Mammals!

When I arrived at REGUA I met Steve Morgan, who is a well known fellow mammal watcher from the UK. He had also heard about REGUA at the Birdfair last year and decided to volunteer to undertake a mammal survey of the reserve. He spent 8 weeks using camera traps, setting small mammal traps, baiting and looking for tracks and signs. He had a great time and established the presence of a reasonable diversity of mammal fauna, but it was worrying that the numbers of some species were still quite low.

The reasons for this are that the remaining forest near to REGUA are not completely joined up and thus creating a habitat barrier to many species. The other reason being the forests around REGUA have a long history of severe hunting by locals and many species are close to local extinction level in some areas. This means there is no population pool for many species to recolonise newly created and protected forest.

Despite this the populations of many species are recovering and it is great to see that top predators such as puma are returning.

I have so far seen the following mammals whilst searching the reserve:
Brown howler monkey, South-eastern common opossum, large-headed rice rat, capybara, paca, brown-throated three-toed sloth, Guianan squirrel, greater fishing bat, fringe-lipped bat, greater spear-nosed bat and several unidentified bats as well as the introduced white-tufted ear marmoset and black rat.

The most exciting encounter was trying to see the paca, which is a very elusive forest species of agouti that has been coming an area of forest that Steve had been baiting with fruit. We could see from our camera traps that they were visiting every night so we organised a stake out.

We sat in the forest on a very steep slope well into the evening in complete silence as we knew they would be very skittish to any noise or movement. It was pitch black and all we could hear were rustlings from small creatures nearby, plus numerous bats flying over and sometimes hitting us. Eventually we could hear a noise that sounded just right and Steve carefully covered the torch enough for us to see but not scare the paca away. We only had about 10 seconds viewing but the views of it, only 3 meters away was a fantastic experience!