I'm almost one month in the jungle now, one more to stay. Every day the time is running faster.
The temperature this week was nearly same than last week. The high temperature made it very difficult to work in the jungle. We had one tunderstorm with rain the whole night on friday.
The photo on the left shows the fantastic view we have every night, when there are no clouds or smoke.
The most interesting activity was CE this week. We installed a letter in the cage of the spectacled bears and open the door so the male and female can meet.
Above the letter we fix a wire to hang food on it. The bears have to climb the ladder up to get the food. Like this they have some activity in the cage.
After the male (Lucho) ate all the food we hid he went to the cage of the female (Sabina) to steal her food.. We opened both doors so they can meet. After the first slowly, curious and interested contact of both bears they started to fight. Well at least the female wanted to fight, the male was only interested to get more food.
This week we also got some new baby tucans and parrots.
Check also my little adventure to the claylick last weekend!
I also had the possiblity to use my more than 5 years knowledge of forestry.
It isn't that much but during my practical by serval foresters and because of my school/universtity I know how to do a thinning. Fernando, the owner of the reserve Taricaya, has a Mahagony plantage and is looking for the best way that the trees grows as best as possible.
He gave me the half of his plantage to mark a thinning. In the last years the trees grew and were in competition for light, space and other resources. Now the trees have a >8m trunk without branches but they stay to close together. With the thinning I want to give the trees which we think are the best in the plantage more space. All the trees which grows into the crown of the "future tree" will be removed soon.
Twitch Twitch
We went again to the swamp place this week for ringing and camping. At our last activity, the swamps was full with birds and swallows used it as roosting place during the night. We hoped to catch some of them and went back for an afternoon-night-morning ringing activity. Unfortunately there were no swallows anymore..
In total we caught only three species there but more than 20 birds. We had more than 20 Creamy-bellied Thrushes.
During the night capture we got visited by Opossums. They tried neak up at our ringing place but got caught with the flash light. After that they stayed in the tree and observed us for a very long time.
In the swamp we found three new species for Taricaya. 2x Crakes and 1x new Owl species.
Furthermore I spend with Julia A. a long time to build 3m and 4m mistnets to use them on the Canopy, a plattform 43m high on a tree with a view over the jungle. We installed the nets on the brigde and plattform. We didn't expected to get plenty birds, maybe just some beautiful canopybirds.
And we got some!
Highlight was the White-throated Tucan which was one of the last birds who flew into the net.
(sry for my english :) )