The best part of my job consists of making my way through the forest, usually alone, often a few kilometers from the nearest person, and reviewing camera traps which have spent the previous weeks recording all the strange and wonderful creatures that live in Costa Rica. That experience is the main reason that I started my wildlife monitoring business in the first place. Being immersed in nature is a wonderful feeling.
That feeling doesn’t come for free. There is a certain amount of danger that comes with being a guy who spends a lot of time alone in the forest. You might imagine that danger comes in the form of some sort of megafauna. While thoughts of a jaguar appearing in the trail ahead of me or slipping into crocodile-inhabited waters do cross my mind from time to time, the reality of the dangers that I face is more mundane. So, what exactly are those dangers? Here’s my top five.
1. Stings
Getting stung is a fairly regular life occurrence for most people. We’ve all been stung. I put it at number one because it happens to me so frequently and the potential for it to really mess my day up is pretty high. I’ve been stung by a ton of creatures including Africanized honeybees, a wide variety of wasps, more species of ants than I can count, and even a few caterpillars that appear more similar to space aliens than the wormy-looking creatures that I grew up with. While I have suffered through a variety of stings from a variety of creatures, I’ve been quite lucky. I haven’t been stung an overwhelming amount of times at once and I’ve managed to avoid (so far) that two scariest stingers in Costa Rica, the bullet ant and the tarantula hawk.
2. Getting Lost
I put getting lost at number 2 because of that feeling that happens in your chest when your brain realizes, ‘Oh no, we’re lost.’ That panic in my chest feeling isn’t a common occurrence for me and I sure don’t like it when it happens. I got lost once alone for a short time in a flooded forest on a sugarcane plantation. That wasn’t even that dire of a situation because the forest was only so big, but I must admit that I didn’t like it. I’ve been lost twice while following the owner of the farm I was on.
We made it out both times, but when the farmer who owns the property starts scratching his head and looking around, it’s unsettling. I have a few methods for avoiding becoming lost including GPS and little scraps of white t-shirt that I tie onto branches as I go, Hansel and Gretel style. Once I was so sure that I was going to get lost while leaving the main trail in the jungle in Limón, that I brought a huge spool of string with me that I tied to a tree on the trail and followed back once I found the camera I was looking for.
3. Injury
In this case I’m thinking more about twisting my ankle or breaking a leg rather than an injury caused by a puma diving out of a tree and clamping down on my neck. A slip and fall while several kilometers away from help could be a pretty dangerous thing. An accident, by definition, can be hard to avoid, but I do my best by constantly reminding myself to be careful and go slow and by taking breaks when I know I’m getting tired. My most alarming injury while reviewing cameras to date happened on another sugarcane plantation. I was searching for a camera trap in neck-high grass and fell in a Vincent-sized hole, badly injuring my right knee. As if this incident wasn’t bad enough, it was combined with danger #4.
4. Creepy Dudes in the Forest
Being all alone in the forest is great. Being seemingly all alone in the forest and then running into a random dude in the middle of nowhere isn’t great. Usually, it ends up being some hardworking individual or another fixing a fence or on a horse looking for a cow, but sometimes it’s someone that makes you rather uncomfortable. In the aforementioned sugarcane plantation, just after aggressively twisting my knee and crawling out of a mud-filled hole, I see a guy in tattered clothing spot me and then quickly hide in the tall grass.
He was between me and the way out, so I gripped my machete and limped my way in his direction. He popped out of the grass, pretending that he never hid from me, and we greeted each other. I told him I was a biologist working with camera traps and he took in that information and walked back into the grass. Creepy.
5. Venomous Snakes
This is probably the one item that you would have guessed made my top five dangers list. I include it more out of respect than fear. I’ve always loved snakes. I used to catch them on our family farm in Pennsylvania. Seeing a snake while reviewing camera traps is always a highlight for me and doesn’t happen as often as nature documentaries would have you think. That being said, there are some highly venomous snakes in Costa Rica’s forests, and I do my very best not to put a misplaced foot or hand on them.
About the Author
Vincent Losasso, founder of Guanacaste Wildlife Monitoring, is a biologist who works with camera traps throughout Costa Rica.
