July 8th-11th, 2016
On our way to San Pedro I had the first mammal spotting of the trip!! We would frequently stop the bus to get out and take a look around for birds (the work that the prof and TAs do focuses on birds so they were always on the lookout for tropical birds). As we were walking I saw something fuzzy and orange walking by the road. Of course by the time I got everyone else to look it had disappeared into the trees. We scurried over and luckily another student spotted a ringed tailed and we later identified it as a South American Coati.
San Pedro was in a beautiful valley and the wildlife began to get more diverse because we’d come down a bit in elevation. There were monkeys hanging around our cabins and it literally felt like a dream. We stayed cabins again and but we were split into pairs and groups of three. The toilets still flushed but they were in open air stalls.
Our first morning we drove to go see the Cock of the Rock lek which is essentially where orange birds come to mate. The males do a funky dance and make a really loud screeching sound. Later we did our second round of vegetation plots. In the afternoon we set up for our first time mist netting!! Mist nets are really long nets made of really thin string so when they’re open they’re invisible to birds. Birds fly into them and get tangled a lil bit and researchers gently get them out and measure them, band them, etc.
To get further down the trail there was a river we had to cross that was maybe 30 ft down. Over it, there was a rickety cable car on a wire that you had to pull yourself across. It was absolutely terrifying. We did groups of three and then one person would go back with the cart until we all made it across. We set up the nets for the next day.
We woke up early to catch some birds and ended up catching five to process, four of which were humming birds! They were so so tiny. That evening we played soccer with Dom Demetri, a man who runs the field station. He lived down the road with his wife, who was maybe four feet tall. They had a bunch of puppies so we were all loving it. We played soccer in a valley in the Amazon under the setting sun and it was possibly the most surreal moment of my life.