A sigh of...disbelief

I am very excited to report that we deployed cameras in the last two trees yesterday! This means that we hit our goal of thirty trees for a grand total of 90 camera deployments. At the moment all the cameras are out in the last 12 trees, which I will climb over the next week or so before I head back to the US on April 9. To be honest I’m a bit overwhelmed right now with disbelief and a rare sense of accomplishment - the victories in grad school tend to be small and infrequent, so this feels completely foreign right now. For the purposes of this blog, actually accomplishing what I set out to do makes it hard to think of the stories of frustration, self-deprecation, and backwards underwearing upon which I normally rely. In short, I’m so stunned right now that I don’t even know what to talk about. I think it’s still a bit too soon to do any sort of grand reflection on my time here (I do still have 36 cameras to collect, after all) so for now I will just share some of the highlights of the photos so far.

This is the most casual display of indecent exposure that we have documented thus far. I know that I could probably get away with revealing what is under this box under the veil of scientific documentation, but just take my word that it is pointedly offensive. We are currently working on photoshopping a Bud Light into his hand, if you possess such skills please let me know. 

He also thought that he might get a better understanding of what the camera was if he looked at it upside down.

These are some of the best porcupine images we’ve gotten so far. These things are weird-looking. End of story.

Most of the woolly opossum photos we’ve gotten so far have been pretty far away and/or a little out of focus, but these ones really give you a sense of what they look like up close. Also, look how crazy-long their tails are!

Howler monkeys are one arboreal animals that we actually see (or hear!) from the ground far more frequently than they show up on the cameras. This is probably the best series of photos we’ve gotten so far.

I’ll leave it at that for now. As I said, I have plenty more to do here and will hopefully get a lot more photos to share over the next several days. I’ll keep you all posted on what I find!