We spent most of January 8th traveling from Paraiso Quetzal to the El Zota Biological Field Station. El Zota is located in Caribbean lowland rainforest in northeastern Costa Rica. We drove through the Central Valley, crossing through San Jose, and then descended from the mountains. Our best sighting- a mother and baby sloth in a tree! We also stopped in a field of flowering bushes to see hummingbirds.
After a few hours, we passed from forest to fields. The area around El Zota is dominated by cattle pasture, with small houses scattered across the landscape. We spent a few more hours on our bus on gravel roads, before it finally became impassible and we switched to a safari-style truck owned by the field station for the last half hour.
El Zota is a really cool station-- there are a few dorms, a lab, and a dining hall around a pond, and surrounding forest with several hiking trails running through it. My favorite spot was the dock over the pond, where you could see tadpoles, fish, birds like Northern Jacanas and Purple Gallinules, and a caiman (pictured below- remember it, because it'll come up again later).
On our first full day at El Zota, we went on a hike through the secondary forest near the field station. The forest closest to the field station is only about 25 years old (the area was once cattle pasture), and is characteristically new-- very few tall trees (only a couple that had once been shade trees in the pastures), and lots of thick undergrowth. As we moved farther away from the field station, we entered an older area of forest that had been selectively logged rather than cleared completely. We saw lots of cool wildlife including peccaries, strawberry poison dart frogs, white-faced capuchin monkeys, and bullet ants!
We also had the chance to do some amazing hiking on our final full day. At the edge of El Zota's property, there's an area of primary rainforest ('original' forest rather than forest that has been logged and regrown). We definitely didn't want to miss out on the opportunity to see this unique ecosystem, so early in the morning, we set out on a ten-mile hike. Bonus hard mode-- it had been an unusually rainy dry season, so six miles of the path we were walking along were mud. We hiked the 10 miles in rain boots, through mud that could reach past knee-deep if you stepped in the wrong spot. It wasn't so bad for the first three miles, but the final three miles in afternoon heat were pretty brutal. Luckily, we had seemingly every mosquito in Costa Rica to encourage us to keep walking!
The forest was incredible! Well worth every bit of mud that it took to get there. We saw two spider monkeys early on, and heard howler monkeys throughout much of our walk. As the trail curved alongside a stream, we saw numerous tapir tracks in the mud. A few minutes later, we heard a large mammal crashing through the thick undergrowth ahead of the group. Despite our best attempts we were unable to get a good visual on it, although we could see the plants around it moving. There was some debate about whether it was the tapir or a peccary that we had heard, but either way, it was amazing. In addition to the tapir tracks, we also saw peccary, raccoon, and ocelot tracks. I was also in awe of the landscape itself. For the first few hours the forest was still distinctly second growth. But as we kept walking, the understory became much thinner and the landscape started to be dominated by huge, old trees with enormous canopies. I was constantly amazed by the sheer size of the trees. It was one of my favorite hikes of the trip!
Also, we were chased by some cows.
Most of our time at El Zota was dedicated to our individual research projects. I was studying ants, baiting trees with a mixture of tuna and honey to try to determine whether tree size or the number of epiphytes in the tree impacted the number of ants in it. Those of you who followed my blog from Panama in 2016 might remember that I've worked with (and been bitten by lots of) ants before, so they were a fun study subject to return to. For the most part, the project ran smoothly, and I was able to obtain data from more than 30 trees around El Zota. I did, however, make one poor decision. I needed to bait and check some trees at night, to get a sampling of nocturnal ant species, which meant having to hike in the dark. I would pick out the trees, make measurements and observations, and then tag them with flagging tape during the day, and then return at night to bait them and then check for ants 45 minutes later. The first day that I did this, I decided to pick several trees around the pond so that I could just follow the edge of the water and find them easily at night. Well, do you remember the caiman that I mentioned earlier in this post? I didn't! Not until I was halfway around the pond in the dark, covered in a sticky tuna fish and honey mixture, and suddenly remembered the caiman's existence when I still had three trees to go. I spent the rest of that night nervously moving my flashlight from the trees to the water and hoping that caimans don't like tuna very much. I picked better trees the next day.
Ants appreciating the tuna.
Front of the girls' dorm. There was a bat who lived in our shower, who we rapidly adopted as our mascot. We named her Carla and adored her, and her presence made the lack of hot water much easier to manage.
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