It’s been raining for four days: Six inches so far, and another five inches predicted to fall by Wednesday. Ed and I spent a fairly miserable morning setting up mist nets in a downpour at 4:30 am, waiting five hours for a lull, then taking down the nets in another downpour without ever having opened them. The rest of the day was a sloshing, muddy, mosquito-infested slog in the jungle! A desk clerk at a neighboring lodge finally took pity on us (or thought we were scaring the tourists) and sent us home early with their own boatman.
A white Christmas it ain’t, but it’s an interesting way to spend the holiday. We ate dinner at a Canadian biological station and took the day off to wander around the swamp forest with a couple of British herpetologists who spent an hour trying to extract a snake from a rotten log, thigh-deep in mud. Ed and I managed to squeeze in a couple hours of bird banding yesterday and were utterly surprised to catch a Great Tinamou in late afternoon – only in Costa Rica!
Noah,
We spent hours in Costa Rica trying to see a calling tinamou, and never did. In Brazil our guide had us wait for 30 minutes while he tricked another tinamou species into crossing a road with a tape. So, what’s your protocol for actually catching a tinamou? Not your usual mist net bird, and not very approachable in our experience.