Week 2025/12 wild life monitoring recap.

The third week of March 2025 saw quite a few very intense days of monitoring in the Santa Lucía Cloud Forest Reserve. The focus was clearly on amphibians as we did the third of four rounds of amphibian monitoring 2024/25. This activity is financed by EcoForensic.

Maicoll Quelal is the leader of the paraecologists for that topic and this time he had a few staff members (Holger and Mauricio) as well as three volunteers (Adam, Isabella and Emilia) to help him. Since it's rainy season we did expect to find a larger variety of species as well as more individuals than in the two monitorings done in 2024 when it was a lot dryer. But that wasn't the case. In fact during the last monitoring session on Wednesday morning we didn't find any frog at all within the two hour session. So, all in all, it was similar to the other two monitorings - we found mainly frogs in the Pristimantis genus and one glass frog. We still struggle with the identification of some of the individuals, but the two dominant species were Pristimantis achatinus and Pristimantos illotus. In December Pristimantis parvillus was the most common one and although we heard males of that species vocalizing a lot, we just couldn't find any during the nocturnal monitoring sessions.

Unfortunately the funding for most of our research projects in 2025 is still open, so we will have to maybe drop some topics or reduce the scope or intensity to a minimum. So - instead of starting the regular bird monitoring - we did some "spontaneous" sessions in order to collect some data. January to March are important here, because quite a few migratory birds are present in the reserve and would not be detected if we reduced the monitoring to the summer months. All in all - no surprises here. The usual suspects were present. :)

Montane Woodcreeper (Lepidocolaptes lacrymiger)

However, if we can't get the funding for the bird monitoring we'll have to live with a few handful of monitoring sessions on a reduced number of observations points for 2025.

The monthly flower census in our orchid garden fortunately is a more lightweight case and can potentially be done with volunteers and even tourists (and therefore sort of co-financed by them). As expected the numbers of flower was more or less on the same level in March as it was February and will theoretically going down from now on - BUT - since we renovated the orchid garden Noé with the help of our three volunteers collected orchids that had fallen to the forest floor (e.g. with the branches they were sitting on) from all over the reserve, so there might be new species in our orchid garden now with different flower times, so we might see an (explainable) anomaly in the data this year. However, in March things still were " as expected" .

Oncidium cirrhosum is an orchid that is typically found at higher elevations in the Santa Lucía reserve

We didn't have time for fungus monitoring and also did very little in terms of plant phenology (again for the lack of time and funding).

The seed collection project - however - is continued and so, every month we collect seeds from the different seed traps that are located in the pastures around the lodge. Meanwhile a youngster from Nanegal has started to help with the first classification of the seeds from the different samples and there might also be a student from the UK visiting us later this year who will then try to process and many of the samples as possible. For the time being the collection keeps growing.

Can you find the seeds under all the leaf litter? ;)

The camera trapping project will definitely continue as we have all the necessary equipment and the field work as such is not very costly. So, here we will have to see whether we find the resources to do the data classification and basic analysis. But, there will definitely be no data lost.

Andean Bear (Tremarctos ornatus) in the Santa Lucía Cloud Forest Reserve