Toucans and Lizards and Monkeys, oh my!

On to the more positive part of my trip...

I went to Belize as part of a Madison Area Technical College service learning trip. The focus for my group was environmental and ecological work. To this end, we took two, three-day trips up to Belize's newest National Park, the Elijio Ponti National Park. There the members of our group worked with brilliant scientists from across Belize to catalog the diversity within the park. It was an amazing and humbling learning experience. The first week we walked the path to the beautiful Sakt'aj (white falls) waterfall and were rewarded with a lunch-time swim in the pools at the fall's base. The following week we did the biodiversity assessment along the trail to a huge cave with ancient Mayan pottery in many spots and beautiful formations.

The tree diversity was as overwhelming as I would have imagined from lectures on the neo-tropics but I managed to learn a few species and got to see and hear some amazing birds! Though I have little photographic proof, I did get to see all three toucans that reside in Belize (the collared aracari, keel-billed toucan, and emerald toucanet), a number of birds that are closely related to the quetzal (the slaty-tailed, black-headed, and violaceous trogons), red-legged honey creepers, a Montezuma's Oropendola and many species of hummingbirds. On our last day on the mainland we took a tour of the largely unexcavated El Pilar ancient Mayan ruins. While one of the area's most respected herbalists showed us around we had the good fortune to see a troop of about 8 howler monkeys passing directly overhead!

The destruction resulting from "slash-and-burn" agricultural clearing was largely evident around the park though much of the park itself was secondary forest growing where mere decades before there had been agricultural fields (and the land had doubtlessly been cleared for agriculture many times by ancient Mayan civilizations.)

We lucked out and had most of our rainfall at night while we were in the park and even then there wasn't much rainfall during our trip. This meant that mosquitoes were also sparse! I didn't use my mosquito net once during my trip and even the ticks that were out weren't nearly as bad as those in northern Wisconsin!