I had just successfully reviewed the first four of five camera traps in a sleepy little town tucked into a rich valley bordering the volcano Rincón de la Vieja. The last camera is the hardest to reach. It’s located in a jungle stream at the far end of a cow farm just outside of town.
You have to cross a stream to drive to the gate of the farm, which is perfectly possible for me in my four-wheel drive truck, but this is an incredibly rainy area. If it rains hard, the whole time I’m hiking I worry that the stream will swell to the point where I can’t get back across. Instead, I leave the truck in the main plaza of the tiny town and walk in.
As I stand at the truck, double checking that I have everything I need in my backpack, the world’s happiest dog runs up to me like we’re best friends reuniting. I’ve never seen this dog before in my life. I give him a pat and then hear someone beckoning me from behind a wall of flowers that borders the porch of the closest house.
This house belongs to the family who owns the farm I’m about to walk to, the only family I know in town. Grandpa owns the farm and the house I’m being called to belongs to his son, a guy that’s a bit older than me. We happen to work together on a different wildlife monitoring project in a protected area, and he has a son who’s a buddy of mine, a bit younger than me.
I peer through the flowers and find the guy I work with in the protected area. He invites me in and I say hi to the family and have a chat. I know I have a long walk ahead of me, so I don’t dilly-dally too long and excuse myself to begin hiking. As I leave the house, best friend dog happily greets me and begins walking alongside me. I guess he’s coming with me.
We cross the stream I don’t like to drive through and begin passing through a series of barbed wire and stick gates that separate the cow pastures that we’re walking through. It’s been lightly raining the whole time but as we crest a hill it begins to pour so hard that best friend dog looks at me like ‘Do you really want to keep walking?’, obviously forgetting he wasn’t invited in the first place.
We continue through the rain until we reach two parallel rectangular pastures. I walk through the gate of the one in front of me and see a herd of cows at the far end. The parallel pasture is on a hillside to my right and inside there is Grandpa who is holding a big stick and directing an Australian shepherd to chase around a second herd of cows with loud whistles and shouts. I’m not at all sure what’s happening and I know I’ll scare the cow herd in my pasture with my presence, but I need to get to the camera, so me and best friend dog walk to the far end of the pasture.
As we reach the far end, we scare my pasture’s cow herd back the way we came from and Grandpa walks to the border of our pastures to chat. He says he’s been chasing cows in the rain for an hour and he’s tired. He tells me to open the gate in front of me because he wants my cows to go through that gate. I open the gate and tell him that I’ll loop back around and scare the cows through the gate. It’s the least I can do. So best friend dog and I do exactly that, we loop around and I hoot and holler at the cows and best friend dog nips at their heels and we scare the whole group through the gate.
I get back to Grandpa and ask what the deal is with the cows in his pasture. There’s a bit of a language barrier but eventually I figure out these two cow herds should be one. His pasture has no gate to scare cows through; these cows entered through a hole in the fence created by a broken post that stretched a cow-sized gap in the barbed wire. We needed to scare the cows through that hole and then through the gate in my pasture, so they could join the others.
It’s raining and I still have work to do, but I can’t leave tired Grandpa to chase cows with his dog, so me and best friend dog hop into in neighboring pasture which has chest-high grass and form a plan. The plan is that Grandpa and his Australian shepherd will wait just past the fence hole and me and best friend dog will loop around and scare the cows towards them.
It’s a solid plan but the first go-round is a disaster. I scare the cows towards Grandpa by yelling, smacking the leather sheath of my machete above my head and jogging through the tall grass towards the cows. That gets them moving but moving too fast. To make matters worse, best friend dog is randomly selecting cows nip at, making them run in random directions and then looking back at me like, ‘Do you see me biting these cows? Isn’t this wonderful?’.
He clearly doesn’t do this for a living. The high-speed cows hit Grandpa and the shepherd but instead of going through the fence hole, they immediately turn and stampede back in my direction, returning to the corner that they started in.
The plan for the second attempt is the same, but to do everything a little calmer. I hoot and holler but walk slower and I keep calling best friend dog back to me so I can pet him and he doesn’t terrorize the cows. Amazingly as the cows reach Grandpa, he directs his skilled dog to push a cow through the fence hole. As soon as the first cow made it through, the others quickly followed suit. As the last cow walked through the hole, I gave out a victory hoot that was met by silence from Grandpa. He was tired.
At that, I hop into the original pasture and close the gate because the second group of cows voluntarily passed through to join their buddies in the first group. I close the gate and look back for Grandpa, but he and his dog were already gone. I take a deep breath and look at best friend dog. All of that and we haven’t even checked the camera yet.
We continue hiking, past the cows that as a group look at us like, ‘What was all of that about? until we hit the jungle at the back of the property. As I walk through the jungle reflecting on my cow experience I think to myself that I may have a new Tico Times article here and maybe I should get out my GoPro so I have an accompanying video.
I film my hike to the point where I reach the camera and set the GoPro down and review the videos. As I scroll through the videos of common species, I hit a series of videos of white-lipped peccaries which makes me shout with joy. Eventually best friend dog comes to check on me, so you get to see what he looks like. Check out the video below.
About the Author
Vincent Losasso, founder of Guanacaste Wildlife Monitoring, is a biologist who works with camera traps throughout Costa Rica.
