Hey y’all! It’s Michiel again : )

I woke up today at 5:45 for my first full day at Las Cuevas. I was planning to wake up at 6:30, but the birds were so loud that I couldn’t stay asleep. Also, last night there was a black howler monkey (Aloutta pigra) right next to the station that was yelling at another black howler monkey elsewhere in the forest. It definitely kept me awake longer than I wanted to be. Anyway, I joined my fellow TFBs on the patio around 6 and we birdwatched together. I saw three beautiful turkeys, and a couple vultures. Later, we had breakfast, then we were tasked to come up with a research question that involved using camera traps. We came up with “Where are different functional groups (large/small predators and large/small prey) most abundant (forest, trail road)?” To answer this question, we decided to set up camera traps throughout forested areas, on trails, and on roads.

We left the station around 10 to begin setting our traps. For the first two hours, we were all so amazed by the surrounding fauna and flora that we only managed to set six traps – one on a trail and five on a road. While we were in the forest, we actually saw Scarlet Macaws! I’ve included a picture of them here.

After setting these traps, we made our way back to the research station for lunch at 12:15. Lunch was kept pretty short because we needed to go back out there and set more traps. When we went back out there around 1, we traversed through a trail with much more hills (it was actually almost completely uphill then completely downhill) than we had experienced on the other trail. We stayed on this trail until about 6:15 and managed to set 4 traps on the trail, 5 traps within the forest, and 1 trap near Frog Pond. While we were hiking this trail, we saw some beautiful bugs that Caio kept picking up, a cave with ancient Mayan pottery in it, and a lot of leaf cutter ants. We also came across a termite nest, and Scott told us to take termites from it and eat them, which, of course, we did. They tasted really fresh – like carrots. We also went up the bird tower, which had some amazing views.

Unfortunately, I did not get to see any mammals. However, we did hear a black howler monkey yelling while we were placing road traps in the morning. I’m expecting that any sightings of mammals will be really rare throughout the next couple of days, but hopefully the camera traps will take a lot of good pictures of them.

The rest of our day went pretty smoothly. We had dinner, had a break to recuperate from the exhaustion we were experiencing, then had some lectures. I’m hopeful that tomorrow I’ll get to see some mammals!