Thank you for your patience, I know that it has been a while since the last update.
We were packed and ready for our first trip to the new study site, but unsure about whether we were prepared for the 6 hour hike it would take to get to the campsite...Yes that's twice as long as the walk from La Esperanza to El Torro.
The organisation that was helping us at this site (SERNANP - Servicio Nacional de Areas Naturales Protegidas) took us, all our clothing and food for the next ten days. It was a bumpy ride and when the jeep could go no further, we had to get out and walk the rest of the way.
(From left to right: Esme, Nicola, Thiago and Leyda)
The scenery around Cordillera Colan was truly stunning and the trails were just as muddy as El Torro (knee deep)...6 hours later and we finally arrived at the campsite, where we would be sleeping in quite different accommodation than we were used to.
(the 4 of us were sharing the silver tent)
The next day we walked along a few of the trails and started to think about where we could set up our census points. We ended up with 4 trails: 3 were in the buffer zone (areas that have been deforested and now used for pastoral farming) and 1 in the national park (protected area).
(buffer zone)
It was a little difficult finding an accessible area to the national park, as there is a river in between the two areas, but we managed to find a shallow bit to cross.
When our census points were marked, we thought that we would make a start on collecting our vegetation data, however our guide (Leyda) found it difficult to identify the trees (to Family and Genus) without a field guide. So this was put on hold until the next trip.
(Nicola marking a census point)
With regard to monkey data collection... I only heard a group of Yellow-tailed woolly monkeys (Oreonax flavicauda) once and never saw them, however Nicola had a few night monkey (Aotus miconax) and kinkajou sightings.
By the 9th day we were quite low on food supplies and all very tired and achey, but despite this we managed to hike back in 5 1/2 hours. It was such a relief to see the Jeep waiting for us at the end.
Thanks for reading :)
No comments:
Post a Comment