Hi friends,

It’s the last full day in Las Cuevas! We spent the whole day collecting camera traps at the trails. In the morning we went to the 50 hectare plot where we had 6 camera traps and it took faster than we expected as the off-trail cameras were easy to find as they were straight into the rainforest from the trail.

After lunch, we went into the Monkey Tail Trail to pick up the rest of the camera traps. This first off-trail one turned out to be really difficult to find as we did not have a marker for it in our GPS tracker and it was really deep in the woods. After 50 long arduous minutes we managed to find it and we were all so relieved. The rest of the camera traps took the whole afternoon to find, though we managed to return Las Cuevas before dark. As we were really into finding the camera traps, we did not focus on looking out for animals and so did not find many. Though we saw a bunch of baby grasshoppers on a single plant which was cool:

After dinner, we checked out the images that we collected on the camera traps and it was amazing! We got clear images of two ocelots, several pacas, a red brocket deer, a herd of peccaries, and a great curassow. They were all mainly taken from a particular off-trail spot in Monkey Tail Trail, so I guess now we know where the party’s at. It was cool to observe that the peccaries were in a huge group, while the pacas were in a duo and the other animals were solitary.

So in one day I managed to see so many animals from my taxon ID which was awesome! What a great way to end the final full day here. On to the last day in Belize… feeling nostalgic already.

Till tomorrow,

Damien