Vincent Losasso, writer at The Tico Times newspaper had a literal field day recently when he managed to capture a menagerie of wildlife on his camera traps in the Costa Rican jungle.
As well as his writing work, Losasso, founder of Guanacaste Wildlife Monitoring, is a biologist who works with camera traps throughout Costa Rica.
While hiking in the tropical dry forests of Guanacaste on a series of trails, Losasso was trying to find suitable places for his seven camera traps.
“I was trying my very best to listen to the forest’s clues about where to place the cameras and after a few hours I think I had done a pretty good job. There were a series of rocks across a stream where the forest said, ‘Hey, wildlife is probably going to cross here’. There was a large tree leaning on an angle across a pond that said, ‘If I were a monkey, I’d use this as a bridge’,” he writes in The Tico Times.
“I retrieved the camera from the edge of the pond, hiked back up to the streambed, and stuck the SD card into my laptop... There was a video of a tapir walking into the pool and swimming around. There were videos of a spectacled owl splashing at the water’s edge, taking a bath.
“There was even a video of a jaguar walking along the edge of the pond away from the camera with something in its mouth. We played back the video, scrunched our noses, and peered even closer at the laptop screen to see what it was. We were able to determine that there was a turtle in the jaguar’s mouth, most likely the same one I had frightened months earlier.”
Inspired? Take a look at our guides to the best trail cameras, the best underwater drones, and the best cameras for wildlife photography.
