Category: Mammals

Black palm (Astrocaryum standleyanum) and the Central American agouti (Dasyprocta punctata)

6/2/2018

The black palm is one nasty tree should you wish to try and climb one. But up there at the top are some very important fruits and many a person and animal have thought about how to get up there. And just for the record, there are a couple of animals that can climb this tree and a couple that leap to the top from nearby trees so it can be done.

So, while some try to reach the fruit at the top, the Central American agouti sorta just hangs out around these trees and waits for the fruit to fall. And by all accounts this is their favorite food and I often see them under these palms.

The kinda interesting part of all this is that the agouti is a scatter hoarder. So like a squirrel might bury an acorn the agouti bury the palm fruits. And then, they dig them up and move them and bury them again. And again. And then the neighboring agouti might come along and dig them up, steal them and re-bury them somewhere else. This can honestly go on a couple dozen times before they are eaten. But with the fruit only ripening for about 4 months of the year, they need those buried seeds to get them through. So the tree feeds the agouti and the agouti disperses the seeds for the tree. This is known as mutualism.

And finally, my blog software is not working well at all right now so sadly I am going to have to put the photo of the agouti as a separate posting.

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Variegated squirrel (Sciurus variegatoides) at the FCRE

6/2/2018

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Some years we see a lot of variegated squirrels and some years very few. This year they are quite common. They get their name because they can vary widely in coloration both between distinct populations and also within a population.

Variegated squirrel (Sciurus variegatoides) seen just above the Program House at the FCRE

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Bat Caves in Costa Rica

6/2/2018

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Costa Rica doesn't have an enormous amount of limestone topography, the usual place for caves, but it has some and there are some pretty cool caves here. However, the cave-loving bats have to use whatever they can find in areas without many caves, and we were able to visit a sea cave with one of the largest cave bat populations in the country. This cave is pretty far from where one would look for caves and an unusual bat cave.

But before the main cave, let me introduce what might be Costa Rica's newest known cave, Cueva Scouser. Warren Roberts found this rather short cave near the main bat cave and we mapped it. Not too much going on inside but it had about 40 bats, with 30 of them being Carollia perspicillata and the others one of the Glossophaga species. Note that these IDs are based on me being able to observe the bats from quite close but not handling and keying them out. Both of these genera of bats have a couple very similar species.

Looking out the cave entrance with Don McFarlane sketching it. Note the bats on the ceiling

Seba's short-tailed bat (Carollia perspicillata) in Cueva Scouser

The big bat cave isn't much of a cave. It is a sea cave in a highwall of rock along the Pacific Ocean and apparently doesn't get enough pounding from the sea to evict the bats. Total length is only about 70 meters of linear passage.

Warren Roberts at the entrance to the bat cave

There is a spit of sand that comes right to the entrance, so no wading or swimming to get to the cave, but...

Getting wet is the only option to enter the cave

After passing the constriction where Don McFarlane was in the last photo, the cave is all walking passage. Still kinda wet though, and the smell quickly gets quite awful. The bats are high up in a fissure at the back end and, well, it is a fairly unpleasant place to be. The floor is 18 inches of...

Knee-deep black salt water and bat poop sludge. Oh the thrill of being under a tropical bat colony

Sorry about the quality of the last photo. It looks great on my computer but lousy as an upload to the blog. And let us not forgets the other animals that love a good bat cave. There are hundreds of giant cockroaches on the floor. I ended up with them up my pants and even in my pockets finding them later. Gotta love those big cockroaches to work in tropical bat caves.

So, back to the bats. There were quite a lot of them in the cave, all up high in the top of a thin fissure. Hard to get a photo showing the colony for a number of reasons, such as their location, the hot and humid cave environment fogging the camera lens, and well let's just say that is was raining bat pee and poo down on me and the camera which is an understatement. But I managed to get a good shot of them.

Here is another shot, taken later in the evening after some had already left the cave for the night, but a wider angle of the roost.

Coming out of the cave I took a photo of my boot. Well, you can't see my boot at it is under some really horrible stinky sludge. I love working with bats but sometimes it can be less than optimal.

Looking down at my boot, which is under some really, amazingly, awful bat poop goop

However all this seems, I do have to say that when coming out of the cave it is quite an attractive site. The sky and the rock make a pretty neat composition.

Warren Roberts at the entrance to a Costa Rican bat cave

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White-faced capuchin (Cebus capucinus) monkey

5/29/2018

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We passed by a small tribe of white-faced capuchins while coming down the access road. These are quite attractive animals and fairly common at the FCRE.

White-faced capuchin along the access road at the FCRE

White-faced capuchin at the Firestone Center for Restoration Ecology

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Two-toed sloth release at the FCRE

5/28/2018

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Today was a very good day. We were able to release a rehabbed sloth on the FCRE property where it should find plenty of great habitat. Max the Sloth came to us from Alturas Wildlife Sanctuary, which does a fantastic job of rehabbing injured animals and then releasing them back into the forest.

https://alturaswildlifesanctuary.org/

Max was brought to Alturas in pretty bad shape. His right hind foot was heavily damaged and infected, and after a long time under veterinary care he ended up with an amputated right foot and had put back on a kilo of weight. He showed that he could easily get around and climb even missing the foot and was ready to be released.

Loyal Clarke brought Max over around lunch time, and he (the sloth not Loyal) proceeded to sleep in his cage while we picked the exact release point and had a wonderful lunch prepared by Marianela. We decided that a spot along the Phyllobates Trail would be perfect. Max was loaded into the UTV and Greddy drove Loyal and the sloth up to the trailhead.

Max getting a ride from Greddy. The rest of us had to walk

Sloths are notoriously slow. In Spanish they are called "oso perezoso" which means lazy bear. Even the word sloth means laziness. But that doesn't mean a sloth is a weakling! These are powerful animals and need to be shown a lot of respect when handling them. In this case we let the professional, Loyal, do all the handling. Which in the end isn't all that much, as one of the premises for the rehabbing is to keep the animal wild and not treat it like a pet so it doesn't get used to being around people.

Up at the chosen tree Loyal took Max out of his cage and we all got a great close up look at a truly gorgeous animal. But it was quick, as Max was immediately placed up against the tree and he grabbed it right away. Pretty clear he was fired up to be getting back into the forest.

Loyal keeps close tabs on Max right at the release.

You never know just what an animal is going to do at a release. In this case, max was quite intent on returning to the canopy where sloths tend to be. In his slow, methodical sloth fashion he climbed right up the tree and into the canopy.

Max climbing after a successful rehab and release

It really wasn't all that long before he was up high and pretty hard to see anymore. We eventually headed out and back down the hill and on the next thing. But we'll be keeping an eye out in that area for the next few days to see if we can spot Max.

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FCRE Costa Rica day 1

5/28/2018

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I just got here and took a few photos. No time to ID things but putting up some pics anyway.

There was a family of kinkajou in a tree just outside the ecology center. But with manual focus at 10 meters essentially taking photos in total darkness I just got this one as best:

Kinkajou in the trees outside the FCRE dorms

This caterpillar is just awesome

Caterpillar from the FCRE. Pretty sure this one is the io moth (Automeris io) but the brown and white side stripe is so weak I am not 100% sure.

Much more to come

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Tent-making bat (Uroderma bilobatum) from Firestone Center for Restoration Ecology in Baru, Costa Rica

5/27/2018

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Welcome to another COSTA RICA week on tropicalbats.com. For the next week or more I will be posting photos from Costa Rica. Most will be from the Firestone Center for Restoration Ecology (FCRE from here on out) but will note if any are from elsewhere.

To get things started... Shortly after arriving this year at the FCRE I had a short walk around the ecology center to look at what's new and all that kinda stuff one does after being away for a year. And while looking at this one small palm tree outside one of the dorm rooms I saw two faces staring back at me. A quick photograph allowed me to identify them as tent-making bats (Uroderma bilobatum). These bats chew the ribs of plant leaves to sorta droop them over into a tent. There are hundreds of these tents on the property at any given time, and on several different species of plants, but here they just cut a little parallel line beside the main rib and it was hard to even notice that the leave had been modified.

Visible, but hard to notice, is a white line that starts near the nape of the neck and goes down the back. Beautiful bats.

A pair of tent-making bats (Uroderma bilobatum) in a tent made out of a palm leaf at the FCRE

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Eastern Chipmunk (Tamias striatus) at Dead Run Stream Valley Park in McClean, Virginia

5/21/2018

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Eastern chipmunks are cute little buggers often seen speeding across trails with their tail held straight up. And oddly, for an animal that eats like this with its front feet, it only has four toes on the front feet but five on the rear feet.

Eastern Chipmunk (Tamias striatus) on a wet day in McClean, VA

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White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) from Foxstone Park, Vienna, Virginia

5/3/2018

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Super hot today for a change and was wondering how the wildlife was reacting since it was below freezing at night very recently. Well a quick jaunt in Foxstone Park found a couple deer that looked very hot in their fur coats. One was visibly panting (it was over 90 degrees outside). These let me get pretty close as while the deer around here are wild deer, they are far less wild-acting than in most places.

Here is a buck that hasn't started to really grow out its antlers yet as still very early in the year.