22 July

Early this morning 4 of the volunteers left to go to Dominical for a weekend, so camp is a lot quieter this weekend. From 8 until 1 Valerie was on Welcome Centre duty for the first time. This is a small building that all the tourists visiting the reserve pass. Here they can get information on anything from the history of the reserve to the trails to the research that we are doing. There is a rotation scheme so everyone will be there every now and then. Tomorrow it is Louise who will be at the Welcome centre.
In the evening we had another survey. Normally Friday nights are off, but yesterday everyone felt too tired so we moved it up a day. Via Sendero Gavilan we walked up to the top of Sendero El Jilguero. The forest was filled with the calls of tink frogs, but we didn’t see any. Tink frogs tend to be higher up in the trees and thus out of reach for us. Probably the best way to survey these species is using canopy walks, but of course it is hard to set these up. As soon as the drizzle stopped we suddenly had a lot of annoying moths flying into our faces. We ended up taking off our headtorches and just carrying them. Finding frogs already is hard, let alone with moths bombing into your face. We first didn’t see too much, but halfway through the crassidigitus showed up again. We ended up catching 4 frogs, not too bad. Walking down El Jilguero is a lot easier for your muscles than going up. However, because of the high amounts of rain we have had in the past few days it was very slippery and we were all very happy with our walking sticks again.