This week saw two days of what we call wild-life monitoring in the reserve and a lot of data entering and analysing in the office during the rest of the week.
On Monday we started with the hummingbird / flowering plant monitoring. This project is run and paid by the Swiss National Science Foundation and it looks into the relationship between hummingbirds and their hosts plants. The four transects along two different trails are done once a month. In parallel cameras are placed on flowers to see which hummimgbirds come to feed. The weather conditions were bad, so the observations were mostly restricted to the lower layers of the forest.
A few plants seem to have shifted or extended their flowering period this season. Norantea anomala a climber in the Marcgraviaceae family tends only to flower in the three months between September and November/December, but this year we still observe along the main trail in February. Also, the few hummingbird-pollinated orchids that we know of (e.g. Elleanthus sp., etc.) are flowering now.
On the way back from the monitoring we did some general plant phenology and fungus monitorings at several points. Fortunately it is fairly easy to find mushrooms now, so the project is finally picking up speed with more observations than during the second half of 2024. Since this project doesn't have any financial resources we currently restricted to taking pictures of various angles of the fungus in the forest and uploading the data to iNaturalist. But at least at some point we will have created a large repository of images until anyone with a profound interest in funding the project or doing their own research.
In the afternoon we set out to the orchid garden together with a volunteer in order to run the flower census, but unfortunately it was too rainy. We did - however - find plenty of species in flower and can hopefully do the monthly counting in two weeks then.
Tuesday started with the hummingbird research in the upper part of the reserve. Although it remained rather dry in the morning, it was pretty foggy (cloud forest!), so again most of the flower and hummingbird observations were done in the lower strati of the forest. No big surprises here. But a lot of large Bromeliads were found half-eaten on the floor which is a hint to the presence of the Andean Bear (Tremarctos ornatus). We'll check whether this is confirmed by the camera trapping data.
Speaking of camera traps - this week we swapped the memory cards of four camera traps and thanks to a generous donation of Fiona Mathews (University of Sussex) we were able to set up two new camera, one on a location that was used years ago for the same purpose and one on a new site, a narrow ridge where a recent treefall has created a small clearning. So, next month we hopefully harvest the first images from those cameras.
Again on the way back we did plant phenology and fungus monitoring. Especially the first one was a little tricky as here epiphytes and trees are included, but of course with the limited visibility at this season it is difficult to impossible to see flowers and/or fruit in the tree tops.
Even the various bird monitorings done during this morning provided very little data. But still we find it important to do these monitorings during this season too as it provides us with insights on the presence of migratory species (e.g. Blackburnian Warbler).
During the "desk-part" of the monitoring, i.e. for the rest of week, we were busy doing all the data enterring (especially the one for the plant phenology monitoring is quite time-intense) and since we've also finished the data enterring for the camera traps for 2024 we were able to publish two more annual reports - one on the orchid garden monitoring and one for the camera traps.
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