We woke up to the sound of howler monkeys and a ton of birds. I wasn’t planning on doing the 5:30 morning birding but I apparently had no choice since the birds were so loud. They have turkeys here! I had no idea, and the turkeys here are so much prettier than the turkeys at home, they have lots of cool colors. We also saw some vultures and Scarlet Macaws! There are so many birds in the Chiquibul, I had no idea!
After breakfast we started our question using the camera traps and decided we want to see what functional groups of animals are using which parts of the forest splitting up by trails, roads, and just the jungle. After deciding everything we went out into the jungle for the first time hiking! It was sprinkling when we left and it continued to rain on and off the whole day. Right away we saw a ton of lichen on trees, all crustose so far, and plenty of mushrooms! Unfortunately a lot of them weren’t on my ID card, and I’ve been told that the fungi here isn’t well recorded or published so it’s hard to find comprehensive information on everything we could see. Most of the mushrooms were tan and brown, relatively close to the ground and maybe a couple inches across, with a pretty flat top. The smaller mushrooms were more bell shaped and much smaller, less than an inch but had longer stalks. I did manage to identify some turkey tail mushrooms on logs since they’re shelf-like, and easy to tell apart from the shape and the stripes (which look like a turkey tail), and even some puffball mushrooms! The puffball mushrooms were super cool, they had already released their spores, and were covered in mud from the rain but still had a little puff left in them if you bumped them a little. I’ve seen those mushrooms all over tiktok as food or just a cool thing to find in the forest so it was so cool to see one in real life!
We also saw some slimes and possible jellies, none of which were the ones I had put on my sheet specifically but hopefully with the pictures I took I can try to identify them eventually. The problem is it’s hard to get a good look at some of them since the fungi are off trail oftentimes, or under logs (where snakes like to hang out) or near ant nests, or are just in awkward positions and I don’t want to touch mushrooms unless I know what they are. At least eating mushrooms isn’t an issue, I can’t stand the texture of mushrooms, so I can admire them from a distance and not worry about getting poisoned by some random mushrooms out in the woods. I do have a lot more respect for anyone who really knows their fungi and can actually identify species and safe versus poisonous types, especially since so many mushrooms have look alikes! I’m hoping tomorrow out in the woods we’ll find something new, since today the mushrooms got pretty repetitive, I have a lot of really cool colorful mushrooms on my wish list of things to see here, so hopefully we’ll have some luck tomorrow finding more!
We finished up the day with some lectures, unfortunately without lights we couldn’t actually write in our notebooks, however we did manage to come up with some good field biology DIY solutions!
