by Lucas Cantrell of Carleton College
One of our first field work experiences this semester was a three week stay in Bladen Nature Reserve (BNR), which is managed by Ya’axché and protects vital habitat in the foothills of the Maya Mountains. We were introduced to Bladen through a drive down the long dirt road that led to Ranger Base, which would serve as our base camp for our next twenty days in the field. Bladen Ranger Base consisted of a field station and a cleared grassy area in which we could set up our tents to camp for the night. Unlike our base at Golden Stream, Ranger Base is located miles from the nearest paved road or village and surrounded by large swaths of protected land in every direction.
Our camp in Bladen sat on the border between the pine savanna ecosystem, which is present throughout the lowlands of Belize, and the dense rainforests of the Maya Mountains. The landscape surrounding our camp consisted primarily of tall grasses and sedges with Caribbean pine being the dominant tree species. On first sight, I couldn’t help but think that this landscape looked slightly out of place in the tropics as I had not been expecting us to encounter any ecosystems so different from tropical rainforests we had experienced thus far. Despite receiving more than ten feet of rain every year, the soils in the savannas of southern Belize are unable to support the plant life necessary for a forest to form. From our camp, the Maya Mountains were also prominently visible as they rose from the savanna only a few miles away, with their tallest peaks covered in mist from the heavy rains we had experienced nearly every day since our arrival.
Our primary field work objective in Bladen was retrieving data from remote camera traps that had been set up around the reserve. To access a few of the farthest cameras, we left on a four-day backpacking trip along the Bladen River the day after first arriving at Ranger Base. At each camera we would record information such as the number of pictures it had taken, its battery percentage, and the date and time we arrived. We would then remove the SD card and replace it with a new one. This process is repeated for each camera in BNR around once a month. The cameras are kept out for three months during the wet season, which is when we visited, and three months during the dry season every year and are an important part of Ya’axché’s research and wildlife monitoring in the reserve.
The night before the trip we prepared our packs as much as we could and left early the next morning, continuing down the dirt road on which we had entered the reserve. After only about ten minutes of walking the tree canopy began to increase and the pines and grasses of the savanna were quickly left behind. Even in the early morning, walking through the rain forest was noticeably cooler than the savanna with very little sunlight reaching the forest floor in most places. Around another thirty minutes later our ranger guides for the trip, Chen and Gerry, stopped to let us know we had reached the turnoff for the trail. Had they not been there I almost certainly would have missed the trail entirely as its start was distinguishable only by a few broken branches and trampled shrubs along the side of the road. As we continued further into the jungle the trail continued to grow narrower and the rangers had to cut paths for us with the machetes that they each carried. BNR is open to outside groups only for the purposes of education and scientific research, making maintained recreational trails entirely unnecessary in the reserve. Cameras set up by Ya’axché are also destroyed or stolen when discovered by illegal poachers, which the rangers hope to avoid by not making discernible trails to their locations.
All the cameras we were checking during this trip were within a few hundred meters of the Bladen River or its tributaries, which meant our route took us through the river valley, and we set up camp along the riverbank each night. Although we paralleled the river for much of the trip, it wasn’t until four or five hours into the first day that our path took us to the edge of the river and granted us a full view of the surrounding mountains and forests. Seeing this landscape with no signs of human life other than our own group reminded me of how truly remote this location was and gave me a feeling of being surrounded by wilderness to an extent that I had never before experienced. Moments such as this became commonplace over the next four days both from the stunning landscapes we experienced as well as sightings of iconic species of wildlife such as the keel-billed toucan and Geoffrey’s spider monkey.
Despite the difficulties of living and working in such a remote location, such as the seemingly endless barrage of mosquitos, ticks, and other biting insects, I still feel very lucky to have had an opportunity to study in BNR and learn from those responsible for its future management. Tools such as camera traps deployed by Ya’axché are important for conservation research and should continue to be used to further understanding of wildlife behavior and make informed management decisions.