On a hot and humid day after weeks of exhausting field work in northern Costa Rica, Mario Jimenez and Adam Curry have assembled the beginnings of an “audio map” to locate critically endangered macaws. For most of February, they drove, boated and hiked miles in tropical rain forests where few people live.
Their daily mission to attach palm-sized AudioMoths in the canopy of trees in Great Green Macaw habitat meant long days and
time away from the usual routine during the December-to-June breeding season. Mario, MRN’s field team leader, explains.
With the recording devices, MRN will capture the chatter and screeches of the Great Greens over the next few months. In July, Mario will return to gather the recorded sounds, then again at the end of the year. MRN will use the recordings to map where Great Green Macaws live throughout the year. With the new data, the team will be able to better monitor the birds and improve conservation practices to save them from extinction.
Climbing 20 meters (66 feet) up a tree and installing an AudioMoth wasn’t the hard part for Mario and Adam, an MRN volunteer from Wales. The hard part was getting to the tree.
Some might say many rural roads in Costa Rica barely qualify as roads … more like craggy paths bent on toppling vehicles. And when it rains, the roads become muddy pits that can swallow small cars. Adding to the challenges are no road signs and no people around to ask for directions.
“Climbing is not the most exhausting thing. It’s driving,” Mario said.
On one occasion, Mario and Adam left the field station in Sarapiqui around 6 in the morning and didn’t return until 14 hours later, having managed to install only a few AudioMoths.
“So that’s really disappointing,” Mario said. “We got lost and then we couldn’t find the right road and, then in Costa Rica if you don’t find the right road, then you have to come back (to where you started in that direction). It’s crazy.”
But Mario can look back on their feat with a sense of accomplishment. He and Adam put 63 AudioMoths on forested land, including
Barra del Colorado and, for the first time, Tortuguero National Park, where they had to travel by boat and on foot to get where they
wanted to install the devices.
In all, they covered some 5,000 square kilometers (almost 2,000 square miles) and drove 4,000 kilometers (about 2,485 miles or nearly one trip across the entire continental U.S.) “It was really intense,” Mario said.
Now back at work meeting the daily demands of the breeding season, Mario and volunteers are faithfully monitoring the nests the macaws use from year to year and locating new ones. They are climbing trees to check on the chicks, following their progress and counting their numbers for the 2023 records and conservation research.
Peggy Harris
Volunteer Writer