I started the day waking up at 5 in the morning to go birding. It wasn’t as hard to wake up as I thought it would be and I’m glad I did because seeing some of these birds in the morning with the sun coming up is so cool. I definitely want to look more into birding and learning about different types of birds and bird calls once we get back.

The main project today was coming up with a question about animals that we could access with the camera traps. We had a long discussion about questions that we had about the Chiquibul forest and mammals found in it and came to the final question: How does the presence of human trails affect mammal abundance, richness, and diversity? Then we set out to put out our camera traps.

While we were at an off-trail site setting up camera traps, Adrienne started yelling about the “mother of all leaf-cutter anthills” and we all hurried to see the giant ant pile which ended up being about 20ft in diameter. Suddenly, someone screamed and we turned around to see a boa constrictor in front of the ant hill. It was about 5ft and seemed threatened because it was pulling back its head and following us when there were sounds or movement. I thought I would have been terrified, but it was actually really cool to see a member of my taxon group that I never would have thought we would see.

After lunch, we finished putting up the last of the camera traps and found some really interesting beetles that no one could identify. Once we got back, I quickly took a cold shower which was a nice way to cool off, and then we heard an amazing lecture from Raphael Montenero, who runs the FCD (Friends for Conservation and Development), who spoke about the Chiquibul forest and how the territorial disputes with Guatemala might cause the forest to be lost. Hearing Raphael speak about his love for the rainforest and passion for saving it and helping Belize was extremely eye-opening.