Video Nasty

WARNING: THIS BLOG POST CONTAINS A VIDEO THAT IS AMAZING, FASCINATING AND DISTRESSING IN EQUAL MEASURE WATCH IT AT YOUR OWN RISK.

In all seriousness the snake video half way down the post is quite distressing to watch, you have been warned!

The night before the trip we went to a nice Mexican restaurant but it was incredibly hot, and full of Americans watching the super bowl. Unfortunately the food and heat made Fiona feel a little unwell, as we walked home she passed out and I had to carry her back to the hostel 3 blocks - luckily she is very light (she made me say that)! We both decided that getting up at 4;30am and doing a 22 km hike in the blazing sun may have been against doctors orders so I had to head off on my own.

The day started with the taxi picking me up at 4:30am

Much of the road was a riverbed making the 4x4 necessary

The river bed, sorry I mean road

We stopped a couple of times for a bit of birding on the way

Dog at the first ranger station

Ralph fresh at the start of the trail

The first bit of the trail (the first 40 mins) is through primary forest - the cicadas were deafening. The two guys in the photo worked for the park authority and were carrying out their daily tracks and prints census  (every morning they look for mammal prints such as tapir and cougar), they told us they had found giraffe and manatee prints on that day.

The primary forest was quite lush

fancy fly

Me and Roger, the guide, had just crossed the second river (not as dramatic as it sounds in the dry season - I didn't even have to take off my shoes!) when we heard a very strange noise like a baby mammal bleating for its mother. We searched around a bit and eventually Roger found a big den like hole just off the trail. Inside was the horrifying scene of a frog being swallowed alive incredibly slowly.

A striped racer eating a smoky jungle frog

Here is the video, the sounds of the frog make it pretty distressing to watch.

click here or cut and paste the link to watch it

http://s1140.photobucket.com/albums/n576/ralphandfi/video%20NASTY/?action=view&current=P1170467.mp4

Brilliant forest frog

This scratch pad had been put in place to get an idea of the big cat population - the strip is impregnated with scent to encourage cats to rub on it

This is the famous blue morpho moth, it looks much more impressive when it's wings are actually open 

This peccary and it's mates were hanging around La Sirena ranger station a little while after we arrived.  It took us quite a few hours to get there as we stopped loads to look at birds - I even got to see the red capped manakin do it's Michael Jackson moonwalk! 

This impressive chap is a great currasow

and this is his lovely wife

This was the mother of all geckos, it was easily 4 or 5 times the size of any we had previously seen

Snake cruising around at 4:30am. You are not allowed to do night walks at Sirena, but for some reason this is categorised as from sundown (6pm) to midnight, early morning walks 1am onwards are ok - go figure....

Although I really wanted to see stuff I was afraid of seeing something really good without Fiona and that she would have missed out, this is exactly what happened, after an uneventful first hour, save the snake above, we went down to the beach to look for Tapir. Me and Roger were talking about something when we suddenly noticed a large teenage tapir crossing the river bed in front of us, the light was terrible so it made taking pictures really difficult.

Once we had seen it pass us and go into the forest behind us we waited a couple of minutes and then returned to the jungle to look for the tapir, after a couple of minutes we noticed something ahead, it was the tapir! We followed it along the trail for about ten minutes, watching it stop to eat once. During which time I was frantically messing with my camera trying to delete pictures as when I tried to take the first shot the terrifying words "MEMORY CARD FULL" appeared on the screen, which was a bit of a nightmare, I didn't want to spend my whole tapir experience deleting photos of our trip to olympic national park. The light was terrible and I had to keep a respectful distance so as not to scare the animal, but I did get this short bit of video which  does give you a sense of what it is like to follow a tapir. Luckily other amazing wildlife experiences were to follow and luckily Fiona would be able to share these.

click here for video

http://s1140.photobucket.com/albums/n576/ralphandfi/video%20NASTY/?action=view&current=P1170532.mp4

Red brocket deer,  no idea who brocket was