Today was our first full day in Belize!! We tried starting our day at 5:00AM to go birding, but none of us could get up so we began our day at 6:15AM to get breakfast. We left Crystal Paradise Ecolodge at 8:00AM and headed towards Caracol and the Chiquibul forest.
On the road, we stopped to see a dead green vine snake in the middle of the road and a Brazilian cashew tree.
When we got to Caracol, we learned a ton about the Maya civilization, and how we can trace their history by observing their structures and gods moving from southern Mexico and Guatemala up to the Yucatán Peninsula! We also looked at a ton of their temples and palaces.
We saw a ton of really cool plants and animals too! Among my favorites include the tree of life, a baby gray fox, and Montezuma oropendola birds.
Additionally, I saw my first grasshopper of the trip! It was a medium sized gray grasshopper, which I think looks like a gray bird grasshopper, but I’m not quite sure. We saw a second one of the same species later on in the middle of a field, and tried to get it to jump! However, we were unsuccessful and nothing happened.
We ate lunch there and then began our drive to Las Cuevas Research Station, where we’ll be staying for the next six days. On our way, we saw three black howler monkeys!!
We arrived at Las Cuevas Research Station (LCRS) a couple hours later and went on a short hike exploring the Maya ruins the center is on, where I saw my first cricket too! It was a bit too high up for me to identify it, and I didn’t get a picture (😔), but it was small and brown, with darker brown coloration through the main body. But that also means I’ve seen the big three groups of my rainforest taxa! Missing locusts but I have a feeling we won’t be seeing any of those.
We wrapped our day up with dinner, and with that, our last travel day (for a week) is over! Tomorrow marks our first full day at LCRS. See you then!
Ian C
