A few of the research cams in their lock boxes, getting ready to be placed out in the jungle.
THE RESPLENDENT QUETZAL...right from my window! People pay thousands to see this thing, and it lives 50 feet from me...soo cool! Any name suggestions?
The TV station that interviewed us wanted some footage of the research students riding horses in the jungle...had to wear this stupendous orange helmet because they had this sense I was accident prone...
Dr. Mooring being interviewed in Spanish on our jaguar research by Tico Channel 7.
No Big Deal...just caballos en la playa...Manuel Antonio Beach...nice surf, warm water...sweeet!
Relaxing at La Mariposa (The Butterfly) Hotel infinity pool over the mighty Pacific in Quepos.
Our hotel friend Isabella with the baby anaconda we found. She was AWESOME
Well, after a 5am start, we survived the day and barely beat out the rain...it started DOWNPOURING at one (ten min after we got back), enough to cause a flash flood/wall of muddy water down the Savegre River outside QERC.
Today's mission was to set out the remainder of the cameras for the phototraps, which we did. We ended up hiking about 3000 vertical feet or so up Sendero De Los Robles (Trail of the Oaks) to place the last few cameras by streams and animal tracks...hopefully we'll find something. We also collected the memory cards from the first four cameras we set up on Friday morning, so they'd been sitting out for over two days. Here's what we "caught" on film: quite a few horses being led up the trail to the moutain pasture, tons of tourists walking by (some inquisitive of the camera traps, some completely oblivious), one Mapache (common raccoon), a few night-hikers, who proceeded to shine their headlamps into the camera out of curiosity, and one tail of an unidentified mammal (possibly a small cat or member of the raccoon family). There you have it...four cameras, nearly three days. Hopefully we'll have better luck with the next batch of photos.
After arriving back at QERC today, I tested out my arborist technique (improvised on the spot, of course) for ascending into the rainforest canopy to rig up the bioacoustical recorders (aka super expensive microphones to record animal vocalizations). It took a bit of manipulating to ascend up the trees, but I figured it out...getting fun was also a challenge, but I made it! It should provide another element of awesomeness to the research protocol for the rest of the summer.
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