The forest that I visit in person isn’t the same place my camera traps record. When I’m physically there it takes all of ten minutes of hiking before I cook up a good sweaty dude smell that the wind blows into the discerning noses of all the local fauna. I stomp around, snapping twigs and crunching leaves, making a clear audio signal of my progress through the woods.
If that’s not enough to alert all of the creatures of my presence, I’m sure some of the birdsong that I hear is some feathered alarm system yelling, ‘Hey! There’s a guy over here!’ That’s what makes my camera traps such magical devices. Each video they record is a twenty second glimpse of Costa Rica’s wildlife doing their thing without any human presence altering their behavior. Discovering which species were recorded and what those animals were up to is the gift I get to open every time I go out to review cameras.
My only complaint is that each glimpse is so fleeting. I get to find out what each animal is doing as it passes by the few square meters that my camera is able to monitor but nothing more. In the case of some species, I can get to know the local individuals pretty well because they live their lives in a relatively small patch of forest and they pass by the camera quite frequently. Animals that require larger territories are recorded with much less regularity.
Unfortunately for me, one of the animals I’m most interested in, jaguars, is a species that can wander over many square miles of territory, making the likelihood that they walk by one of my cameras fairly small. I have one particularly jaguar-heavy project in a protected area in northern Guanacaste that has allowed me to re-record a few individuals several times. One of the individuals I’ve recorded most is GWM-H2.
Whenever I record a jaguar, I send the video to a researcher who keeps a database of jaguars that any researcher within his network records. He identifies each individual by analyzing the pattern of rosettes on their coat. Each jaguar has a unique pattern, so he compares the jaguar in each video to the animals already in the database. He let’s me know if it’s a jaguar that somebody has recorded before or if it’s a new one.
In the case of GWM-H2, she was new to the database when I sent my first record in the beginning of 2024. She is young, seemingly healthy, female. Her name is a reflection of the fact that I was the guy that first recorded her, GWM signifies Guanacaste Wildlife Monitoring, my wildlife monitoring business, and H2 means she was the second female that I had recorded during this particular project, female is hembra in Spanish.
I recorded GWM-H2 a total of ten times, all in 2024. In the first four months of the year I recorded her seven times, in the same general area. In Guanacaste, the beginning of the year marks the arrival of the dry season. The cameras that recorded this female were all placed along the shrinking puddles of what was a small but quickly flowing river months before. Then there was a little pause before I recorded her three more times about six kilometers away on forested paths at the end of 2024. That’s it. That’s all I get to know about her life, a total of about three and a half minutes of activity.
I have yet to record GWM-H2 in 2025 but I still have cameras on the same property so there could be a new record of her waiting for me on one of the cameras at this very moment. That would give me one more little glimpse of her life. Until then, enjoy a few moments with GWM-H2 in the video below.
About the Author
Vincent Losasso, founder of Guanacaste Wildlife Monitoring, is a biologist who works with camera traps throughout Costa Rica.
