It happened as soon as I hung up. I was immediately grumpy. I had just completed a video call about wildlife monitoring services with some very professionally dressed people speaking Spanish very quickly. I didn’t understand everything that they asked me and stumbled through the call with my subpar Spanish while sporting a not so professional looking t-shirt with a background that included all of the plates my family owns on a shelf behind me in the kitchen.
I started thinking about how embarrassing my Spanish was, how my business was bound to fail, and how I should probably just move back to the US where I could at least articulate my thoughts at a level higher than a third grader. There’s nothing like a good combination of fussiness, exaggeration, and self-doubt.
I went to bed grumpy, and I woke up grumpy. I grumpily packed the kids’ lunches. I grumpily made sure they had their uniforms on. When they were packed up in my wife’s car to go to school, I gave the whole crew an extremely unenthusiastic goodbye. Afterwards, I got my things ready for a day reviewing camera traps and hopped in the truck to drive to the property. I sat with my grumpiness in the truck and thought about how much I hated the podcast guest I was listening to.
As soon as I reached my destination at the end of a muddy road and stepped out the truck it was obvious that the forest intended to lighten my dark mood. Not ten feet away, slowly crossing a trail was a large Halloween crab (Gecarcinus quadratus). If you don’t know what these crabs look like, their coloration is beautiful.
They look as though someone handed a black and white coloring book-style picture to a child and said color it in, and instead of the dull browns that one imagines for crabs, the kid colored the body of the crab bright blue, the legs bright red, and the huge claws pure white. I thought to myself, I still feel angry, but I do love that crab.
As I moved through the forest, reviewing camera after camera my mood slowly improved. At the base of a tree I found an interesting fungus with a large bright red insect wing lying next to it. It was a small thing, but it made me a little happier. I had to climb a small cortez amarillo tree to review a camera trap in its canopy, and as I moved from branch to branch, I flushed out small clouds of moths that flittered all around my face, lightly brushing against my nose and cheeks. It’s difficult to maintain a high level of unhappiness when you’re literally experiencing butterfly kisses, but I still managed to stay a bit sour.
The final camera that I had to review was placed on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. I had a twenty-minute walk ahead of me to reach that location, plenty of time to brood about my shortcomings. As I slowly gained altitude, I passed under a female mantled howler monkey communicating with a juvenile, not in the loud howls that they’re famous for, but in low coos that reminded me of a hen lightly clucking at her chicks.
I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of appreciation for seeing and hearing that. As I moved forward, the trail that’s already picturesque due to its seaside location was made even prettier by flowering trees that had dropped pinkish-purple flowers all over the ground. As I hiked over a trail literally lined with flowers I thought to myself, this forest is determined to make me feel better.
The final blow to my bad mood came while reviewing the last camera trap. It’s set up on an undeniably beautiful spot, but the trick is, there’s almost no reason for wildlife to be at this location so, more often than not, this camera records nothing but trees swaying in the ocean breeze. As I reviewed the twenty or so videos on the camera, the second to last one was a perfectly framed white-tailed deer walking towards the camera on a sunny day with the ocean gleaming brightly in the background. Camera trapping involves a lot of almosts and not quites, but when a camera gives you the exact video you were hoping for, there’s no room for grumpiness.
Alright forest you win, I feel better.
About the Author
Vincent Losasso, founder of Guanacaste Wildlife Monitoring, is a biologist who works with camera traps throughout Costa Rica
