me but it has to be done... the trip would not have been possible without the following people at the Museum:

The Learning Department and specifically Honor, Abigail, Martin and Stephen for letting me leave the office for a couple of weeks. Thanks!

The Nature Live team, particularly Jo Kessler for hosting the live-video-link events so expertly, and Ivvet Modinou, Natalie Mills and Ana Rita Claro Rodrigues for your support and good ideas. Also, thanks to Museum scientists Erica McAlister and Gavin Broad for being in the Studio to help prepare the ground with the audience for the live-video-links.

Tony and Adam in Special Effects for training me to use the satellite phone and other kit, coming to the realisation that I was likely to break it yet still letting me take it into a remote area of tropical forest in a completely different country (I hope you now feel it has been tested properly!).

To Jonathan for posting my blogs every day (even at the weekend) and for providing a forum for the live-chats we’ve held with UK school children as part of Nature Live in the Field - and also thanks to them and their teachers for some great questions and comments!

To Grace for developing the schools side of the project and for keeping me busy

In Costa Rica, a huge thank you to:

Our porters and guides in the La Amistad National Park, and Frank Gonzales at INBIO for sorting out the logistics of the trip and for providing me with a filming permit.

The rest of the botany team: Holger Thues, Jo Wilbraham and Neil Brummit - I hope I have been at least a little bit useful and that I have not wound you up too much with endless questions?

Daniel Santa Maria for my new nick name!

Finally, to Alex Monro for organising the trip and my part in it. I have had a wonderful time and I am so thankful to you for giving me this opportunity to follow science as it happens in the field. Thank you!

I asked the scientists what they thought….

P.S. This is not the end for Field work with Nature Live as, starting from the 7 March my Nature Live colleague Ivvet Modinou will arrive in the Bahamas with a team of scientists to report on a field trip exploring the life in our oceans. It should have some great footage as they'll be using a mini-submersible in their research!

Keep in touch with the Field work with Nature Live community and subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog and you will receive updates whenever a new post appears.

And remember, you can meet more Museum scientists every day at Nature Live events held in the Museum’s Attenborough studio at 14:30 (and also 12:30 every weekend and throughout the holidays).

I hope to see you at a Nature Live event soon!

Tom Simpson, Costa Rica, 2012.

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Note: Tom is currently on his way back to the UK, so I am posting his final blogs from Costa Rica on his behalf.
Jonathan - NaturePlus host

I was just about to submit today’s blog when Holger rushed back from a walk to say he had seen a huge Tapir – maybe 1.2 metres tall. He said it caused the earth to vibrate! I ran down to the river to catch it crossing - have a look, it’s a bit shaky but I was very excited. It’s very rare to see a Tapir here so I am very chuffed with myself for catching it on film.

I also filmed the others’ reaction back at the hut.

(If you listen carefully you can hear Daniel, once the camera had swung away from the Tapir and was showing my feet on the computer screen, saying, ‘Wow, A Yeti!’)

The weather today was sunny and warm – a glorious day, so with my life in my hands, I ventured up a very rickety ladder on to the roof of the hut, which gave me a good view of the forest near by.

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I spent the day with Holger, who is a lichenologist. He talked me through some of the things he has found so far on the trip and why lichens are such an amazing tool to understand an environment such as the one here in the Talamanca Mountains.

(My apologies for the low quality of the film but I had to make it smaller to be able to upload it - I'll see if I can update it to a higher resolution version later)

At night, once the generator has been turned off we our at the mercy of our head lamps.

We enter the world of things that flutter in the night. Beautiful and bizarre, I made a short clip from photos Alex took last night, after lights out.

And speaking of flutterers – I had a visitor to the laptop today.

My keyboard must be pretty filthy and he/she spent a good 5 mins tasting it!

Species of the day goes to Holger and joins up today’s themes nicely! It is a lichen in the genus Dictyonema (most probably D. sericeum)

And it is species of the day because it could be confused (or vice versa) with one of the moths from last night. What amazing camouflage!

Tomorrow, I am going to report on a day with the florwering plant team and attempt a tropical bioblitz.

At the end of day 8, in order to be nearer our site for the next day's work and to finish pressing, we did decide to camp out on the peak (see yesterday's post).

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We set up our tent at the top and set about making a dinner of soup and pasta.

This was the most incredible place to eat and sleep - on top of a rock, the forest floor hundreds of metres below on either side of us. The picture below shows the peak.

Over dinner we watched the weather, which was better than any TV programme. It was amazing to see clouds form below us and then race up the side of the mountains and roll by while turning the color of the setting sun to orange and then grey.

I tried to capture it on film.

The next day, having been buffeted by the wind all night, we rose early and made some coffee and scrambled eggs. Someone (either Daniel or Alex ) took this horrific photo of me in the night!

What is it? A Yeti?

We had a tin of tuna going spare, but couldn’t face it that early!

Today we are collecting on the neighbouring peak and after lunch we will walk back to our hut for the remainder of our stay. The descent and climb between the two peaks was dramatic. I did most of it on my backside! Sliding down the mountain holding on to anything that didn’t come away in my hand.

Every time we venture further into the forest, all the places we’ve already been to seem to feel less wild and more hospitable.

Coming down the peak from our camp last night, the forest below began to feel familiar and safe (I promptly fell between two trees, bringing me back down to earth, metaphorically and literally - with a bump) and I completely understand why visiting places like this can become addictive.

Apologies for waxing (poorly) philosophical - it is Valentine's Day as I write this and I’m feeling whimsical!

Back to why we're here... Species of the day goes to Daniel and is a new species (probably)!

It is a member of the genus Blackea and normally this genus is epiphytic (i.e. it would grow on other plants) but this one is a small tree, three metres high and has pale translucent green flowers unlike any other species in the genus that we're aware of.

Daniel is pretty sure it is a new species but we can’t be 100% until it has been checked.

Also, I should have said a few days ago, Holger and Jo stayed back at the hut as there are more sites of interest to them in that area than up the peaks, so we’ll catch up with them this evening.

Food update! We have been brought a butchered pig to add to the holy duo of rice and beans – this is a gruesome picture of the skin but the meat was delicious! I have also spied some sausages amongst the supplies and wait eagerly for their appearance at the dinner table!

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The main aim of our trip is to document the biodiversity of the area and collect different species of plants. We take five copies of each species – one goes to INBIO, one to the Missouri Botanical Garden, one each to the National Herbarium of Panama and the National Museum of Costa Rica and one to the Natural History Museum.

Collecting is a meditative process and it is wonderful to be in the field as a team, finding out what the environment holds. Amongst the flowering plant team (Daniel, Alex and Neil) the duties of collecting are split: today, Daniel searched out the different species in the area and collected them, Neil and Alex set up a small processing area - one photographing and taking DNA samples of each species and the other pressing the five copies of each species between sheets of newspaper.

I had a go at pressing but my main duty was the honourable task of pressing down on the pile of specimens, a job that you may think could be done by a rock or gravity but Neil described my contribution as very useful, so here I am hard at work:

These specimens are bagged up and brought back to the hut at the end of the day where they are placed in sealed bags full of 70% alcohol, which stops them rotting. These specimens will be carried down the mountain and dried on heaters before being sent to the various institutes to be mounted and added to their collections (a collection of pressed plants is called a herbarium).

Neil explained the process to me in the field:

The DNA is stored in silica gel which keeps the samples dry by absorbing the moisture in the atmosphere. I have lots of the stuff (which I keep in tied-up tights) to try and keep all my equipment - kindly lent to me by the museum - free from moisture.

I made what could be the 'driest' video of all time about how you dehydrate the silica once it has done it’s job and is saturated with liquid - dry-fried next to the omnipresent beans, so worth watching for that scene if nothing else. My silica is dark blue when saturated with moisture and orange when dehydrated:

Species of the day – Vaccinium bocatorense (collected by the flowering plants team) is very closely related to the blueberry and grows between 1.5 to 2 metres tall. It’s endemic to the national park so is not found anywhere else in the world and it’s a beauty!

Tomorrow we set off to spend a couple of nights camping at a location a few hours walk form our hut - I will try and blog from there but if things go quiet due to lack of internet access, I’ll be back on Wednesday.