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Data And Hikes – 11th September






Success! My first experience of hot water has occurred. It’s odd how such a simple things can feel like a gods send when you haven’t experienced them in a while. On this ‘high’, I could feel my self ready to tackle everything that the day had to throw at me.

The canyon was slowly becoming my second home, the giant slopes provided much welcomed shelter from the rays of the sun as we collected our traps and quickly stored our data. We couldn’t help but have a sneak peak of what the cameras had seen and it was magnificent. The videos of many bird species including a female variable hawk, Geranoaetus polysoma, and the multitude of Atacama Toads, Rhinella atacamensis, was simply breath taking. Such spectacles are rarely ever witnessed let alone recorded producing such a unique sensation of awe when viewing the data knowing no one else has seen it.

With a trip back to base for lunch being done with, we set back for the canyon to reset our traps. This time with a twist. We went for a small climb… The views seen from the top of the canyon are something indescribable, the beauty of the many mountains and hills around all covered in varying shades of green, white, yellow and purple just engulf you. You feel yourself become something minute that’s part of something way to big to imagine. With a decent being made we found the variable hawks nest that to our delight contained 3 chicks. It was without question that we’d attempt to place a camera trap here as the chance to see even a glimpse of their lives was something that we couldn’t miss. This was however much easier said than done… the nest was on a very vertical cliff face… After much deliberation 2 older much more experienced members of our team scaled the cliff face and to everyone’s shock had managed to place the camera. Now all that was left, was to leave and wait for the incredible data that would be collected.

With our fieldwork done, we headed back and set to focus on our next task at hand, revision for an ID test on all the endemic species of plants and animals that we had encountered over the duration of our trip so far. I’ll be honest with you here… Latin is definitely not my strong point after staring at my notes of a million different species. It get so easy to end up calling a magnificent flower such as ‘patte de guanaco’ by the Latin name of another species that’s completely unrelated! Thankfully though, a couple more days are left for me to finally figure all of this out and exploration of the field definitely helps with this once you start referring to everything by its scientific name instead of its usual common name. Once the pain of revision was done with, I headed to bed rather excided for the early day that laid ahead tomorrow. No data collecting in the morning… but a visit to the ‘Penguinos de Humbolt Nacional Parque’ that lays a 2 and a half hour coach ride away on an island that can only be reached by boat.


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