Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Instant Results - Jag!

GVI Costa Rica has started phase 111 with some new Bushnell camera traps. Naturally all the staff were anxious to put them through their paces and similarly the news volunteers were itching to get off base during an intense training week.

Therefore on Wednesday afternoon everyone ventured to the edge of the forest to learn about how to place the cameras in order to capture pictures of the elusive jaguars here in the national park. Positioning them near the entrance to the ‘North trail’ in an area some of the staff have come to call the ‘turtle graveyard’ (owing to the large number of turtle carcasses in a very small area), this was seen as more of a test run than an ideal opportunity for catching jags.
Going back to retrieve the cameras only 24 hours later, staff members Joao, Zahra and 2 week volunteer Rachel scoured the ground around the area for prints of anything likely to have been caught on ‘film’. The team returned to base not expecting much as there was no clear indication that any animals had passed the site.


It was therefore with tremendous surprise that we found 2 pictures the following day, and even more surprising what they were of!
A female jaguar had passed through the trail at around 7:30am, only 90 minutes before our team were there! Not only that, she appears to be fairly large and we suspect that she could be pregnant!


There couldn’t have been a more exciting start to phase. We haven’t started our first full survey week yet! Needless to say all of our new volunteers can’t wait to get out into the forest now.

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1 comments:

Dom G said...

Not only a pregnant jaguar but a pregnant jaguar with a GVI sticker on her back! What are the chances of that? ;-)