Camera Traps!

February 11, 2013

Margay! Checking our camera out

Camera traps. Hands down the best thing that has happened on the FBQ so far. JP and I ran around with 9 of them a couple days ago, setting them up in spots in the forest that “we had good feelings about”. Camera traps are boxes that are meant to blend into the surroundings- they have infra red light and can capture images and videos of animals in the dark as well as the day light. They are motion censored, so you set them up, leave them alone for a few days, hopefully recording anything that walks by, and check them when you feel like it.

Margay(?) photo 2

Today we hiked out to where we set them- the furthest trail from camp that gets the least human traffic, and collected the photos onto a USB stick. As each was loading, we had some sense of how many photos and videos we collected. It was so exciting to speculate about what was on there- a jaguar! a tapir! It was a long hike back until we could get a computer and load all our images. By the time we got to camp it was almost lunch and a bunch of the students were around and picked up on our excitement and gathered around the computer with us. As we opened them, each find was better than the last. First an agouti, which looks kind of like a giant guinea pig (or a small capybara). Then a peccary, which is a wild pig. He (she) showed up twice, on two different cameras located in patches across the trail from each other. Then a brocket deer, a small deer with very pronounced facial structure and little pointy horns. They’ve never gotten a picture of one out here, though people from previous groups have glimpsed our heard them before. And finally, two photos of big cats. One, with its face pressed to the camera and is clearly investigating it, is a margay. It has a color pattern similar to a jaguar, though is much smaller. The second is a beautiful coated cat, though unfortunately you can’t see its face to identify it. We are guessing it is another margay, though the ocelot (also similarly patterned but larger) and the jaguar are not totally ruled out. As we were opening the photos, we were ridiculously excited and had everyone in the crowd yelling and cheering. Neither JP or I realized just how fun it would be to play with the camera traps. We moved a few to new locations, and “baited” a few with bananas (for the frugivores- apparently tapirs love bananas) and others with some canned tuna we bought on our excursion to the town of El Castillo yesterday. Hopefully we continue to get lots of exciting pictures- and try to learn a little more about the biodiversity of Refugio Bartola!

collared peccary

Red brocket deer