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About five years ago, I started capturing adventures through my camera. Guanacaste Wildlife Monitoring I found myself alone, deep in a forest in Guanacaste. After two hours of walking through a tropical dry forest, I slid down an embankment and came to a large, rushing stream. The surrounding forest was leafless due to the dry season heat, but the stream was surrounded by breezy, green trees and shady trees.
I jumped down from the bank, skipping over a series of gray boulders until I reached a large boulder in the middle of the stream. I shrugged, unloaded my backpack from my shoulders, and sat down in the cool water. Just as I thought to myself, “This is so beautiful,” a group of spider monkeys appeared from a high branch on the other side of the stream and began to expertly shimmy their way to the other side. My immediate thought was, “I wish my dad or my best friend were here to see this. They would love it as much as I do.”
As I have the opportunity to hike through forests throughout Costa Rica and document the creatures that inhabit them, I continue to have incredible experiences. Sometimes the scenery is the highlight, a rushing river, a volcanic landscape, or the largest tree you can imagine.
Sometimes you get so excited when you turn on your camera trap and realize you’ve recorded something mind-blowing that you literally have to yell. Most of the time I go through this alone, but sometimes I have someone with me who I can share the moment with and ask for a high five.
Since it wasn’t practical for my dad or best friend to move to Costa Rica and hike into the forest with me, I started thinking about who else would enjoy an experience like this. Would enough people be interested in hiking into the forest with me and checking camera traps? It’s my favorite thing to do, and I thought it would be the best way to share Costa Rica’s tremendous biodiversity, so I was going to give it a try.
Over the past few months, I have been working hard Horizon Forest Experiment Station Creating tourism-based camera trap experiences. Horizontes is located in Conservation Area of Guanacaste (ACG)a protected area covering the entire northern part of Guanacaste. Horizon National Park is one of my favorite places on Earth due to its vast area and astounding amount of wildlife. It is the perfect place to do this activity.
Here’s the plan. You and a few other nature lovers arrive at Horizontes. I’ll greet you warmly and give you a brief overview of how the project works, and then we’ll hike through two different areas, one forest and another forest with lakes, and check out seven camera traps. I’ll take a laptop into the field, and we’ll see many of the species that have (hopefully) recently stood where we’ll be, including pumas, tapirs, and jaguars.
I can’t guarantee that we will see any wildlife during our trip, but I have seen tapira jaguar, and the 30 deer I have seen on recent visits to Horizontes. We were able to walk slowly along the approximately 2.5 mile route I had planned.
This camera trap project has many goals. The main goal is to take you into the forest and show you Costa Rica’s incredible biodiversity on camera, but there are many other benefits to this project. The information collected by the cameras will help Horizontes staff better manage the land, the videos will be made available to any researchers who find the information useful in their studies, and I will use the videos in my environmental education programming with local students.
The fees collected from the research have enabled me to run the project and replace faulty camera equipment, and a portion of the funds go directly to Horizontes, helping them to financially support the extensive activities required to protect such a large area.
This is the first tourism project I have attempted and a unique way for the public to experience the great nature of Costa Rica. If this pilot project is successful, I will continue to expand to 17,000 acres of land. Before we know it, we will be riding ATVs and horses deep into the forest, checking camera traps to monitor Tapir Pool.
I have had a lifelong love of nature and wildlife and I hope this project will allow me to share that love with you. If you are interested in getting involved, you can find more information here hereThe first trip for up to 10 guests will be on Saturday, July 6dayYou can contact me for more information or to arrange a private group tour. I look forward to seeing you in the woods soon!
To learn more about Vincent’s camera trap tours, visit https://guanacastewildlifemonitoring.com/tours/send an email to vincent@guanacastewildlifemonitoring.com Or send him a WhatsApp at 8497 0083.
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