So far I've had a few scary experiences while down in Costa Rica.
The first night in the jungle alone was pretty intense. The lightning storm a few nights ago. Finding a bullet ant crawling up my arm. Realizing the giant boa constrictor was a lot stronger than I thought.
I have a new winner though.
Mitch and I were in the swamp looking for snakes for his project. He has helped me quite a bit on my project, so it was time I pitched in and helped him comb the swamp looking for more of his study species.
Mitch was also there when I caught the caiman last time. He kept talking about how it was 'his turn now' and he couldn't wait to find and catch one of his own.
Fine, we should all get a turn.
He ended up finding one, a tiny, cute little guy. Looked like it had hatched pretty recently...
I'm not a caiman expert. But I immediately recognized the sound that little thing started making when he picked it up. I've heard it before on National Geographic specials. It's kind of frog/bark sound. It kinda sounds like a noise one of the three stooges would make.
You get the idea.
It's the "Mom, Dad, come help me quick, someone is messing with me!" sound.
Alarm bells started going off in my head.
That was our que to get the hell out of there real quick.
Mitch: Hold on dude, I want a picture of me holding this thing.
Caiman: Quack, quack, quack (translation: help me! help me! help me!)
George: Are you f*cking kidding me? Put that thing down now we have got to get out of here!
At this point I was ready to crap in my pants and run out of the swamp screaming.
But Mitch held on and took a few selfies while I desperately swung around in circles scanning the waste deep water.
This was straight out of a nightmare.
Crocodylians show pretty strong parental care and will defend their youngins fiercely.
We were about to be eaten by one angry mamma!
And it got worse.
We started to hear a few more quack/ribbit/barks coming from various directions.
From all around us!
At that point, Mitch got the fear of God in him and dropped the caiman and we started to split.
All the frogs had stopped by now. The only sounds was the two or three caimans that were chirping from all around us. Clearly they were calling in reinforcements...
We finally got to dry land. and jumped on the closest fallen tree.
Whew... that was close. Hmm, the jungle is awfully thick over here.
And then my heart stopped.
You've got to be kidding me.
It got worse.
We were on the wrong side of the damn swamp!
We had to walk 50m back through waste deep/caiman infested waters!
At this point all the little baby ones had stopped barking. What does that mean though?
They're no longer alarmed?
Or worse.
Mom and Dad had showed up to comfort them?
I'm writing this now bite-free, so obviously we made it out of there unscathed.
How can I explain my pure bone-chilling fear as we made our way through that swamp? We had hurried out of it so quick that the water was really cloudy too and you couldn't see what was below you. If something would have touched my leg I'm pretty confident my heart would have stopped.
Needless to say, my caiman handling days are over.
The daytime was entirely uneventful compared to that.
I spent 6 hours hunting for lizards during the morning and early afternoon.
Know how many I caught?
TWO!
Then I teamed up with a fellow REU...
And caught 20 in a few hours!
I think I'll be recruiting some teamwork from now on.
We even managed to catch a little baby iguana. They're cute before they get big and try to slap you with their dinosaur tails.
Aww, hey big guy!
Tomorrow I have a lot of lizards to play with, which is a nice change form the last few days when catching them was pretty sluggish.
We had a lot of food left over from our 4th of July BBQ, so we invited everyone over to eat our food and do some karaoke.
And if you were wondering. Yes, that is a ladle. I told you, you always have to improvise in the jungle. 'Oh, what's that? No barbeque tools... pocket knife and metal ladle will do!'
I biked some leftover food out to the bat-girls and met a new friend.
Trachops cirrhosus (Frog-eating bat) If you don't think that's precious, I don't think we can be friends.
Tomorrow will be a lot of lizard cookin', it will feel good to get back to work though. We're half way through our experience.
If the second 4 weeks are half as good as the first, I'll be in pretty good shape.
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