Camera Trap Work

We had a rafting ride down the river this morning, which I will post about soon, but the afternoon found us hitting the trails again to check on our camera traps.  Here is a photo of us, looking for one of the traps.  

 Trekking around in the pouring rain trying to get our technology to work can be a bit of a challenge.  So far we have had bad memory cards, low batteries and mysterious malfunctions.  But we are catching some images too.  This was a Paca, which is a small ground dwelling rodent.  We haven't seen any in person, but here it is on our trap.

The peccary on the other hand, seems to be everywhere!  They hang out in herds and don't seem to be bothered by us at all.  We have started to recognize the smell on the trail.  It is a strange combination that most resembles body odor and onions.  

 There were two more puma sightings!  Both on different cameras.

We don't know if we are finding the same cat multiple times, or different cats.  We want to do some more research into the range and maybe find a naturalist to see if we can find out any more about what we are seeing.  We have started to think about how we will turn our camera trap work into a cohesive project.  Perhaps an analysis of sampling of more and less abundant populations based on their place in the food chain.  We are still working on ideas, but we had a mad giggle fest at dinner coming up with names for our project involving the letter "P".  Something about Puma and Peccary Populations Perhaps.  

We have also captured plenty of people on our traps.  This is a birdwatcher who we have seen, he spotted the camera and stopped to wave.  This brought up the idea of studying the interplay of people and animals.