La Selva

Walking out to the arboretum, Zach and I saw a Tantilla reticulate, a fairly rare small (~30cm) snake that is semi-fossorial (living under leaf litter) and usually nocturnal. It had distinct yellowish tan patches on either side right after its head. Lars and Becca also found a caecilian, a very rare amphibian that resembles a large earthworm and is fossorial. Earlier, walking around the swamp we saw two great green macaws fly overhead. We also saw several species of toucan, sloths and motmots. The peccaries are everywhere, but we didn’t see any big cats.

Today it was properly raining for a while during the day, one of the first times on this trip. It felt like being back in Hilo at a certain level. Allegra, Lars and I saw 6 or so howler monkeys climbing around on the bridge cables. A few mothers had babies that were running a short distance away, then returning. There were two males right near the center of the bridge, down low by the railing. One seemed unperturbed by our presence, we walked by it and took pictures, and it only looked at us and growled a bit. It then started walking toward the other male; we thought they might fight, but they only hugged a bit as they passed on the cable, then the first male made a flying leap to the other cable.

The river is known to get very high in floods, up within two metres of the large bridge, and flowing over two metres above the small bridge up to the river station (as a previous FSP observed). On this trip the water was very shallow, rarely over a metre, but Zach, Allegra and I went swimming anyways below the river station. It was fun splashing around in the shallows and lying on the sand. Earlier that morning most of the group went on a rafting trip 10 kilometres up the river down to the station again. We saw a lot of birds, a few iguanas and ripples from river otters, and found a deep spot with a cliff we could jump off.