Dec 30 2011 La Campana

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Carol's Nicaraguan helpers Christian Bonilla, Marlon Jelasquez, Jose Martinez we here to help again today. We left the house at 1pm to drive back to Don Daniel's ranch (Las Pampas). He had two of his kids on horseback and lead our truck to about a mile from our destination. The girl was 4 years old and obviously had been on horseback for a while. Don Daniel is a former Californian who escaped what he said was Disneyland and bought this ranch about 10 years ago. We followed them up the dirt road a ways, onto his land, driving a few miles through a couple of fields. We parked at a muddy gate under a large tree with parrots and then hiked our equipment with Don Daniel about a mile into the beautiful forest. We set up 5 nets along the creek. This was one of the "less fragmented" pieces of native forest.
We caught 37 bats of 10 species... 4 new to me from yesterday. The new ones were:
Rhogeessa tumuda, Central American yellow bat
Artibeus watsonii, Thomas' fruit-eating bat
Eptesicus furinalus, Argentine brown bat
Desmodus rotundus, Common vampire.

We caught 4 vampires 2 each of brown coated and very pretty orange coated. I even took one out of the net on my own! Definitely a bat to take seriously. The front teeth are very sharp chisel-shape. No one was bitten.
Christian, Marlon, and Jose are great at finding other interesting animals. We also saw:
Central American wooly opossum
Kinkajou
Vine snake
Scorpion
2 mantled howler monkeys
Ferruginous pygmy owl

Jose and Marlon collected acoustic (echolocation call) data from the species we caught, plus free flying bats. They are students working on the project with Carol. Jose also speaks English well enough to discuss project topics. I'm getting lots of practice speaking Spanish as the American with more than a few words. Carol is learning as she goes down here and doing pretty well at communicating.
We packed up the nets about 12:30 and hiked back out to the truck. Home at 2am.
Pictures: Following Don Daniel; Very big water spider (2" dia); on of the net sites.