Tangled puppets by Ruby Easther

When I was a kid, I used to have two string puppets. One was a carpenter and the other a little drummer boy. They were handmade works of art that some family friend had bought me for one of my earliest birthdays. As I grew up I would carefully take out my string puppets to play with, but more often than not they would end up horrendously tangled. My Great Aunt Margaret was the best at untangling my little string puppets. Oh, if she were here now. Untangling bat nets can test the limits of anyone’s patience. My name is Ruby and I am an intern from New Zealand working on a bat inventory of Laguna Blanca with Joe. I have been here for almost four weeks now and have seen tarantulas, scorpions, owls, giant moths (that allegedly suck your blood and predict who is going to die by perching on their doorframe) cute little beetles and one huge, big Black Tegu (who we named Targaryen) all just inside our little PLT house. In addition to these weird and wonderful critters, there is no shortage of spiders. As I do not possess any arachnaphilia (yes, that is a made-up word) I have successfully made my bed a fortress against spiders – the top bunk completely encircled by a mosquito net and a foot away from the walls in all directions. I am one step from putting a moat around it. Airell, a volunteer here, suggests a moat of vinegar - apparently insects and spiders don’t like vinegar - I quite like the sound of that. But we are getting off topic, bats are where it’s at. Joe and I have been setting up 5 bat mist nets in different habitats to catch a selection of bats that reside in the reserve. So far we have caught 17 bats, 9 of those in one night! I’m not sure how much you know about bats, but it turns out they are not only strong and feisty but also spindly and easily tangled. As you may imagine, catching a bat in a bat net leaves not only a mess reminiscent of a child’s string puppet but also a sharp set of little bat teeth which wooden puppets seldom boast. The bats we have caught so far have been a pretty decent variation in size, my favourite being about the size of my thumb and weighing all of 6grams. Six grams! So tiny. We think this little guy is Molossops temminckii, the Dwarf Dog-faced Bat, but to be certain of the species of any of the bats we catch we need to remove their skulls and feed them to PLT’s flesh-eating beetles(!). Once the beetles have done their thing, we will take some measurements of the skull and identify them further from there. Anyway, I’m off to the cerrado to catch some bats, Ruby

Zen and the Art of Trail Maintenance - A blog entry for PLT by Rosemary Gamsa (part 2)

Here is the essence of The Zen of Trail-Clearance / Maintenance (using the term Zen very loosely, as I know little about it) and its most obvious effects: One experiences a sort of time-dilation in the physical action; the upswing, the core torsion, as the body twists, coiled and ready to unleash the optimum amount of force, at the optimum angle. There is beauty in this moment of stillness and balance as the machete reaches its zenith, and the trained eye judges precisely the thickness, solidity and elasticity of the target material. Will the blade deftly slice, scythe seamlessly, exert a blunt force trauma, bludgeon, smash, land like a professional executioner’s sword, or recoil sending a spray of red soil up into the eyes? The judgment is made in a split-second, the body shifts a degree this way or that, and the cutting edge arcs downward, whistling. The result is a satisfyingly severed root, a neatly spliced and knotted vine, or a stubborn thud as the unrelenting tangle of underbrush springs back, having moved but one millimeter. It is an art to not take the results personally, sometimes the easiest section of pre-cut path is the nastiest to clear. Neither can one rest on one’s laurels after a series of elegant and rapid-fire slashes. The fresh, leafy forest soon gives way to dry, head-high grasses; to bouncy and treacherous bamboo, full of rotten tubular beetle hotels and crawling with gentlemanly spiders, making off discreetly on their long legs. Myself, I like to picture them in tails and top hats, bumbling along to fetch the morning paper, it helps dispel any residual fear. All too frequently a devastatingly large ants’ nest is revealed, and one must scarper, leaping and hopping crudely from the scuttling legions, abandoning the persona of the intrepid explorer. As the weeks have gone by I have experimented with siphoning emotion into the clearing action, seeing if a particular image or thought process alters my effectiveness with the machete? So far, it seems that the most balletic work comes from a silent mind, or at least that unencumbered by words. Having no internal dialogue is a blessed state, and many of us will have been advised to practice this through mindfulness and meditation. Macheteing is an active form of meditation on some days (or it is until a situation arises, usually involving ants to break the calm) but on other days it is a sort of dance; partnered to a steel edge and a gracefully long wooden handle. A dance which the machete and the wielding party can move together, alternating tenderness and wild abandon, in an utterly secure grip. Visualize each debonair swing left and right; the bold advancing together into the tunnel of twisted branches and huge wet leaves; edging backwards from the falling of a suspended bamboo log, then swishing through the gentle confetti of dead leaves and caterpillars. Sidestep in a series of genteel foot and blade-tip taps to the ground; kick leaf litter aside joyously, recklessly; trample and jig on the loosened earth; launch a swaggering fling of kinetic energy up, up into the canopy; and finally repair to a quiet spot to ‘sharpen up’ on a rusty but stylish file. And all the while, be it a session of dancing, a cathartic smashing, or mindful contemplation, the soundtrack is provided by a plethora of tropical birds and insects, which are unpredictable, funny and eerie by turn. Then there is the difference in the debris concerned; if it is freshly cut, or old and gnarly. Like any psychological obstacle, the older and well-ignored ones are the real buggers to deal with. A newly sliced path gives way pleasingly, and fast, the soil underfoot is revealed bright red and silky. On the more neglected trails (or those too daunting to take on immediately) the hardening piles of dead matter seem to lock together like some form of torturous twining Tetris. It taunts and teases as the machete blade pings off, ricocheting at alarming angles. In and around the fallen trees, that must be crawled beneath, or hurdled over, a dense matting of mossy crust develops. This in turn attracts peculiar assemblages of fungi, caches of invertebrate eggs, alien larvae and ghostly, crystalline spiders. Glutinous slug-like caterpillars, equipped with toxic spines, wander aimlessly through the litter; clouds of butterflies descend to feed on sweat whilst gigantic crickets munch away at the nylon of one’s rucksack or ‘bug-proof’ clothing. More than once an hemipteran of disturbing appearance has crashed into my face and taken up residence in my hair. The very fabric of the forest is moves and seethes; look closely enough and lose all sense of time and scale. It feels sacrilegious to chop through such a wealth of organic, bustling strata, given that most of it is (to the layman) un-named and unknown… Please, botanists, entomologists and all experts in small wriggling indecipherable things, come here to Para La Tierra and tell us what they are! Of course, all this is all very well when the weather is fine; cool enough to be vigorous, and bothered not too much by mosquitos. When it is really baking and humid, the ability to slash and clear takes on a new level of dedication, and I admire those who function well in the heat. I am a temperate beast, and when most of the other volunteers are out sunbathing and volleyballing, I am usually hiding under a shrub, mumbling fondly about how nice and chilly the UK is at this time of year. However, on the torrentially rainy days, when thunder rolls in and the lake lights up with sheets of milky-blue lightning, we all sit under the porch and look longingly at our machetes. Or write long mellifluous monologues about the Zen of neo-tropical scrub-bashing. Everything here at Para La Tierra has the potential to be a valuable lesson; be it the replacing of irrational fears with realistic ones, the acceptance of proximity to ants, or the grass (and vegetables available for dinner) being markedly greener on the other side. I could happily wax lyrical about the challenges of moth-cataloguing, beetle-wrangling, or the gentle art of acquiring bedtime spider-tolerance, (or, and there’s a paper in here somewhere, ‘what drives the volunteers here to develop an unquenchable, passionate dependency on Game of Thrones?’) but it is all for another time. To sum up; come and try it for yourself; this adventure has done me a power of good. When I am back in Britain, plodding through tarmacked streets of dog poo and dog ends, under a washed-out, skyscraped horizon, I will yearn for the hum of mosquitos, the cool tongues of butterflies on my skin, and the singing of glittering machete steel at dawn. Rosemary Gamsa Para La Tierra Volunteer 2012

Mbaracayu

Hey Everybody! I’d like to quickly give you an update of how things are going here at RNLB before telling you about the amazing opportunity I had this past weekend. We’ve had two new arrivals since the last post: Airell, a volunteer from Canada who will help with the primate project, and Ruby, an intern from New Zealand who’s helping us out by taking on the bat inventory. Ruby and I have been prepping to start up the inventory tomorrow night and with all the poles and nets sorted and we are both anxious to start catching some bats. Georgia has begun her sleep-site study which has meant that she’s been walking out to the forest before sunrise to try to catch any of the capuchins that are having a lie-in. The house is slowly filling up again and everyone is getting involved in all the projects. This past week, I had the amazing opportunity to visit a neighboring nature reserve in Paraguay for a weekend: The Mbaracayu Forest Reserve. The refuge is located on the border of Paraguay and Brazil just 5 hours from RNLB and is a whopping 64,400 hectares. The immensity of the forest is immediately noticeable as you drive toward the reserve; as we drove past the soy fields and cattle ranches that are the unfortunate but typical Paraguayan landscapes, we crested a hill and what lay in front of us was a never ending ocean of forest. Once inside the refuge, the forest’s size remained awe-inspiring; we found a tree that was so thick it took five people with arms spread out to ring around the trunk (the tree was 200 years old!). The reserve was founded in 1984 and has an amazing variety of projects going on at all times. The most impressive in my eyes was their work with community outreach and education. They have helped the local populations to not only adapt to the increase in tourists that come to visit the reserve but also to profit from their presence. They also run a high school for girls that focuses on environmental education and female empowerment. The school is completely self-sustaining as they grow most of the food they eat in a garden tended by the students and pay for anything else they need with profits from a student-run chicken coop. Karina, Conce, Jorge and I arrived originally to learn from them about how to run a chicken coop but on arrival we decided to split into two teams to take full advantage of all the projects that were taking place at the time. While Karina and Conce visited the chicken coops, Jorge and I took part in a Tour Guide course that was run by a member of the SENATUR (Servicio Nacional de Turismo). We learned a lot about what it takes to qualify as a nationally recognized Tour Guide as well as a few tricks of the trade. All in all it was an amazing learning experience and we left Mbaracayu not only inspired by the beauty of the forest but also by the versatility of the projects run by those living and working on the site. RNLB has come a long way in the past two and a half years, but seeing the extent of influence the Mbaracayu Forest Refuge has on the nearby communities, it’s clear to me our job is FAR from finished. I know that I returned to Laguna Blanca with a mind full of ideas of what amazing new projects Para La Tierra can get into next, we just need your help to get ‘em done. Joe

Capuchins and Tayras in the Atlantic Forest

Yesterday, I ventured deep into the Atlantic forest following Jonny Miller on a hunt to find the group of Capuchin monkeys that live and feed in the area. Amazingly, just fifteen minutes after entering Jonny’s favorite trail, he stops and whispers back to me, “Do you see?” My immediate reaction was “See what?” but then my eyes caught a flash of motion in the trees just thirty meters ahead of us. There was a group of at least 6 Capuchins travelling through the canopy over our heads. The monkeys had been well aware of our approach and a few of them chirped loudly as soon as they realized we’d seen them. They slowly began moving away, always in a single file line, usually following the exact same path using the same branches as those ahead of them. We were able to follow them through our matrix of amazingly well cut trails (thanks Rosemary). We would lose them for a few moments just to turn a corner and hear the crashing of nearby branches as they leapt from tree to tree. Jonny, after more than 6 months on the primate project, has become adept at knowing where and how the monkeys will move after being spotted. He was able to predict their behavior and enabled us to follow them for nearly a full hour before they lost us. After searching around for another hour or so, occasionally stopping to admire a colorful beetle or caterpillar, we decided to give up our search and begin cutting a new trail. Jonny knew of a place down towards a water source that he wanted a path because frequently the capuchins move away in that direction and the undergrowth was too thick to follow them through. Mina, a new volunteer, joined us as we began cutting the new trail and quickly ran into a boggy area that surrounds the majority of natural springs in the forest. While resting, Jonny again turned to me and asked “Did you hear that?” I shrugged my shoulders and asked “Hear what?” But then to my surprise I looked out through a clearing and saw a smaller group of capuchins perched in a tree looking at me. As they slowly moved away, Jonny attempted to move around to cut them off. At that time, Mina and I stayed put and began hearing a strange huffing/hissing sound and to our surprise a TAYRA climbed up a tree ten feet in front us. It scurried up the tree pursuing the capuchins but after catching sight of me and Mina, began hissing and snorting at us. Joe

Zen and the Art of Trail Maintenance - A blog entry for PLT by Rosemary Gamsa (part 1)

This is a taste of my musings on machetes… I arrived at Para La Tierra six and a half weeks ago to volunteer on the Capuchin project, with naïve fantasies of hanging out with the monkeys every day. However I soon realized that the finding and following of Capuchins is an exercise in patience and a very specific kind of agility. It requires dedicated and methodical searches; crisscrossing the forest matrix of the undergrowth, GPS and machete in hand, all the while hyper-alert to the manifold hazards. There are the concealed pitfalls and burrows that suck your feet down into the earth, and twisted roots and stumps emerging from the loose red soil like stubborn, lignified homunculi (pull them out and see for yourself). In addition there is some alarming eye-pokery from jagged branches, the unexpected thorny whiplash of deceptively delicate looking Mimosa, and vast invisible spider-webs that lace between the trees and land like sticky cotton threads in the mouth… and of course there is the ever-present whine from millions of tiny flying beasties, awaiting delicious human blood (it is nice to think of oneself as delicious, if only in this context). Stop too long and you will be eaten alive by something or other, DEET or no DEET. To follow the Capuchins one must be silent and speedy, maneuvering this humid obstacle course fearlessly, eyes adjusted to seek out the flash of chestnut fur, ears pricked for the crash of foliage and chittering calls that often accompany their arboreal antics. They can hear us coming long before we become aware of them, and should they choose to, they can lose us easily in no time at all. We cannot negotiate even the clearest trails with such speed and dexterity. Luckily, through tireless work of many volunteers, they have become habituated to our clumsy attempts to track them, and, I like to think, tolerate us with good humour and some interest. The pay-off for kilometres of clammy clambering and creeping is definitely worth it; moments of incredible and unashamed cuteness; the surreal excitement of being in proximity to wild primates (quite unlike any zoo encounter), and feeling honoured to be allowed so near. To the point; after my first few days out monkey-hunting, and negotiating the challenging terrain, I realized that the majority of my work would be in the cutting and clearing of trails, adding twists and turns to the web of interlocking pathways that snake through the dense trees, rendering them safe for potential pursuits and future volunteers. My description of the hazards above is biased somewhat by a restless and slightly compulsive nature, specifically the need to tidy things up, create straight lines and lovely orderly right-angles. This is probably what led me to develop an obsession with trail clearance. Here, in a working field research station, with its fluctuating temperatures, insect populations, excessively ‘interesting’ spiders (meaning large and frightening) and the ebb and flow of volunteers, there is no personal space in which to exercise much control. This is probably for the best, life is too short to endlessly dust skirting boards, and much can be learned simply in the act of co-existing with others. To relieve my tensions and worries (mostly parasite-based) I turned to the comfort of trail-clearance. Why is it so satisfying about this, you may ask? Well, it certainly was not at first; I emerged from my first day of macheteing with the most all-encompassing of full-body aches, and a fair few wonderful blisters too. The ache was alarming, in that I had thought myself relatively limber for someone a third of a century old (and suitably proud of being often the oldest person here), but then again, when else do you spend so long swinging a huge blade at tough vegetation? I had never cut through tropical forest before. My conservation biology lecturers would be aghast…”you spent the summer chopping at one of the last fragments of the Atlantic Forest?!” It is in a very good cause, I assure you, this Capuchin subspecies has not been studied before, and they may well help secure Laguna Blanca as a protected area far into the future. Anyway, once the obscure muscle groups had settled down and gotten used to the motion, and I had transversed the rocky ride through loving and hating it, back out the other side, I found my rhythm. More to the point, there was something Zen to the work. No desire to be the one forging ahead and tackling the trees head on, I found myself drawn to the clean-up job, and the peace it afforded a usually hectic mind. I loved the transformation of near-impassable debris to an elegant red pathway; rootless, shootless, scarily consistent in diameter, the soil soft as velvet carpet. Such a level of perfectionism is certainly not necessary, I hasten to add, and I think ideally my work would progress faster if it was less pernickety about it. People have pointed this out to me, in kindness, and thus that challenge is…well, it is probably the next level of Zen. Indeed, having walked the trails back and forth, I became aware that to render every path to my idealised standard, I would have to work on it for a year, and then some. The plants probably see my whole effort so far as some charmingly futile pruning, and were I to return in a few months the whole lot would be happily sprouting back. (Indeed, on my last day in the forest I noted that trail cleared a mere week ago had festooned itself in lush green ground flora.) Rosemary Gamsa Para La Tierra Volunteer 2012

Creativity overload, Scotland - Paraguay exchange and colouring in to save the cerrado!

Hi folks, Creativity is the theme of this weeks blog. Not only do we have an amazingly creative group but we also have a new community outreach project to tell you about. Last week we had 4 arrivals; Joe our new member of staff and 3 volunteers, Elizabeth, Maia and Leo. There are now 13 of us in the house and what an amazingly creative group! Zander has taught everyone how to crochet and we now have a house full of hats and gloves that these guys have made themselves. There is also a PLT monopoly board with species instead of properties and community chest cards with instructions such as “you get a paper published in Nature win 500,000” or “horses trampling your pitfall trap line miss a go”. And of course the currency is in Guaraní! With a group this creative it would have been foolish of us not to take full advantage of this skill base and so that is exactly what we have been doing. All of our moths and butterflies are now pinned and our colouring book for the local children is coming along in leaps and bounds thanks to Rosemary’s amazing artistic talent. Our signs around the reserve have received not only a paint job but have been decorated with pictures of local animals and the new museum displays are starting to look pretty amazing. The colouring book I mentioned is part of a community outreach project that we have recently got off the ground. The people in the nearby villages receive only a very basic level of education and there is little or no focus on creativity largely due to a lack of resources. However from experience we know that any opportunity for the children to be creative is met with a lot of enthusiasm. With this is mind we felt that producing a colouring book of the animals and plants in the reserve would be a great opportunity to teach the children about the cerrado and we hope it will help raise awareness about this important habitat from an early age. The colouring book is only a small part of this project however. We have teamed up a school in the local village with a school in Scotland and each child now has a pen friend in the other country. The children exchange postcards from their home country and the school in Scotland have also produced a colouring book so the children here have an opportunity to discover the species from another country and vice versa. This project has only just begun and we have more ideas in the pipeline that we hope will enable the children from both countries to learn about the cerrado and how important it is to protect this unique habitat. And finally this will be my last blog for a while as I am heading off on holiday next week for a 6 week stay in the oh so exotic United Kingdom (no the irony of taking a summer holiday in the UK does not escape me). While I can’t say I am looking forward to the weather I am REALLY looking forward to seeing my family and friends again after 16 months away (but maybe not as much as I am looking forward to eating mushrooms and hummus!). See you in a couple of months and don’t discover a new species for science without me! Hx

The museum opens, the volunteers turn over and the armadillo finally gets stuffed!

Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it gives me great pleasure to announce the grand opening of the one, the only, Para La Tierra Natural History Museum. Yes you guessed it folks we have opened the new museum and I have to say we are all rather proud of our efforts. We actually opened on 21st June and held a little ceremony for the volunteers staying here. Following a short speech, Karina cut a ribbon and we gave a tour of the exhibits. There is still a lot to do on our displays, large map and photo wall but it is shaping up nicely and I have already given 2 tours to tourists, one of whom gave a donation in dollars! The new museum opening isn’t just a landmark day for us here at PLT it is also a reflection of just how much hard work has been put into the species inventories by volunteers and interns over the last couple of years. Who would have thought that our collection would grow so quickly and we would need a new building after only 2 years? Well done and thank you to all our visitors, past and present for making it what it is today. If you would like a virtual tour of the museum you can find a short film on our Facebook page where there are also pictures. Or if you are not friends with us (yet) it can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3UoxvVhztk Last week, in between getting the museum organised we had a massive turn over of volunteers. Sadly we have now said goodbye to Nick, Noah and Dec; 3 wonderful interns who undertook 2 fantastic projects. But we are delighted to welcome in Jess (US), Zander (US), Rosemary (UK) and Rachel (UK). You’ll notice that we have 2 from the UK and 2 from the US which now means that we have an equal number of Brits and Americans. Needless to say this has resulted in some lively conversations over the pronunciation of oregano, Iraq, tomato and vitamin! The camaraderie has been great fun and so was Independence Day weekend which would probably have gone uncelebrated had we not had the US faction with us. Jess and Rosemary have joined the primate project and are having a great time hacking through the forest, Rachel has an interest in invertebrates and has been getting involved with not only our butterfly and moth collection but has also been discovering some of the beetles that Sabrina is working with. And Zander is trying his hand at all of the projects that are running at the moment and has also taught everyone how to crochet! We have a really creative group here at the moment which coincides perfectly with the upcoming museum jobs. I have also been developing my newly found interest in taxidermy and this week I stuffed an armadillo. Well. Stuffed isn’t the right word, more mounted. I was actually given the skin and shell of this specimen for Christmas and it has been in the freezer until now as we simply didn’t have space for it in the old museum. I have been itching to get my hands on it for the last 6 months and this week the day finally came. There wasn’t enough skin left on the underside to stuff it and sew it back up again and when I started to sew it I quickly realised (by breaking 2 needles) that armadillo skin is not a pleasant material to work with. So I changed tactic and made a frame (table). The skin then went around the table so that the shell covered the surface and the legs and feet were surrounding the table legs. And then, as it was originally invented for surgery, I used superglue to hold it all together. I squashed it between 2 boxes to ensure it held its shape while it dried and the end result is not too bad. This may not been the most conventional of methods but we now have an armadillo standing up looking like a, well, an armadillo! And that’s about it for this time, see you in a fortnight. Hx