Panama 2022 - Week 4
- Matt Greenwell
- Mar 30
- 7 min read
Day 22 – 13th October 2022
Three weeks since we left home. One of the other residents (Kane) has his birthday on Monday, so we decided to go on a food and drinks run to Gamboa so that we could celebrate properly on the day. This meant getting the 9:30 am cargo boat and spending a couple of hours on the mainland before returning to the island just in time for lunch.
In the afternoon, after too many days in the lab, El and I finally got back into the forest to do a couple of seed pod transects. Whilst rummaging through the undergrowth I disturbed a tarantula. Pretty harmless, but still a bit of a shock. The rain began falling whilst we were out which was quite refreshing. It was a typical light, persistent rain that reminded us of home, rather than one of the colossal downpours that usually roll through here and feel like someone has dumped a barrel of water over you.
Day 23 – 14th October 2022
A productive day. We spent the morning cutting PVC pipe into lengths to make 24 exclusion cages and 24 shade covers. This meant cutting 192 one-meter length pipes into 70cm and 30cm pieces. The 70cm lengths were joined to make squares and the 30cm lengths were used as legs.
At one stage, as we were working away, a swarm of small wasps emerged from a scaffold pipe that the storage shed was made from. Upon closer inspection (using a pair of binoculars and keeping a safe distance to begin with) we saw that the pipe they were nesting in had been invaded by army ants. Over the next hour, we watched as the number of ants swelled, forming lines of workers along the roof of the building, and using their bodies to seal off the end of the pipe. Gradually, workers began to emerge from the pipe carrying wasp larvae (and a few adults) back down the line, now guarded by soldier ants, to feed the colony. The wasps had mostly dispersed by now, but a few still buzzed around the pipe, powerless to intervene in the face of such relentless efficiency. Ants are awesome. A little scary, but awesome.
In the afternoon we cut mesh to size and tested the designs. The cages are supposed to exclude insects (large flying ones anyway, there’s no stopping ants) from getting to the seeds that we plant. The shade covers are just so that we can control for the effects of shading on non-caged seeds. That way we'll know if any effects that we see from the cages are due to insect exclusion or just due to less light coming through the mesh.
Our final task of the day was to sort through seeds, which didn’t take long. Tomorrow we will be in the forest, planting seeds and erecting the exclusion cages. It will be long and tiring, but we’re looking forward to getting out properly.
No new species to report today, although I did spend five minutes looking at a pigeon that could only be one of two species, but displayed none of the distinguishing features of either of them. I hadn’t expected pigeon ID to be this hard when I left home three weeks ago.
Day 24 – 15th October 2022
The first full-length field day in a while, and I am feeling it now. Although, I’m in a better state than the others who didn’t drink enough. We carried the constituent parts of the exclusion cages to some previously identified light gaps - areas where trees had recently fallen. We cleared away sticks and leaves, and planted the seeds, finally covering them with the cages and shades.
In the end, a few of the light gaps turned out not to be light enough, so there was a fair amount of trudging around looking for suitable spots to plant the seeds. We ended up using four sites, which meant we had eight more to go. That will be the first project set-up completed. There’ll be a few days at the end of the project where we'll have to go around counting germination rates, but otherwise, we can forget about it for a while.
After dinner and the usual evening’s TV, we headed back to our rooms. During the day a troop of howler monkeys had been feeding on the trees over the dorm buildings. Even if we hadn’t seen them earlier we’d have known as I stepped in a large monkey turd on my way to bed. There's shit everywhere on the island - a sign of the high animal abundance. Around the centre the maintenance staff are tasked with pressure washing all the concrete paths to keep them faeces free and to remove any leaves that snakes could hide under. In the forest, the task of tidying up after a toilet falls to dung beetles. These industrious insects are remarkable, As soon a dung hits the ground they are there, fighting over the spoils and then rolling away their prize. They're not the most efficient of rollers and will sometimes come up against a particularly steep leaf, roll halfway up, fall down, then try again and again and again. Like Sisyphus from Greek mythology, but with a much smellier boulder.
Day 25 – 16th October 2022
For the first time since being here, I really felt like I hit my stride today. We did around 10km in the forests and, for once, I didn’t feel like I was about to die as I got back to camp. In fact, I actually felt pretty good. We set up another four locations, planting seeds, and building enclosures and shades. At one stage we had a glimpse of a pure white bird which turned out to be an unimaginatively named White Hawk. I’m not sure what the advantage of being white is in the forest, maybe it’s camouflaged against a cloudy sky. On the edge of the forest, just outside the centre we had a good view of a Red Brocket deer. We sometimes see them in the forest and they tend to be very nervous, especially those deeper into the forest, but this one was unphased by our presence. It's often seen on one of the closer trails that the tourists are taken up, so must be fairly used to people going by.
Day 26 – 17th October 2022
What an absolute bastard of a day. The plan was to put out the seeds and exclusions at the last four sites. The first two were easy enough as we’d spotted good potential sites yesterday and we completed them by half 11. We then spent the next four hours trying and failing to find any suitable canopy gaps to place the last two in, ending up on Lathrop, which is a short but savage trail that just goes up and down, gully after gully. The result is that, instead of a rest day tomorrow, we’ll be heading back out again in the hope of finding suitable canopy gaps. We did have a spectacular view of the White Hawk again though, so as often happens, a hard day in the forest was still worth it.
The evening was much better. It was Kane’s birthday so all the residents went to the lounge to celebrate, playing table football, chatting and making up games for a few hours. We turned in at 12:30 pm, a couple of hours later than usual. We agreed that as tomorrow shouldn’t be a big day, lie-ins were in order.
Day 27– 18th October 2022
I woke around the usual time of 6:30am, rolled over and went back to sleep, finally emerging from my room at around 9am. Breakfast is served between 6:30 and 7:30, although typically the cooks start packing away around 7am and get a bit grumpy if you’re late (depending on which cooks are on rota). Fortunately, cereal and toast are always available, unless they decide to hoard them in the kitchen, in which case you have to ask for them to be left out where they’re supposed to be. It’s a strange system.
We decided that it would be fine to set up the final two experimental spots tomorrow, giving us today to recover with a quiet day in the office. There’s very little of note for me to write about for the day, with the exception of dinner. The last few days the meals have been pretty basic and, in the case of one questionable fish stew, inedible (the smell of which was enough to put me off my veggie meal of tofu, rice and beans). Today, however, the cook shift rota changed and we were treated to spaghetti bolognese with garlic toast, a pesto drizzle and parmesan cheese powder to go on top. There was much rejoicing.
Day 28 – 19th October 2022
One month ago I set off on the coach for Heathrow. The time is going both very quickly and surprisingly slowly. It’s odd. The days are repetitive at times and days of the week are entirely meaningless; a Monday may as well be a Wednesday or a Sunday. But all is well.
Today, instead of an 8km hike to set up a plot on the far side of the island, Kane offered to give us a lift in his boat. Paddy will apply for a boat licence for next season, but apparently the bureaucracy involved means there is zero chance of that happening this year. The boat ride was thrilling. We sat in the front of the small boat, where the ride was bumpiest, but the view was the best. You’re sharing the water with huge cargo ships that utterly dominate the canal and small birds that skim along beside you, feeding off of the water’s surface.
After a successful set-up, we were back in camp for lunch and able to head out in the afternoon to set up the last plot. Fortunately, this location was only a 15-minute walk away, which meant by 3pm we were back again and I had the rest of the afternoon to myself. Tomorrow will be another office day, and then it’s back to daily forest trips, this time collecting seed pods instead of seeds.