The best part about camera trapping is the moment you pull the SD card out of the camera and stick it in the laptop to see what wonders await you. I’ve been doing it for years and in that time I’ve seen tens of thousands of wildlife videos, but my level of anticipation has yet to wane. That’s because the variety of videos the cameras can record is nearly endless.
Yes, there are a limited number of species walking, flapping, and slithering around in Costa Rica, so in theory, I could record at least one video of each one thus eliminating the joy of recording a new species for the first time. Even if that were to happen, which it never will, the joy of a twenty second video is that it shows you more than that animal is present, it shows what that animal is up to.
Last year, when I was sharing the joy of reviewing camera traps with a group of people participating in my camera trap tour, or as it’s known around my house – the very best tour in Costa Rica – we came upon a camera that featured a type of video that I had never seen before. The video started with a female great curassow strolling by the camera quickly followed by a young male white-tailed deer with another female curassow right on his tail. It seemed as though they were purposefully walking down the trail together rather than it being a same place at the same time/coincidence situation. I explained to the group that this was an interaction that I hadn’t seen before and thought about the positive response that video was going to get on social media.
I received the positive vibes that I had hoped for upon sharing the video with world. Along with people praising the adorableness of the interaction, I received a message from my friend Lucia who also uses camera traps in the organization where she works called Fondo de Biodiversidad Sostenible. She sent me a video that she had recorded three years prior in the same general area of Guanacaste that featured another female great curassow walking around with another, different, young male white-tailed deer.
We both decided to do some searching to see if there was already some sort of documentation about these two species interacting and came up with nothing. We kicked around the idea of attempting to publish a note in a scientific journal about the videos, but both got busy and kind of forgot about it.
Last month, I was reviewing camera traps for a DSLR camera trap project that I’m doing with wildlife photographer Jeevan Vridhan and we recorded another juvenile male white-tailed deer palling around with three female curassows. Inspired by this new record, I searched through all of my camera trap databases over the last five years to see if there were any similar records that I didn’t remember, and I came up with two more, this time juvenile male deer with male curassows. A total of five records out of thousands of videos may not seem like a ton, but it’s enough to consider that something is happening.
So, what’s going on here? In short, I don’t know. I’ve spent some time thinking about it and this is what I’ve come up with so far. A good way to consider relationships in nature is to think about eating and being eaten. Maybe these animals are being recorded together because one or the other is gaining an edge in finding food or maybe they’re together because the interaction helps them to avoid predators in some way.
As for food, I’m sure there’s some overlap in their diets, but I can’t see how foraging together would be greatly beneficial to either one. It’s possible that the curassows are flying up into fruiting trees and knocking down some fruit that the deer eat, but I haven’t recorded that.
The two species spending time together to help both avoid predation is a definite possibility. They’re both on the menu for several predators where they’ve been recorded together and it always helps to have some extra sets of eyes scanning the area for trouble. Another factor that makes me consider this idea is the fact that every record is of a young male white-tailed deer. Female white-tails kick their male progeny out of their territory while the males are still pretty young. Perhaps some of these males are substituting the safety of the deer herd for the safety of hanging out with a bunch of great curassows.
For now, the mystery of the white-tailed deer and great curassows continues. Perhaps these videos show a chance meeting of two species that simply don’t mind being in each other’s presence. Perhaps they show two species working together in some way. What I do know is that these videos are fun to watch, so take some time and watch the video below.
About the Author
Vincent Losasso, founder of Guanacaste Wildlife Monitoring, is a biologist who works with camera traps throughout Costa Rica
