A State of Equilibrium and Covering up Our Dirty Little Secret

A couple of weeks ago I dropped Mick and his family off at the bus terminal in Santa Rosa and collected two new arrivals. Inge, from Denmark, has joined the primate team and Kelsey from the USA, is a general volunteer and is helping out with the many projects we have running at the moment. Their arrival marked the beginning of a period of calm; you could say equilibrium, here at Laguna Blanca. Much as I enjoy the high turn over of volunteers we have passing though here, there are also rare occasions when we have a few weeks with no arrivals and departures. It’s at these times when I get the chance to pause for a moment and reflect on what a wonderful life I lead and how lucky I am to be here. And so with that in mind I thought this would be a good opportunity to give you the reader a taste of what a typical day at Laguna Blanca is like. There are currently 10, soon to be eleven, of us in the house. Our mornings begin at first light which is when traps need to be checked. So everyone who is undertaking fieldwork us usually up and fed by 6am. The primate team head out into the forest on our motocart and spend a few hours looking for the monkeys in an effort to increase their contact time and work towards habituating the group. This will then be followed by machetting new trails in order to open up the forest to allow further access to the monkeys. Nick and Noah are studying the opossums we have here and so check the traps each morning. Rich has just had his proposal approved and will beginning trapping and recording the behaviour of Microteiid lizards this week. Dec is running the camera trap project so is moving his traps on a regular basis and Augusta is out in the cerrado getting filthy measuring Clyomys burrows. By mid-morning/lunch time everyone is back at the house. Nick and Noah might have a small mammal for me to process for the museum and Dec doesn’t get any peace and quiet until he has seen if there was anything on the cameras! After a hearty lunch the volunteers all work on a number of tasks needed to help keep this place running; varnishing butterfly boxes, painting signs, improving our maps, laminating photographs etc all of these small but significant jobs are so important to us here at PLT. It’s not just the little jobs that the volunteers do to help keep this place amazing. Last week we took on a massive job. Here in rural Paraguay there is NO environmental awareness and waste management or recycling are simply not concepts people understand. So for us as an environmental organisation it is a real challenge disposing of waste. We reuse what we can, glass jars or bottles for example are used in the museum or as vegetable patch borders and cans can be sold for a small amount of cash. Beyond that however the only options we have are to burn or bury our waste and with limited space the latter has now become a problem. We had a couple of large pits behind the house where non-burnable waste was being “disposed” of. However over the months these have overflowed and needed a good sort out. So that is exactly what we did! All of us took it on one morning last week and in the space of two hours had collected, sorted and organised all of the rubbish from the two pits and the surrounding area. Plastic bottles, cans and glass jars that had made their way in there have been removed and sorted for various projects we have coming up, tins are ready for collection and best of all the two pits are now buried and a massive new pit has been dug. Not only that but we now have a fully functional fire pit once again and on our next trip to Santa Rosa we will buy some new big bins so we can continue separating our waste and keep this good thing going. All of our volunteers past, present, and I am sure future, are so precious to us at Laguna Blanca, we simply could not do what we do without them. And it is nice on occasion to have the chance to sit back and reflect on what a great project I work for. “Volunteers aren’t paid, not because they are worthless, but because they are priceless” (Anon)

Controls, close encounters and capuchins

Greg Goodfellow is into the last two weeks of data collection for his investigation into white-rumped tanager duets, territorial, and mate defence behaviours. He has been successful in collecting a healthy and valid amount of data over a 3 month period which will eventually allow him to test his project hypotheses through statistical analysis. Greg has achieved this result through dedication, hard work, and a rigid consistency in his fieldwork. These final two week for Greg will involve collecting the last few data points and also conducting control playback, i.e playbacks that are not white-rumped tanager duets. This will assess if it is simply bird vocalisations they respond to or the actual duet of a perceived rival pairs. Greg also videoed some very interesting behaviour today. During one of playback experiments which included the presence of two dummy tanagers, the resident pair flew over and approached the dummies within 0.5m. Then they came together just 1m from the dummies in the same tree and produced a return duet. This evidence shows that on some level the visual presence of rivals adds to the severity of reactions from resident pairs.

Our botany intern Georgina Snelling has now begun data collection from her 100m x 100m plots. Within each of her 12 plots she has randomly selected ten 10m x 10m quadrants. Data will be collected from inside these quads to eventually give a 10% sample of the habitats. Next week she will begin using the new equipment Para la Tierra are providing. These include a moisture and conductivity probe as well as a sunlight sensor. At the same time Georgina is building up a herbarium of ferns and other botanical samples from the reserve. This involves a lot of ‘keying out’ as botanists say.

Aimee Oxley has completed her data collection period for her Masters research into the affect of habitat disturbance on small mammals. She gained a good amount of captures and data during the allocated time period and is now collating it all together in preparation for statistical analysis.

Aimee’s study in the Atlantic forest has had an additional unexpected result and benefit. Over the last two months Aimee and the volunteers who have helped her have regularly observed tufted capuchins (Cebus libidinosus paraguayanus). The reactions from the monkeys to human encounters has been so encouraging that we are now aiming to launch a long term primate project at Para la Tierra. The monkeys were not scared (which is usually the case for unhabituated primates) and did not run away. Instead they were more inquisitive and stared at the people for a while and then carried on with their business. This is an excellent sign and we intend to habituate these groups and get to know them a lot better.

Finally, I am leaving Laguna Blanca for a couple of days next week to visit Asuncion. In the capital I will be collecting some important items for camp, holding some research meetings with Para la Tierra collaborator Dr Robert Owen, and also giving a presentation on the organisation at an English speaking class.

Until next time ill say goodbye.

Best wishes,

Luke