Panama 2022 - Week 7
- Mar 30, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: 9 hours ago
Day 43 – 04/11/22
We spent the morning up in the 50-hectare plot, surveying as a team of three again. Working as a trio provided a bit of a boost, despite a constant threat of rain throughout the day. It turns out we were lucky and managed to stay dry, but other parts of the island had clearly been hit by downpours. As we walked back to the research station we kept coming across areas where the leaves on the ground were soaked and the forest floor was a mess of wet mud.
In the afternoon we booked our accommodation for a short holiday we’re planning in the Chiriqui region of Panama. We’re going away for almost a week from the 13th and are very excited.
Day 44 – 05/11/22
Another supposedly easy day that ended up being harder than planned. KL took us to the other side of the island on his boat, and from there EJ and I struggled through dense palms in a completely futile attempt to find one of our target trees. We gave up on that one and managed to survey five others before it started raining. PC had been on a nearby route and found us as we were finishing our last tree. A close encounter with a bullet ant kept us on our toes, with one wandering around a branch that EJ was leaning on. This wasn't as close as the occasion when PC had trodden on a nest of them, though...
Day 45 – 06/11/22
For only the second time in 45 days, I slept past 7am.
Another day measuring pods. Once again, by bringing in lots of material from the forest, we’ve absolutely ruined the lab. The lab is now worse than the forest for chigger bites, so as soon as I finished with the pods in the lab, I returned to my room, took a shower and worked there on my laptop instead. As a group, we all managed to avoid the large group of American tourists that descended on the island from the Nat Geo cruise ship, which had just anchored in the BCI cove.
At 4:30pm PC and I went for a brief birding walk around camp. It was overcast and breezy, so aside from the usual flycatchers and hawks that are always about, we weren’t expecting to see much. We were, however, surprised by a Painted Bunting. This is a small bird with a red body, blue head and green wings. It looks like it’s been coloured by a child who’s never actually seen a bird before. Interestingly, according to both the bird book and Merlin, it doesn’t occur in this region of Panama. Whether it was lost, the book is wrong, or whether it was just passing through, we were very lucky to see it.
Day 46 – 07/11/22
We thought that we had a Teams meeting after breakfast today with SG, but we’d completely forgotten that we’d rescheduled. That meant we were able to get into the forest in good time for what should be the penultimate day of pod collections.
Our route took us out to Harvard, the longest peninsula on the island. Fortunately, it doesn’t undulate like those on the East side of the island, so although it's longer, the walking isn’t so bad. In terms of wildlife, we saw a fairly dull bird, aptly named a Plain Brown Woodcreeper. We also spotted a small, almost pure white bird that, after some time studying the book and Googling, we came to the conclusion doesn’t exist. The most likely option is a leucistic individual of some species. One thing we could ID (to family level at least) was a clear-wing moth with some electric blue colouration on the abdomen and orange on the wings, going crazy for some honeydew on a leaf.
In terrible news, I had my first tick bite since being out here. The ticks are a mix of tiny bastards and big buggers. The big buggers are fine because, as I found out today, you can really feel when they bite and latch on. The small ones are stealthy and apparently you don't feel them for a while. I don't think I've had one of them yet but who knows? The tick from today though - it’s dead now.
Day 47 - 08/11/22
After a mostly dry day yesterday, the rain returned this morning with a vengeance. It fell so hard that the noise of it pounding on the roof woke me before my alarm, which I probably wouldn’t have been able to hear if it had gone off anyway. During a slight lull in the weather, I made my way down to breakfast where I was shortly joined by the others. Going out in these conditions was a no-go, so we just did office work until lunch.
In the afternoon the rain cleared so I went with PC to check on the seedling exclusion experiment. This involved walking to four points in the forest and counting how many of the seeds we’d planted had germinated. At the last point (on Fairchild), PC noticed that the GPS was showing we were only 300m from camp, rather than the 500 or 600-meter route that the trails would take us. We cut across country, up and down a gully or two and were back by half four, a little damp from the now falling again rain, but otherwise none the worse for wear for our off-trail excursion.
Day 48 – 09/11/22
It’s done. Pod collecting is complete. Unless we have data gaps of course, but that’s a problem for future us and frankly, who cares about those guys.
We set off this morning on the long walk to the Standley peninsular on the far side of the island. The first tree that we surveyed was an absolute monster growing on a steep slope and as a result, awful to work with. The other four, thankfully, were much easier to sample. Although we didn’t see any new species in the forest we did get another view of a Purple-throated Fruit Crow and a Three-toed Sloth slowly making its way up a tree. Back at camp I went for a little wonder, but it was fairly quiet, which gave me time to finally put some effort into IDing the swallows that fly around the dock. Although we’ve seen them every day it's only now that I can add Grey Breasted Martin to the species list.
Day 49 -10/11/22
We completed measuring the pods today. Or at least, we thought we had. We may have a few left to do, but we’re a bit confused about where they’ve come from. After lunch, we set about cleaning and tidying the lab in the hopes of killing all the little biting things that currently infest it.
I collected the camera trap today and couldn't believe the results. In one video, in broad daylight, an ocelot makes its way down the trail towards and then past the camera. I’ll have to think of a new location for the camera as I won’t top that. Whilst I was collecting the camera the forest suddenly went strangely quiet, until a troop of Spider Monkeys started alarm calling. Knowing that I'd captured footage of an Ocelot right where I was standing I looked around to see if, by some unbelievable chance, the animal was still around. After a few minutes scanning the forest with my binoculars I gave up and took a look at the monkeys instead. It was then immediately obvious what was the cause of their alarm calls. The first one I looked at was staring and shouting directly at me. I was the animal that they were warning about, not an Ocelot.