Tag Archives: Swallowtail

Day 6: The Rainforest Lives Up to Its Name

There’s nothing that centers me quite like a torrential downpour can. I’ve always loved the scent of the Earth after it’s been washed clean. I find it calming and restorative. (And I just learned that this scent is actually the odor of soil bacteria!) I’m writing this blog as thunder is rolling through the gray skies and fat raindrops are pelting the ground. The sheer velocity of the rain is blowing a breeze through the screen windows.

I really can’t describe how oddly serene it is to sit on the floor of a non-air conditioned, wooden research station in the middle of the rainforest as the sky empties itself. It’s humbling. All life here depends on this rain, and today marks the first huge rain of the season. That means that the forest is about to come to life, even more than it already has been. We may get to witness the nuptial flight of ants, in which newborn queen ants and males take to the air in a gargantuan swarm to mate. Amphibians will be more active. It’s going to be a different forest now.

Other than enjoy the rain, we also collected our urine samples from a couple of days ago! On the way back from collecting the traps, I found a dying swallowtail butterfly on the side of the road being eaten by ants. It was was an elegant creature even as it was being gnawed on.

Poor little guy 🙁

Nitrogen an extremely important element that is vital to most life forms. It’s a surprisingly scarce element in a place as rich in life as the rainforest is. Because of this, we figured that more arthropods would cluster to our urine, which we used as a nitrogen source, in areas that are more nitrogen-poor. The forest canopy is actually more nitrogen-poor as compared to the forest floor, so we expected more critters to end up in our traps that we placed in the canopy.

After we sorted and counted the species of bugs, insects, and other invertebrates that we discovered in our pitfall traps, we actually ended up finding some pretty cool results. It was a long afternoon of sorting, counting, and identifying dead insects and bugs that were soaked in our own urine, but we ended up getting to present to a new group of college students that arrived at the station today. I think they were slightly grossed out by our poster, titled “To Pee or Not to Pee,” but I think our presentation went over pretty well.

Today was again a quiet day on the Lepidoptera front. I only spotted 4 blue morphos, all of which evaded me. I know that they purposely fly extremely erratically in order to escape from birds, and they’re certainly doing a great job of escaping from me. Alas.

Day 3: Walk Softly and Carry a Big Stick

I honestly don’t know how I hauled my bug bite-riddled butt out of bed to go bird watching this morning at 4:45am, but it happened. We spotted so many parrots and kites perching in the tops of trees. Breakfast was at 6am, and then we headed to the classroom for a meeting to discuss out first project of the trip: camera traps! After a long and intense discussion detailing the methodology of our first experiment, we headed out into the jungle recesses for the second time.

Our goal of the day was to set up our camera traps at strategic locations to hopefully catch some cool shots of rainforest mammals. We tramped through the dense foliage on a path covered with leaf litter and all forms of creepy crawlies that make the forest floor their home.

I was torn between keeping my eyes on the ground so I wouldn’t take even more spills, scanning the area for cool terrestrial animals like snakes or frogs, or watching the skies for butterflies flitting by. I failed miserably on the “not taking a spill” front – I pretty much have a map of bruises.

Today was my first day with the butterfly net! (Peep Elena smoldering in the back.)

I was just a “little* too excited about the butterfly net. The impulse to swing my new toy stick at every flying insect won out over the survival instinct telling me to keep my eyes to the ground. Blue morphos kept flitting tantalizingly near but flying away before I could even get within swinging distance. I’m determined, however! I’m sure that with the amount of shouting I get from the group every time someone spots a blue morpho, I’ll manage to snag one. Maybe. Hopefully.

Despite my lack of success with the blue morphos, I did catch seven butterflies, a pink katydid, and a moth today in my net. I spent a solid half hour in the hot sun of a forest pathway swinging at passing butterflies, perfecting my technique and sweating profusely.

Wouldn’t say I perfected it – not by a long shot – but I did make some pretty neat catches, some of which I’ve inserted here! The brown striped one is a Many-banded Daggerwing, and the other I believe is a species of Swallowtail. They were both zooming down the sides of an open forest path, which is where butterflies tend to be found.

Swallowtail butterfly Many-banded daggerwing

But the star of today’s show was not a Lepidopteran. As we were hacking through the brush to place a camera trap, we came across a magnificent iridescent boa constrictor!! It was coiled in the leaf litter, regarding us with clear annoyance and suspicion. It was a truly beautiful creature. Its scales were brown with darker brown and black splotches, and its entire body gave off an iridescent sheen that reminded me of the surface of soap bubbles. It was probably 5 or 6 feet long. Here it is:

!!!!!!

Dinner tasted so, so good after a long day of meetings, lectures, and hiking. Tomorrow, there will be more. My body is protesting and my brain hurts a little from the sleep deprivation, but I’m ready to tackle the Chiquibul Forest once again.

But first, some sleep.