On Sunday I was driven from my jungle hike about 11 am by a driving
rainstorm. Unfortunately it continued through the day so further
attempts to work on my monkey photography were squelched. It was one
of those rains that if we got one like that in Denver, there would be
the mayhem of closed roads and many flooded intersections. There is
no way our existing systems could handle such a deluge.

When darkness descended on the jungle though an amazing sound began to
emanate from it. Frogs. There had to be millions singing to make
that much noise. And it also brought all kinds of frogs out in the
lodge area with their being all over the sidewalks. The toads come
out every night and station themselves next to the path lights where
they feast on the bugs that are attracted to the light. I have seen
this in other tropical settings. The result is very fat toads with
almost zero energy being expended to feast on the bug supply.
Unfortunately I wasn’t fast enough in the dark conditions to catch
that action.

So just a few shots of the couple of spider monkeys I encountered,
some of the frogs and toads and the rain. I recorded the frogs (the
black photo) singing but I do not know if the sound will come across
properly on this post. The hum you should hear is the frogs but my
camera microphone did not do them justice.

I haven’t been to as many places in the world as I should have at this
point in my life. For instance, I have a friend who, by coincidence,
I was on a trip with to Antarctica in 2000. He did so much traveling
with his family that Antarctica was all five family members’ seventh
and final continent to visit, including their ten year old. I’m still
stuck on five. One of my “problems” is I tend to repeat some places
quite a bit. As an example, here I sit tonight deep in the jungle of
western Belize at a lodge called Chan Chich (www.chanchich.com).
Benjamin and I came here for an escape in August of 2009, loved it and
this is now my fourth visit in 22 months. My real reason for being in
Belize is to have my fifth experience excavating Mayan Ruins with the
Maya Research Program (mayaresearchprogram.org). But that begins on
Monday and now I can’t come to dig without visiting Chan Chich.
Twelve rooms set among Mayan ruins, 36 miles from the nearest paved
road. Wonderful staff who live here year round and raise their
families here as well.

I spent today on some of the trails here checking out the birds,
flowers, plants, lizards, toads, monkeys and my favorite, the leaf
cutter ants. I paced off one leaf cutter trail that measured 8 inches
wide and a half a mile long. I think they are amazing animals. But
tonight, Elder the manager, took me “Jaguar and Puma Hunting.” We
drove the gravel roads around the area, me behind the wheel and Elder
sitting out of the passenger window with his spotlight. Given there
were hundreds of deer including many fawn, the cats were apparently
not hungry during the early part of this evening. In addition to the
deer, we only had four gray fox and one raccoon to show for our
efforts (some bad pictures of our expedition in the dark are
included).

Once I get settled into the MRP camp next week and have a few days of
work under my belt, I will hopefully have another post. But just in
case that activity doesn’t generate another post, Baseball Tour 2011
begins on July 20!