Tag Archives: wildlife photography

Costa Rica parte dos: On land, in which I take a liking to some of the locals.

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After diving a few days, I joined a tour to the massive Corcovado National Park (42,000+ hectares of land area). They’ve somewhat commoditized and package-ized the outdoor experiences here, which ruffled some of my meander-leaning feathers. This was before the bad dive and the whales, so I was still uncertain of my feelings for the place overall. But I went in with an open mind, a camera, a lot of water, and a desire to see some cool critters.

Check-in at 5:45, load onto the boat at 6, disembark and check-in at the ranger station, bag check for illicit food and plastic (Corcovado is very strict), and we’re ready to go into the park. In my group of 10 was a very nice Italian couple, a trio of French women, and a few others. We walked the trails slowly, with the guide stopping every 50 metres or so to point something out. It felt like he was acting the “guide” part a bit, with a flourish of his scope each time we stopped. Despite the showmanship and the production value, the trails were nice and we managed to see some indigenous species: 2 sloths, 3 tapirs, a smattering of birds and reptiles, a coatimundi, an agouti, and a partridge in a pear tree. Actually, a partridge-type thing (a tinamou), a great curassow, a couple of crested guans, a chachalaca (which is a great sighting if for the name alone), and others.

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All-in-all, it felt canned. Like walking through a ‘nature park experience’ rather than hiking through primary and secondary rainforest. And, while I’m not regretful that I went, I’d likely sign up for a different experience if I go again. When I got back to Drake Bay, I booked some time with a local guide to go birdwatching.

The highlight of the day: a couple of Imperials (the local beer) with the Italian couple, some very decent ceviche, and fun conversation, culminating in them urging me to reconsider my domicile in these very bizarre times.

I rode out the hottest heat of the afternoon on the balcony of my hotel room doing some napping and lazy birdwatching from the hammock. The cacophony begins at dusk, when the cicadas announce the exact moment of sunset. It’s amazing, really, the scissor-like crescendo of their song. Track 2 to the evening symphony is the squawking chorus of scarlet macaws as they make their way, 2-by-2 into the jungle to sleep.

I met up with the local birding guide the next day with honestly low expectations after my Corcovado experience. But the magic of the whales prevailed and it ended up being a lovely, if a tad wet bird walk (we got caught in a tropical downpour while looking for toucans), making the memory better, if soggy.

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If you are in Drake Bay, I highly recommend William Mora Gomez as a guide. He knows the area like the back of his hand, and his passion for birds and local wildlife shines through.

We ended up going on 2 outings, each time seeing more and more local birds and wildlife. The 2nd walk we took, William had rescued a baby white-face capuchin earlier in the day. The little monkey had gotten zapped on an overhead wire, and William reunited him with his troop. We walked by the same area a couple of hours later and the monkeys were still there, maybe waiting to give some good photo ops in gratitude. I’m anthropomorphizing of course, but it’s nice to wonder if they remember the good humans.

This inspired me to take my own late afternoon walks in-between lazing and diving. Birdwatching is good for the spirit. Looking through a viewfinder focuses your attention and silences the ridiculous chatter in your mind. A nonsense self-conversation about what’s going to happen in 4 days when you’re back in the real world has no chance against a chance sighting of a red-lored Amazon parrot with mate sitting on a nest, close encounters with rufous-tailed hummingbirds, cartoon-ish sightings of fiery-billed aracaris and yellow-throated toucans. Lineated woodpeckers.

It was during these walks, despite the heat, despite the prices (I still have no idea how people without a hefty vacation budget can afford to live there), despite the touristic-centricity, that I came to really appreciate the Pura Vida, pure life, aspect of Costa Rica.

There is a concept in my yoga practice called Iccha: the willingness to allow something, or the opening up to what might be. It had been a long time since I’d really, purely tapped into this energy and it felt like my spirit was trying to come home.

The following day the ocean would redeem itself.

Read Part 1 here.

I spent my holiday doing citizen science in South Africa: Part I

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What draws us to elephants is a mystery. Or is it? They represent wisdom and strength and empathy. They are revered in Thailand and in India and elsewhere in Asia. Ganesh is the Hindu elephant god of new beginnings, the remover of obstacles and bringer of wisdom and luck. His name in Thailand is Phra Phikanet.

Across Asia and Africa, these magical and mystical creatures are worshipped in temples and simultaneously loathed in the fields, where their land is being encroached upon by farms and development. A mere “drive by” by a herd can decimate a family’s crops in minutes.

I think I’ve always been charmed by the magic of elephants, intrigued by their human-like behaviours, disgusted by humans’ treatment of them and their habitat. My first visit to Africa gave me a up-close look into those long-eyelashed orbs and I was smitten. It’s not a secret that Ganesh is something of my patron saint, and it’s certainly no surprise that I’m something of a wildlife freak. So when an opportunity to participate in Bring the Elephant Home’s volunteer program, assisting scientists with crucial behavioral research to learn more about social structure, welfare and habitat usage, I couldn’t apply fast enough.

Fast-forward 8 or 9 months, and I’m beginning to pen this on my flight home, coming down from the elephant high that has been my status quo for the last couple of weeks.

I joined the group in Port Elizabeth (recently renamed to Gqeberha), on the Eastern Cape of South Africa: a couple from the UK, a handful of Californians, and a student studying ele behaviour at a University in Johannesburg. From PE, we went up to our post at the Kariega Conservation Center at the Kariega Game Reserve. I posted a blog at the beginning of our time there called What Happens When You Drop a Fence, outlining our initial observations and the main research objectives.

What was it like?

So the 8 of us volunteers, 2 PhD researchers, and a local ecologist ventured out into the thicket of Kariega Game Reserve each day looking for elephants. While like something out of a dream, it also felt much harder than it seemed like it should have been. One might think elephants are so big, and how could you miss them, right? Well, crazy ele fact #1: they move silently. I mean, so silently that you could be sitting in a spot for a while and see or hear nothing, but a moment later, you could glance over your shoulder and see an animal the size of a Land Cruiser standing just metres away, trunk curled, sniffing in your general direction. While you’d think they’d make themselves known by heavy footsteps, their massive feet are so cushioned that they walk as if clad in slippers. In fact, more often than not, we’d know they were nearby only from the branches snapping rather than anything else (the tracking collars, when working, didn’t hurt either 😉).

Day 1

That first afternoon we went out on a game drive to get our sea legs, as it were… we saw zebra and white rhinos and giraffes and warthogs (Pumba!) and of course a few elephants. Even though it was just a couple of hours on the reserve, and we got a flat tire just before dusk and had to wait a while for another vehicle to come and bring us a spare and a new jack, it didn’t feel like a harbinger of doom for the week. Instead, it felt like the beginning of a cool adventure. Especially when I looked up and realised that the giraffes we had been watching on the other side of a hill began to creep in closer to get a peek at what we were up to out there in the scrubby thicket.

The first full day was a series of lectures on why we were there, classes on how to do elephant identification, exercises in what to look for, behaviour-wise, and a slew of what to do when things around age and sex and different behaviours and dung sampling and using the Zoomonitor app to record said behaviours. It felt like a lot.

I mentioned to my manager that we had elephant school that first day. He replied that he had heard they are good learners. Us humans, though… the jury was still out.

One of the first lessons was ageing elephants. It’s done by relative size, facial features, and behavioral characteristics. Calves (<1) can walk underneath an adult cow. Juveniles (1-4) are still suckling but may or may not have tusk buds (squeee!!!). While Intermediates (5-8) may or may not look like sub-adults (9-15), they are weaned and the females take on more and more “big sister” duties. Sub-adult bulls spend less and less time in the center of the herd as they mature and become more independent (and, you know, more like naughty teenage boys!). Adults (15 and up) come in different shapes and sizes, depending on whether they are bull or cow. I learnt so much just this first day on these different stages, not least that bulls don’t even come into their first musth until they are about 25, while cows can start having their own calves by about 11.

Once we had a decent grasp on ageing, we moved on to sexing (size, head shape, body configuration, rear view). About half-way through this lesson I felt like I might fail elephant school altogether, so I was glad that the professionals would be with us in the vehicle to help out with our ID follies!

The team uses the SEEK (System for Elephant Ear Knowledge) system which incorporates a set of features and markings in addition to body condition on a scale from 1 (emaciated) to 5 (chubbo) to identify and code the targets of our observations. I’m grateful for the visual aids we were given, as well as the Elephant Voices ethogram website which we were encouraged to review prior to arriving. This was beginning to feel like work.

The last part of our training day was to review the different behaviours we were to observe and track: continuous behaviours like locomotion, grazing, browsing (and identifying the differences therein), and all-occurrence behaviours like head shake, sniff, play spar, trunk curl, trunk to face (and whose trunk to or from whose face)… again I was appreciative of the technology at hand – the app into which we were to record said behaviours and the myriad PowerPoint decks and references that had been prepared for us novices.

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As the long day wound down, we received our marching orders: review the materials and get ready for an early wake up call. We were going into the field in the morning, then breaking up into groups of 3, one to observe behaviour, one to do elephant ID, and one to be the photographer.

One can only guess which role I was more than glad to take on.

Stay tuned for more adventures from a citizen-scientist perspective. And be sure to take a look at Bring the Elephant Home’s updates page for more stories from our time at Kariega.

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