Seasonal changes

The forest canopy over the reserve provides requirements for niches of numerous plant and animal species. We’re frequently straining to spot a small bird calling high in the foliage or admiring a tree festooned in a hanging garden of epiphytes. Walking along the trails, particularly in previously disturbed forest, we are sometimes stopped suddenly as something big crashes through the leaves overhead – a monkey, a guan? Falling down through the layers of forest it is a cecropia leaf 60cm across, palmate like a hand, with a long heavy stem that makes the leaf plummet like a stick. The plants and animals become familiar to us.

Cecropia tree

Looking up

Heliconia leaves

Distinctive melastome venation

Aroid or triffid?

Over the canopy from the entrance trail

In June we recorded 132 mm of rain, less than one fifth of the quantity that fell in May. As the season changes many canopy trees and vines, epiphytes, shrubs and herbs are flowering more prolifically than they did the month before. This reproductive effort is a boon to insects and birds whose niche includes collecting payments of nectar from flowers in return for pollination services. This month the hummingbirds have found more nectar all over the forest so the feeders at the front deck of the cabin are relatively less attractive to them. The regular rush of this bar’s happy hour that Jo records at the end of the each day has been quiet, a little bit lonely.

Nambillo River rapids bonier than last month

Heliconia bracts

Rūb in flower with pollinating wasp

Delicate gesnarian flower

Evening light

One morning Jo found clear cat prints along the beginning of the Quetzales trail. Our guest Danielle later found more of the same prints treading up and down new steps at the top of the trail in the freshly disturbed soil. After some research they concluded that the prints belonged to either an ocelot or a jaguarondi – quite big cats! Exciting. On our next visit to town we bought a chicken leg for bait and a stack of D-sized batteries to power up the reserve’s boxy camera trap with its bright flash and motion sensor. Every evening for about two weeks I put out the camera and the increasingly foul-smelling chicken leg. The results: no cat. Only gangs of tank-like scarab beetles chomped great holes in the chicken leg and they were joined at the feast by primitive carrion beetles, large butterflies and of course, flies. Scarabs have become favourites among the insects at the reserve with their animated antennae, shiny VW exteriors, trundling progress when walking and surprising flight. Amongst the most entertaining characters were a tiny dung beetle in metallic-green rolling a ball of precious poo along a trough of corrugated iron and a massive 41 mm beetle who had hidden on the forest floor. As for the cat, it wasn’t so surprising that it didn’t show for the photo shoot given that they range over a large territory. Jo found more of the same prints several weeks later on the other side of the reserve.

Cat print

Scarabs on drumstick

Giant scarab beetle

July is holiday season both in Ecuador and in the USA, so Mindo and Reserva Las Tangaras will become busier with keen bird watchers. Dr Dusti Becker will bring a team of birding volunteers for two weeks from the middle of the month. We’re looking forward to learning masses of ornithological facts and bird-researching skills from these avian enthusiasts as well as chatting about their experiences of home and travel. It promises to be a great month at Las Tangaras.