After a while trying to solve Deep Thought (my computer) problems, I sent it to maintenance and now we are back to carry on sharing our experiences on jaguars and ocelots conservation.

Marina and I went to Seis R to check out the camera traps and fix the hair traps. We left Little Miss Sunshine about two kilometers from the forest fragment, where the road ends and walked on the open pasture under a typical hot tropical day. We just arrived on the fence at the edge of the fragment and found relatively recent puma and ocelots’ tracks in the sand.

A good signal! Hope to record each one of them with nice photos! To recognize tracks and footprints is a very important issue in fieldwork. It is relatively easy in some terrains as wet sand or mud, but in most cases only a trained eye is able to find what is under the surface in other terrains. Here I have to talk about our Jedi field assistants - Cicinho and Wilson - they are experts in finding and following what we call “carreiros” (literally “animal path”) inside the forest. Most mammal species - as armadillos, tapirs, peccaries, etc. - use always the same paths in the forest. And… where these preys are we do expect to find predators! These paths are the best places to fix cameras. For those who did not have the opportunity to meet or to be in the forest with someone who uses to track animals but have interest I do recommend the Tom Brown`s book “The Science and the Art of Tracking“, which with the aid of a footprint handbook guide of the local fauna can be really useful.

One can ask:

- Why do not put cameras in the fence?

Yeah! We find indeed lots and lots of tracks on roads and in open pastures around the edge of forest fragments. However these pastures have also… cattle, many times hundreds, and they seem to really enjoy being photographed, because once they find one camera they finish almost the entire roll. Despite nice pumas’ photos we got in an old road across Santa Mônica, the rest are photos from cattle.

A puma relaxing in front of our camera.

Back on Seis R, we started our journey inside and around the fragment to check out the cameras. One of them was turned as if was moved by something or somebody.

Looking closer we found out what had happened. Grasshoppers and/or ants gnawed the elastic band that fixed it. They come because of the salt from our sweat that impregnate on the band. Cicinho swears that he once just left his backpack on the ground to lunch and the “horse-grasshoppers” gnawed it opening a great hole. Now I almost believe…

Who eated the band?

We did walk all day long and each 500 meters Marina fixed a hair trap with catnip. Let’s see if it works!

Marina fixing a hair trap

The moon was rising at the early night when we did start to walk back on Little Miss Sunshine direction, and it looks just as a white point far away from our tired feet. Our reward: two film rolls, let`s see what surprise it contain.

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