While we are currently hosting a group of 13 students of the S.I.T. program in our reserve we also did three days of monitoring in various parts of Santa Lucía.
On Monday we could finally do the monitoring of our orchid garden which was not possible two weeks earlier because of the weather conditions. February / March tend to be the months with most orchid species in flower. During this month' monitoring we foudn 23 species which is not an all-time high, but considering that the remodelling of the orchid garden has been finished only recently, it's still a high number. Stelis with six species and Maxillaria and Pleurothallis with four species each were the most common genera. Some of the Stelis sp. remain un-identified to species level.
After finishing with the orchid garden we did bird, fungus and flower monitoring on various points along the self-guided trail. Here too the orchids dominated with plenty of flowering species. In terms of birds we keep observing the typical migratory birds (Summer Tanager, Blackburnian Warbler, etc.) in additional to the "regulars".
Finally we also emptied a few of the seed traps in the lower part of one of our pastures. This project is financed by María Clara Castellanos (University of Sussex). Several seed traps have been located in pastures around the lodge and emptied every 2 - 3 months. The questions around which this project is circling is how seed dispersal works in a Cloud Forest - who are the dispersers, how far are seeds being carried, ... etc. Unfortunately we currently have a large backlog in the analysis, i.e., we have too many samples and are not able to keep up with analysing them. The analysis is typically done by students of the University of Sussex, but we are currently looking into the possibility of doing that year-round and with local para-ecologists in order to close the gap a little.
Tuesday saw monitoring all the way up the main trail to the upper end of Santa Lucía at around 2.530 masl. The camera traps that were recently set up at new locations along the way have not yet shown any mammals, but this is normal considering the season. The rainy season and especially January to March have less mammal observations within the reserve on all camera trapping locations. Nine-banded Armadillos (Dasypus novemcinctus) are somewhat of an exception here. We also took the chance to do bird, fungus and plant monitoring as well checking the data loggers which collect climate data, such as humidity and temperature at different elevations.
Generally we found less fungi / mushrooms than in January, but this has to be looked at through a thourough analysis of the data. Since the project does not have a proper financing the sampling rate is rather low.
With regards to birds there were no big surprises. We are always hoping to find rare high elevation birds, but at least this time around the usual suspects (Plate-billed Mountain-Toucan, Buff-tailed Coronet, Chestnut-crowned Antpitta, etc.) dominated.
The upper part of the reserve is considered upper montane rain forest and we do see quite a difference in terms of vegetation. So, this time around we found lots of orchid species that are not present in the lower parts of the reserve. Especially Stelis sp. are present with a striking species richness.
On Wednesday morning we finished monitoring with few birding sessions.
Next month - although the schedule is a little tight - we are planning to do three days of amphibian morning on top of all the other activities.
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