Mangrove drone study

So the bright idea was to fly a drone over some mangroves and see if by using fancy sensing cameras anything useful could be learned.  Can you tell red mangrove from white mangrove from the air?  What about black mangrove? 

​Thus at far too early an hour for a bat guy we headed out to the beach at Hacienda  Baru, a property that abuts the Firestone Center and runs all the way to the ocean.  The down side was that while the drone team pulled out a chair and a table and set up a wonderful little beach cabina near the car, we "truthers" had to walk 2km down the beach to where the mangroves were.

One of the "truthers" visible walking down the Hacienda Baru beach. No swimming due to undertow so no tourists

And what exactly is a "truther"?  Well someone has to go out into the field and identify things and plot their location so that what is guessed at by the remote sensing stuff can be verified as accurate or not.  Our job was to plot and identify all the mangroves by the estuary of the Rio Baru where it hits the Pacific Ocean.  Easy enough, right?

​We arrived at the estuary and found...a handful of mangroves.  So the students were properly schooled in species ID by the esteemed Professor Donald McFarlane, although there were hardly enough trees to really get any kind of sample for the study.  Remarkably though, there were two white-faced capuchin monkey in these mangrove trees when we got there.

Standing next to a red mangrove tree, left to right are: Don McFarlane, Leta Ames, Sara Freimuth, Sabrina Wu and Gabriela Ochoa

After this rare photo of Don actually teaching, we headed into the bush in search of the Lost City of the Mangroves, which was not particularly easy.  Not super hard either, but there were challenges.  The first of which was a freshwater canal that runs through there just on the other side of the mangroves in the photo.  So time to get your boots wet.  Some folks had more fun than others crossing it...

Leta Ames crossing the canal while searching for the elusive mangrove trees

Unfortunately we were unable to find any mangroves on the other side nor realistically able to go much further due to a ridiculous amount of brush.  So in an honorable display of courage, Don supervised everyone re-crossing the canal by standing around acting as crocodile bait to keep the students safe.

Don McFarlane supervising, a not uncommon sight

We still spent a bunch more time dodging (or in a couple of cases failing to dodge) a world of spiny palms in the swamp looking for any more mangroves, but found none.  Finally headed out of the there and back to the beach and the long walk back to the vehicles.

​But the droners had left (this was actually planned) and we had more butts than seats in the car.  Warren Roberts and I walked to the office area of the Hacienda Baru while the rest drove back to the FCRE.  And since there is a ton of wildlife on the Hacienda Baru property, we saw a few nice animals along the walk.  The three-toed sloth was sleeping in a horrible position for a photo so I am not putting that up, but this mangrove black hawk was a very cool bird. 

Mangrove black hawk on the Hacienda Baru property 50 meters from the ocean

And always nice to see iguanas

Iguana on the dirt road

All this work and wildlife and fun and we were still back to the FCRE in time for lunch.  That left a lot of day to still get things done, but that'll be my next post.