My most lasting impression of the jungle is how incredibly alive it was. There is more rain and more sun, and plants and animals grow fast there. Finding animals in your house is commonplace if you live in the tropics. In the northern U.S., our ideal seems to be to completely separate our indoor environments from nature. I won't get into a discussion of whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, because I think there are arguments both ways, but the bottom line is that in places like Massachusetts, it is pretty much possible. Sure, we might get mice in the pantry or ants in the kitchen or squirrels in the walls or chipmunks in the dining room or raccoons under the fire escape on occasion (yep, they all happened, even the chipmunks). But these tend to be isolated incidents. We call an exterminator or set out traps or poison, and most of the time the creatures go away. In Belize? Forget it. You could build the nicest house imaginable and you would still find yourself living alongside animals. The tropics probably aren't the place for you if you can't learn to love your ceiling geckos. So in the spirit of gecko appreciation, here is a collection of animal anecdotes from Belize. There won't be quite as many birds as usual. You're welcome. Howler monkeysHowler monkeys are found all over the Central American rainforest, and they are loud. They "howl," but it really sounds more like a roar. They live in small family groups and they are territorial, so most of the howling will be rival groups howling at each other over the best trees Howler monkeys are also nomadic, moving from place to place to find fresh fruit and leaves (they eat mostly leaves, which is interesting for such a large animal. Leaves are not particularly nutritious). As a result, days or weeks would go by when we wouldn't hear them at all, and then suddenly they would appear somewhere in the area and howl constantly for several nights. One day, the howler monkeys moved into some trees right next to the main part of the lodge, where they were visible to everyone. I got some videos. HummingbatsPook's Hill kept their hummingbird feeders constantly filled, and the hummingbirds put on an amazing show all day, every day, zipping across the open porch and sometimes coming amazingly close to my head. In the evenings, as dusk fell and the hummingbirds retired to their nighttime roosts, bats took their place. Nectarivorous bats, predictably, love to drink from hummingbird feeders. They, too, would fly all around the porch and through it, coming amazingly close to people's heads. The only difference was that it was dark. I think bats are absolutely fantastic; they're like birds with fur! And they eat mosquitoes! (Well, these particular bats eat nectar, but my goodwill for their insectivorous cousins transfers to them). Some guests were less enthusiastic about having so many bats around, but most of them got over their anti-bat feelings when they saw the bats drinking from the feeders. One memorable night, there seemed to be way more bats than usual. They came in droves, seemingly crazed by the sugar water, and they completely ignored us; we could stand by the railing right next to the feeder and they would still come. We shone a flashlight on the feeder to see them better, and still, they came. Eventually they began to land on the red, flower-shaped feeder ports of some of the feeders, and you could see their little arms aligned along the edges of the ports as they bent their heads to the nectar. The bats never stayed long at the feeder; each drink lasted a split second, and then they were gone. It was hard to see them properly. It became a challenge among the guests to get the best photo of the bats. Lots of beautiful photos of the hummingbird feeders, sans bats, resulted. This was my best shot. The Belize ZooI am not a zoo person; it bothers me to see wild animals living in small enclosures. The Belize Zoo was an exception. Yes, it was still a zoo; there were still cages; the birds still couldn't fly free. But the Belize Zoo does a couple things really well that I have not seen at other zoos. First, all of the animals at the Belize Zoo are native to Belize. This means that they are living in the climate they are naturally adapted for. It also means that tourists and Belizeans alike are getting to know the fauna of the country they are in, instead of coming to gawk at exotic species out of their natural habitats. The Belize Zoo does lots of outreach, and they have a big focus on teaching Belizeans about their natural heritage, instilling pride in them, and encouraging a conservation mindset. The second thing that sets the Belize Zoo apart is that most or all of its animals were rescued; either they were orphaned or injured in the wild, or they were illegally kept as pets, or they were used in movies and are too tame to be released. It is still sad that these things happened to the animals in the first place, but at least the zoo keepers didn't go pluck animals out of the wild for the sole purpose of putting them on display. Third, it's cool to walk around the Belize Zoo because of how integrated it seems with the nature around it. Trees grow in between the enclosures, and walking along the paths feels almost like walking in the forest. People go birding at the zoo, which seems like cheating until you realize that there are many birds to look at that aren't part of the exhibits. The Zoo is one of the top eBird hotspots in the area. My two checklists are here and here, and they don't include any of the captive birds. They do include a Black-throated Blue Warbler, which eBird flagged as rare for that date and location. Who knew? MothsVicki, the owner of Pook's Hill, has a fantastic moth light. Mounted on a tripod in front of white sheet on one of the few dry nights, the light would attract an amazing number and variety of moths. I know next to nothing about moths, and I have my work cut out for me learning birds without getting into moth ID. But I do think they are beautiful. If anyone wants to take a shot at identifying these, go ahead! Overheard in the Pook's Hill officeGuest: Excuse me, do you have a protocol for dealing with scorpions? PH Staff: Well, we usually just move them outside. Do you have one in your room? Guest: Well, I already brought it outside. Just wanted to check that that was the right thing to do. Thank you! Apparently Pook's Hill does offer complimentary scorpion removal services for guests less animal-savvy than this one. Mammals without wingsBelize has all sorts of cool mammals. A lot of them are nocturnal, and even the diurnal ones are skittish, so they tend to be less visible than the birds. But I did have a few cool mammal encounters. Coatis (also known as coatimundis), are a raccoon-like mammal with a long tail found in Central and South America. They climb trees, using their tails for balance, and they travel in large groups. On a few of my walks through the jungle, if I was moving very quietly, I would come upon a group of coatis foraging in the underbrush on the forest floor. If I stood still and quiet, they often would not notice me. Sometimes the group would be in the process of crossing the trail. I would watch as adult after adult came across, their long tails sticking straight up into the air. Then there would be a short pause, and then some much smaller baby coatis would scamper across to catch up. Eventually, I would sneeze or swat a mosquito, or the wind would change, and the coatis would see or smell me. And then, oh my goodness, the squeakings and snufflings that went on! Up into the trees they would go, one after another, wheezing and chirping and making all sorts of alarmed movements. Then they would sit on branches and vines, watching me. It was always such a delight to find them. The animal below is a tapir, also known as a "mountain cow," and it is the national animal of Belize. One day, as I was walking by the river, I came upon a trail of tapir tracks deeply embedded in the sand. From the different sizes of the tracks, it looked like a mama tapir had walked here with her baby. Vicki has many cement casts of tracks on display at Pook's Hill, and she is always excited to find new tracks, so she set me up with some cement, and I and a visiting biologist and one of the managers went to fill the tracks. The video below is of me filling one of the tracks. Video creds to Mison Ferguson, manager at Pook's Hill and budding cinematographer! The trail cameras that I was responsible for were another way to observe mammals that wouldn't let themselves be seen. Every week was like a treasure hunt when uploaded the pictures from each camera onto the computer. We had coatimundis, agoutis, lots of gibnuts (a large rodent that sort of looks like a cross between a pig and a guinea pig), and a few armadillos, mice-opossums, and skunks. We also had an ocelot (!) that would appear on one of the cameras almost every week. One week, it came right up to the camera and sniffed it. I wondered how many times the ocelot had been hiding right near me as I walked, fully aware of my presence, when I had no idea it was there. Other visitors to my roomAs I brought my suitcase into my room on the first night in Belize, I was greeted by a remarkably large millipede on the floor under my bed. I think millipedes are cool, so I bent closer to examine it. It noticed my movement and curled into a tight ball. The extremely large spider (maybe a small tarantula?) next to it that I hadn't seen also noticed my movement and scuttled across the floor, inches under my nose. Removed the millipede from the room with a cup and a piece of paper. Removed the tarantula from the room by opening the door, sitting on the bed and waiting for it to find its own way out. The next night, I noticed some hairy legs poking out of the drain in the ground outside my door. But the tarantula never came back into the room. That I knew of. A Close CallTwo owls began to call from the trees on the edge of the clearing. I heard them from the main porch at Pook's Hill and jumped up. I was determined to record an owl before I left Belize, and these were the first owls I had heard since I got there. So naturally, my recording equipment was put away neatly after a day of use.
I ran the hundred yards up the hill to my room and arrived panting. I strapped on the recorder and headphones and ran back down to where the owls were, thankfully, still calling. It was pitch black and I couldn't see them, but there were definitely two; they called back and forth in a lovely duet. The best place to record from turned out to be in a grassy area near some parked cars, not far from the house where the kitchen staff and some of the guides lived. I approached as close to the trees as possible and recorded, cursing the noise from a nearby generator and from the insects, which were deafening at night. Here is the recording I made, edited only slightly, of the two Black-and-White Owls. The grass was wet from a rain shower a few hours before, and as I walked through the grass in my flip flops, my toes got damp and chilly. Earlier in the day, I had been properly dressed in a quick-dry shirt, field pants, and hiking boots, but it was almost time for dinner and I had already taken a shower and changed into comfy clothes. Hence the flip flops. I was absolutely not dressed for the field, so I was thankful that the owls had so cooperatively called from right near my room. I could just stand on the nice, safe, mowed grass in my flip flops, no trail walking necessary. The owls stopped calling and I returned to the porch to socialize with guests. One of the guides, Mario, appeared, in a hurry and with a frightened look on his face. All talking stopped. He showed us a picture he had taken just moments ago of a Fer-de-lance snake, which he had found on the ground. Right next to the stairs to his room. Right near where I had been standing to record the owls. In flip flops. [Follow-up and clarifications: they killed the snake. As a general rule, snakes found at Pook's Hill are left alone, and if this one had been found on a trail in the jungle, it would not have been killed. Since it was found so close to the staff house, right where people walked every day, they felt it was too dangerous to leave it alone. Fer-de-lance bites are extremely dangerous and definitely fatal if not treated promptly. However, Pook's Hill has an antivenom kit, and there is a hospital eight miles away. After this, I stopped wearing flip flops anywhere except on the porch and on the road, and always with a flashlight.]
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A couple months ago, one friend asked for my help identifying a bird he had seen. "Blue on the top, white belly, white stripe along the wings, a bit lighter around the eyes," he said. I asked him how big it was: "Was it bigger than a robin?" and found out that he didn't know what a robin was. I realized I'd have to back up a little bit. We eventually figured out that his bird was a Blue Jay, but I was surprised by how long it had taken me to get there. For starters, when he said "blue," my mind immediately jumped to birds like the White-breasted Nuthatch and Black-throated Blue Warbler, which are more blue-gray than blue. A Blue Jay is really, truly blue, but it's a bird I'm so familiar with that it almost didn't occur to me as a possibility. Then, when my friend looked closely at the photo of a Blue Jay I sent him, and said he wasn't sure that was his bird because he didn't remember it having black on the wings like the bird in the photo. I realized I didn't know how to respond. If size, shape, behavior, and general color pattern pointed to a Blue Jay, I wouldn't look farther. I had never stopped to consider the details of Blue Jay plumage.
This conversation made me realize that I needed to step back a little and think about how I identify birds, and that I also wanted to help beginning birders learn to see the bird's most important features more quickly. This idea lay dormant for a while, until I was asked to write a bird identification pamphlet for Pook's Hill Lodge, where I was staying in Belize. I wasn't trying to write a field guide: I'm not that good, and besides, a wonderful field guide to the birds of Belize already exists (if you're going to Belize, this book is necessary!) Instead, I tried to create an introduction to birding, using examples of birds found at Pook's Hill, so that visitors, intrigued by the beautiful birds around them, could make a start at knowing what they were seeing. I owe a lot of credit to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology on this one: the basic layout of my guide is based on their "Bird ID Skills" series, which focuses on similar features of birds to those that I wrote about and goes into a lot more depth than I was able to do. I would also like to thank H. Lee Jones, for writing such an incredible and comprehensive field guide, and Dana Gardner, whose illustrations in Birds of Belize provided the references for my own drawings. That said, here is my bird guide. Read from left to right across the rows, from the top row to the bottom row. Eventually you guys are going to figure out that this "Part 1" thing is a clever trick to get you to keep reading. But I promise there will be a part 2 to the food post eventually, and there will definitely be a Belize, Part 2, since I have a lot to write about. From November 12th to December 12th, I was in Belize, staying at Pook's Hill Lodge. That's in the Cayo district of Belize, which is inland and pretty much centered North/South. Here's a map. The red star is the approximate location of Pook's Hill. It's about eight miles (very long miles, through the jungle and over an extremely bumpy dirt road) from Belmopan, the capital, and about two miles from the village of Teakettle. Belize is a small country on the eastern coast of Central America. It's bordered to the West and South by Guatemala, to the East by the Caribbean Sea, and to the North by Mexico. As of 2014, Belize had a population of about 340,000. In terms of land area, it's about the same size as Massachusetts, whose population in 2014 was almost twenty times that of Belize. As you can see from the map above, Belize's villages and towns are largely tightly clustered together along the main roads, and there are large expanses of land that are extremely sparsely populated. As a result, much of Belize remains wild, and the country is quite progressive in terms of environmental legislation and conservationism, although it still faces problems from poaching, logging, and development. I went to Belize mostly for the birds, and the bird diversity there is stunning. The country has about 600 species of birds, in part because it has a wide range of habitat types, from cloud forest and montane coniferous forest to mangroves on the coast and subtropical broadleaf forest inland. I did find birds. Here's a picture of one of them, a female White-whiskered Puffbird that posed nicely in a tree near my room one morning. But before I dive into the bird stuff, I want to talk a bit more generally about Belize and what I was doing there. I was staying at Pook's Hill as a volunteer, which means that in exchange for staying there, I helped out around the lodge with whatever projects were going on. On the best days, this meant leading guests on bird walks. A lot of people come to Pook's Hill to watch birds, since the lodge sits on a large nature reserve and almost 300 species have been documented there. But many of the people came were just beginning to look at birds. It gave me so much joy to introduce them to some of the magnificent birds at Pook's Hill. It was even better because I was learning at the same time. Sometimes we'd run across something that I didn't recognize, and then the fun was in looking it up in the guidebook and figuring it out together. Most mornings, if I wasn't birding with guests, I went out on my own walks to record bird songs and calls with equipment that the Cornell Lab of Ornithology lent me for the trip. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has an online archive of natural sounds, called the Macaulay Library, and they've recently linked it to eBird. Now every recording that someone submits becomes its own "digital specimen"––with details about location, time, date, recording equipment, species, age, sex, behavior, and other information pertinent to the recording. And all these recordings are available for free, as an increasingly valuable archive to be used for fun, for education, or for science and research. I'm going to write more about the audio recordings later, but as a teaser, here are a few checklists that I've already uploaded audio to. http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S26224850 http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S26224737 http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S26170253 As I mentioned, many of the guests who come to Pook's Hill lodge either aren't birders or know only a little about birds. But for many of them, coming to a tropical place full of bright, colorful birds is inspiring, and they want to learn more. So one of my other projects while I was in Belize was to write and illustrate a pamphlet designed for the beginning birder. I wrote about how to look at birds, focusing on color pattern, shape, size, and behavior, and I tried my hand at drawing birds, which is something I hadn't really done before. I plan to post the pamphlet here as soon as I can get it into a format that will make sense to view online, but again, here's a teaser. The illustrations are mostly in black and white, but I did this Keel-billed Toucan in color because really, how could you not draw a toucan in color? Every Sunday, I'd take a break from recording and bird walks and pamphlet-making, because Sunday was trail cam day. As part of a study by a student at the University of Southampton, Pook's Hill has been managing six motion-activated trail cameras. The object of the study is to obtain a census of animals, particularly mammals, that are using the human-created trails, with the ultimate aim being to determine the extent to which human activity on the trails (or tourism in general) affects these creatures. So every Sunday I would hike out to collect the cameras, come back to the office to offload any pictures that had been taken that week, and then hike back out to replace the cameras on various trees along the trails. It rained on and off for most of the time that I was in Belize, so these hikes meant a lot of mud and a lot of mosquitoes. (Eventually I decided I'd prefer the heat to the mosquito bites, and so I hiked in long sleeves and long pants). But it was well worth it, because trail cameras offer an incredible opportunity to "see" wildlife that's otherwise too reclusive or too nocturnal to find. Almost every week, we would have a photo or two of an ocelot on the cameras. We also got great looks at Great Curassows, Great Tinamous, and a Blue-crowned Motmot, which are all birds that are quite hard to see normally––it took me until my very last day to see a Curassow with my own eyes, and even then it was only a brief flash of feathers on the path in front of me. There were so many other animals, too, and it was a wonderful reminder of all the wild things living right next to us. The most thrilling parts of looking at the trail cameras came when we looked at the time stamps on the images: in a few cases, the camera took a picture of an ocelot or a group of coatimundis just minutes or an hour after a hiker had passed by. When I walked the trails myself, it made me wonder what was watching me. The picture above shows my other ongoing project at Pook's Hill: replacing and repainting signs for an "arboretum trail," a sort of self-guided interpretive nature walk. Several years ago, a group of botanists created this trail, posting signs at the base of certain trees along a small stretch of trail and preparing a booklet with more information about each of the tree species. But when I got there, many of the signs were overgrown or missing. So I created new ones! These signs have just been painted and outlined and are waiting to be attached to their posts. I had fun with these signs: I got to learn the names and uses of some of the trees, including Mahogany (the national tree of Belize), Red Gumbolimbo (often called the "tourist tree" because of its peeling red bark, which is thought to have evolved as a defense against climbing vines), and the Rubber Tree (whose sap really does make rubber––the ancient Maya used it to make rubber balls for their games). I also learned how to use a power saw and re-taught myself how to use a drill (which was made substantially more difficult by the fact that the two pieces of wood I was screwing together were joined at a 45-degree angle and could not be laid flat. Hence the cinder block in the picture). When I wasn't hiking or sawing or birding, I observed lots of cool critters (lizards, howler monkeys, large spiders, geckos on the ceiling, leaf cutter ants, you name it), and got to visit some maya ruins. I made chocolate, held a boa constrictor (at the zoo), touched a boa constrictor (in the wild), and got hit by a bat (the flying kind, not the baseball kind). I also got to meet some fantastic people and see a little bit of Belize, which is an unusually diverse country, in terms of both the people and the flora and fauna. Now I'm back, and I miss everything but the mosquitoes. Here are a few more pictures, and there's more to come, I promise. A striped basilisk, also known as a "Jesus Christ lizard" because they can run across water. These little basilisks were absolutely everywhere, especially on sunny days when they liked to sun themselves on rocks along the road. They never failed to make me smile, with their ridiculously long tails and toes. They also have an uncanny ability to stand completely motionless; you can't even see them breathing. |
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Welcome! Language Learning Welcome to Hawk Ridge A Massive Migration A Happy Birdthday Photos from the Week Visiting the Banding Station A Watched Kettle Never Streams Food, Part 1 The Big Picture Last Weeks at the Ridge Belize, Part 1 How to Look at Birds, A Guide (or: Belize, Part 2) All Creatures Great and Small La France! Kids and Language, Again Musée Fenaille More Photos from France Food, Part 2 Building Nests in California Please Do Not Pet the Woodpecker Condors and Creatures in Big Sur A Day at Hastings AuthorI am a high school graduate taking a gap year before college. I’m interested in birds, biology, and the natural world, as well as history, foreign languages, writing, and reading. Archives
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