As I prepare to leave Costa Rica, I try to reflect back on my trip, but all I can think about is sleeping for days. The last six weeks (2 for vacation and 4 for our class) have been exhausting but totally worth it. I’ve learned so much about the tiny country of Costa Rica and it’s rainforests and weird organisms and field work and, of course, all about Costa Rican’s mammals.
Our final project on mammals was truly a
a success. Hiking through the jungle to get our data was tiring but very enjoyable. My partner and I worked well as a team, and while we didn’t get the exact results we were expecting, we still saw some really interesting and unexpected things throughout the project. To remind you, my partner and I were researching mammals and sound at Las Cruces and Las Alturas Biological Stations. We set up camera traps along chosen trails and then walked those transects, taking soundscapes and looking for evidence of mammals along the way. We put a lot of work into this project but we also had a lot of fun. We found it was quieter at Las Alturas than Las Cruces, as expected, but that is about all the statistically significant data we found. The story doesn’t end there though. Let’s get to our observation results. We got to see white-faced capuchins in Las Cruces and my partner saw spider monkeys in Las Alturas. It may be gross, but we also saw feline scat (which we concluded one was from an ocelot and the other a puma) at Las Alturas, which was exciting for our project as well. Lastly, our camera traps. Each time we took the SD cards out of the camera traps, plugged in each of those to the computer, and waited for them to load, we shifted with anticipation as to what we might see. It was like the feeling you got, as a kid, on Christmas Eve as you awaited to see what you would get the next morning. We wanted to see a jaguar or a puma. Unfortunately, we were let down, a lot. As we were doing one of our transects one day, we spotted 2 sets of tracks that looked to be like a puma and baby’s. We were so excited to look at the camera trap pictures; we were sure we would have caught them on camera. But, it turned out to be 2 feral dogs wandering through the forest. A total let-down. We caught a few small mammals on that transect, though, agoutis, opossums, pacas, squirrels. We were let down again at Las Alturas as we expected to maybe see a puma or ocelot from the evidence of scat we saw. We didn’t see much of anything on those camera traps, though. Nothing new that we didn’t already see. Finally, on our last transect at Las Cruces, we got exciting results. As we were going through the pictures, we saw the same mammals we already saw and more feral dogs too, but then we saw a coati, which we hadn’t seen before. But then, the infrared camera caught something in the bottom right of the screen. The next picture showed it was an ocelot. An ocelot! According to researchers at Las Cruces, this cat hasn’t been seen here in over a year! Finally, we got the results we were looking for, but didn’t expect at Las Cruces. Even though we couldn’t show any correlation between mammals and sound like we wanted, I still think our project was a success. We learned so much about field work and working together in the rainforest. It was a very exhausting, but rewarding experience and now I have pictures of an ocelot caught on cameras that we set up!
Anyways, It’s been a blast, Costa Rica, but it’s time I leave your wonderful country. I am grateful for this wonderful experience and to Dr Wasserman and everyone in cohort 4 for making it truly memorable. I’m ready to return home, though, to tell everyone about my amazing trip. But first, I will need to sleep for a few days.
-Bri’yonce
That sounds like a wonderful time you had in a different country?