Hi Blog,
Today was day 3 of Belize, and our first morning at Las Cuevas Research Station! I didn’t get to hear it, but apparently some people were woken up at around 4 AM due to a calling from an ocelot! I wish I heard it, because I’ve been dying to see one of the cat species!! After breakfast, we devised a game plan for our first research project, with the research question of “how does the presence of manmade trails affect the biodiversity of vertebrates in the Chiquibul forest immediately surrounding Las Cuevas Research Station?”
For our research, the rest of our day consisted of setting up 14 camera traps — 7 on disturbed and 7 on undisturbed locations. For the undisturbed locations, Dr. Solomon took the lead with his machete cutting down any trees, vines, or other plants that were in the way as we walked into the forest. I got to place mine in the undisturbed portion of the forest which was a cool experience! In the following days, I think we will be observing what is captured on the camera traps to answer our research question.
Today was actually a day full of mammal sightings!!
At the beginning of our hike down the Monkey Tail Trail, around 10 AM, we discovered a big cat scratch mark on the ground — perhaps of a jaguarundi, jaguar, oicelot, or puma. It looked fairly recent based on how there were only a couple of leaves on top of the cleared dirt. Also, Dr. Solomon caught a distinct whiff of an animal — again possibly of a feline species. This was really exciting for me, because it made me realize that the cat species are actually in the forests with us, rather than being just a distant idea.
Around 10:50 AM, Dr. Evans spotted pinch marks from Honduran white bats! This was really interesting, as it was sets of evenly spaced holes/marks in a 10-leaved plant. We suspected it may have been from a family of these bats, based on how many of the marks were on the leaves.
Then, right before dinner at around 6PM, we saw two agoutis lurking around the trees of the clearing, and it looked like hey were foraging around for food. I was at first confused on if it was a paca or an agouti, but then identified as an agouti after seeing that it was uniformly colored. It was so far away though that my camera could not capture it without it looking like a speck of dust. So sadly, no agouti pictures taken by me are available. 🙁
I’m really excited to see what the following days at the rainforest will look like as Day 1 at LCRS (Las Cuevas Research Station) has already been so informative and awesome!
With love,
Sohee
