Big anteaters, bad photos and sustainable tourism

So when I first began the Venezuela posts I mentioned that a number of nature bloggers had recently seen similar stuff in Guyana and that my Venezuela posts would cover similar taxa to Julie's Guyana posts (though inevitably less eloquently). The Venezuela posts continue to be strung out but this post covers an area Julie covered and provides an interesting contrast between our two experience that I thought warranted detailed comparison. Way back in January 2009 Julie posted two posts about her trip to see Giant Anteaters on Guayana's savannah. You can read those here and here and I'd recommend you do so. The gist of Julie's experience was, on my reading of her account, that they drove around the Savannah in the morning looking for anteaters and upon finding one it was pursued by vehicle and ultimately herded on foot towards the viewers. This was apparently a rather stressful looking exercise and concerns were (it would seem rightly) raised about the sustainability and ethicality of such methodology. My giant anteater experience was rather different hence this post. Before we get to methodology lets look to results. Did we see anteaters? Yes. Yes we did. In fact we saw eleven (11!) of them. Which was nice.

The methodology used at Hato el Cedral involves looking for the anteaters at night. This has two benefits. Firstly the anteaters are active at night so they are easy to find, on the move and already active so not being woken. Secondly the other nocturnal stuff is out and about too including owls and nightjar and foxes for us as well as potentially the weird fluffy arboreal anteater and a range of cats (puma was sighted the night we arrived, ocelot is apparently seen reasonably frequently and whilst not yet seen there is no reason to rule out jaguar as a possible). Plus amphibians, snakes and similar stuff of course. The basic technique will not be unfamiliar to most. You drive around in the bed of a pick-up scanning around with a spotlight until you see reflected eyeshine whereupon you head in that direction for a closer look. With fences and ditches of crocs dotted around the farm there is no question of pursuing anything off road so you get close enough for good views and then the beast leisurely trots off back into the dark. We did try approaching one (presumed - it would've been the twelfth) anteater on foot for better photos and whatever it was disappeared completely (which was a little scary). There is of course a disadvantage - you're in the dark. This raises some issues with photography. I had anticipated the need for flash in advance and bought a nikon external flash with me. Unfortunately it proved to be ideally suited for illuminating little girl's tea parties as opposed to beasts lurking in the distant gloom and hence my photos were all rubbish. Nonetheless here, after a hefty amount of photoshop, is a venezuelan giant anteater:

See? No? Does this help?

Yeah. It wasn't the best of experience from a photography point of view but we got great looks at a spectacular mammal. Properly equipped photos should be no problem (though of course powerful flashes should be used on wild animals with caution and restraint with a view to the animals welfare). I saw no signs of stress behaviour in the animals we saw, they moved off but were on the move when first seen and there was no acceleration, they just bimbled off into the night.

It has to be said that this is a truly spectacular species and it has the sort of charisma that makes it one of those animals tourists will love to see (think whales and dolphins, south africa's penguins and so forth) whether they are nature-lovers or not. Hopefully at least some of the areas they exist will be able to find a way to run sustainable ant-eater trips which will encourage the protection of their habitats. Its worth noting that giant anteater is surprisingly widespread across south america and one would hope that this remains the case and it can continue to wander the continent's plains.

Wordless wednesday - Smooth-billed Ani

I miss these little characters if for no other reason than that it was nice being able to ID a bird by voice alone.

FYI: 10,000 Birds Conservation Club is awesome!

So a while back the team at 10,000 Birds unleashed the 10,000 Birds Conservation Club on the world. I wanted to tell y'all about it then but no laptop meant no new blogging. Anyway now I'm back I thought I'd post a little something in case it had passed any of you by.

Basically US$25 gets you a twelve month membership. A twelve month membership gets you access to twelve months worth of competitions to win cool birding stuff like dvd's, books and who knows what else. By way of illustration I just won the Birds of the Western Palearctic and BBi dvds (which was pretty sweet). So far I've made joining the club sound rather like a sensible self-interested decision but better still, in addition to winning all that good stuff, your joining money will be used to fund worthy conservation projects helping endangered/critically endangered birds. More detail and all the important stuff can be found here. As a very satisfied member I recommend it!

Hermit crab house swap

This is one of a load of photos I took at one of my favourite little spots in the caribbean. This area is a bay with a shallow sand slope with a fair bit of sea grass. There is a bar on the beach (nice) and a floating boat bar a little offshore so there are two jetties either side of the bay. The end result is that this is an excellent place to take beginner divers for the first "confined water" parts of an open water course. These are sessions teaching literally the first things you do in the water, in water you can stand up in and its essential skills like simply breathing from a regulator, clearing water from your mask when it floods and putting your regulator back in your mouth if it is knocked out. Whilst the instructors would do that, I would either help or (preferrably) explore the jetty pilings or sea grass for critters of which there are a surprising amount. Mostly we are talking about small sand/sea grass critters but I've seen plenty of big 'cuda, sting and eagle rays in there and the guys in the floating bar see shark reasonably regularly at night (unfortunately the boat traffic makes this not a great place to night dive). Anway on this little foray I found one of my favourite things to watch. It would make for a great photo sequence but unfortunately we had to leave before I got to the climax so you only get the one photo.....

In the conch on the left is a hermit crab - it has temporarily retreated. The shell on the right is bigger, cleaner and a little nicer so the crab was in the process of thinking about shifting. When they do this it is hilarious. Being out of its shell is high risk for a hermit crab with that soft juicy abdomen exposed so the change itself needs to be quick. However that new shell has been sat on the sand there for a while so you know there is going to be some sand or grit or worse another creature somewhere in that spiral. What you get therefore is a convoluted process of slow, methodical positioning of the new shell, cleaning and shaking to get the sand out and then a frantic switch. This is always (in my limited experience) followed by some body language that can only be described as the closest a hermit crab can come to showing irritation and discomfort and then another frantic switch, more shaking to get those last bits of sand out and yet another frantic switch. This can go on for some time. Alas that time is often longer than confined water introductory sessions so I got this initial shot and settled to watch what was coming when I was recalled to the boat. Gah! Next time.

New year's day birding

Like thousands of other nature lovers, I took the chance to get outside on New Year's day and enjoy the natural world with a couple of hours birding. No question what the birds of the day were; I finally got decent looks in good light at the Lesser Scaup that have been here since early December. With the sun (sort of) out, I took the opportunity to get some (sort of) in-focus shots.

There are a number of cool things about these birds. Firstly they are on the wrong side of the Atlantic which is cool but scaup seem to manage to do that fairly regularly as do a number of other American ducks. Slightly cooler though is the fact that whilst reasonably regular vagrants to mainland Britain, no Lesser Scaup have landed here on my little island before. The bird above is a national first....unless that is it touched down immediately after the bird below.

There are two of them. Getting lost and flying across the Atlantic is one thing. Doing it with a wingman in tow is something else. These two have been faithful to a couple of sites for a while now; I'd love to see them stay and moult into their adult plumage. Intriguingly they are both unsexable first winter birds. Wouldn't it be fantastic if we got a male and female that stuck into spring.....

There isn't much of the joy of spring about them at the moment though. The odd bit of diving was a rare interruption in the apparently vital lesser scaup business of kipping (synchronised kipping in this case).

Seeing the relatively frequent vagrancy of certain American ducks (BWT, RND, scaup) makes me wonder how often our European ancestors encountered them before Columbus - did wetlanders bag an unusual duck from time to time and if so what did they think they were? Did they notice the differences? Did they taste the differences? Did they care? These were just some of my idle musings on a New Year's day afternoon.

The lack of power of my prophecy

 So a while back I prophecised as to my next 10 island ticks. I predicted I'd see the following:

1. Pintail
2. Hen Harrier
   
3. Short Eared Owl
   
4. Goldcrest
   
5. Firecrest
   
6. Brambling
   
7. Mediterranean Gull
   
8. Woodcock
9. Knot
10. Great Crested Grebe

Since then I've bagged 10 more island ticks. They were:

1. White-fronted goose
2. Back-throated Diver
3. Great Northern Diver
4. Chiffchaff
5. Firecrest
6. Goldeneye
7. Great Crested Grebe
8. Pochard
9. Waxwing
10. Cattle Egret

Which means I hit 2/10. I should've predicted at least one of the divers and waxwing was pretty predictable once the weather hit oop north in mid-december. Cattle Egret and Pochard were both givens sooner or later but came sooner than I perhaps anticipated. Goldeneye and White-fronted goose are both rather more out of the ordinary here than on the mainland so were perhaps unpredictable.

In light of a) the colossal failure of the last set of picks and b) the tickfest that it precipitated, I've decided to repeat the exercise for another ten and see if I can do better. Interestingly I can now do so with some assistance. The BUBO listing website can now produces a target list of species most likely to occur in your region based on how many other listers in your region have seen birds you haven't. According to BUBO I should be expecting:

1. Red-legged Partridge,
2. Eurasian Hobby,
3. Curlew Sandpiper,
4. Purple Sandpiper,
5. Common Tern
6. European Turtle Dove
7. Whinchat
8. Cetti's Warbler
9. Sedge Warbler
10. Blackcap
11. Dartford Warbler
12. Goldcrest
13. Common Bullfinch

 But am I? Not exactly. This is my predicted next 10 and why:

1. Goldcrest - plenty around if I can just clap eyes on one.
2. Brambling - sooner or later one of these chaffinches I'm grilling will be a brambling.
   
3. Mediterranean Gull - sooner or later one of these black-headed gulls I'm grilling will be a med-gull.
   
4. Woodcock - cold weather should push these south soonish. My dad has been seeing quite a few already.
5. Long-tailed duck - as I write this, there is a long-staying drake in one of the coastal bays. Today I realised the reason I keep dipping it is because I've been looking in the wrong bay. Hopefully this essential revision to my twitching plan of attack should yield results.
6. Curlew Sandpiper - BUBO is right, statistically I should hit one of these soonish.
7. Purple Sandpiper- see Curlew sand.
8. Common Tern - I have no idea why this isn't on my list yet.
9. Blackcap - this wiill require some focus on my part, being small and a bit drab but is very doable.
10. Slavonian Grebe - now that I love seawatching so much I'm bound to get one of these!

I've left out the summery birds from the BUBO list as I reckon I'll get these 10 pretty quick. Red-legged partridge are put down by shoots and I don't think they are as common as they used to be so that could turn into a blocker. Keep tuning in to see how wrong I turn out to be for the next 10.