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Bioblitzes at Sylvan Falls, Costa Rica! With Fiona Reid

I recently bought a large and beautiful property in Southern Costa Rica – 154 acres, with massive waterfalls, lots of mature forest, and a good variety of habitats.  I have named it Sylvan Falls.

In order to find out more about the biodiversity on my land, I am planning a series of bio-blitzes and bat workshops. Two are already full, but there is space available for participants on two others:

Dec 14-21, 2019.  Bat Bioblitz and Workshop to coincide with Nils Bouillard’s Big Bat Year. Nils is traveling the world to see as many bats as possible and try to help promote their conservation. He told me he would be in Costa Rica in December, so I thought what better way to help him, plus start to develop a list of bats at Sylvan Falls

Leaders: Loren Ammerman, author of Bats of Texas and renowned bat biologist, and her husband Mike Dixon, a herpetologist will provide their expertise and help with mist netting and herping.

Feb 20-27, 2020. Nature Bioblitz This is the second of two nature workshops, where all fauna will be recorded.

Leaders: Rich Hoyer, a very experienced birder-naturalist (employed by WINGS), will be surveying birds, butterflies, moths and odonates; Tracie Stice and Gianfranco Gomez, naturalists and spider experts, organizers of the legendary Drake Bay Night Tour  will be providing their intimate
knowledge of local natural history too.

I’ll be co-leading and organizing both workshops and I will have permits for catching rodents and bats. We will take at least two day trips to other habitats. For batters we will visit locales where I know of roosts for species we may have missed. With luck, we should find roosting Spix’s Disk-winged Bat, Chestnut Sac-winged Bat, Pygmy Round-eared Bat, and a number of tent-making bat species. I’ve found tree roosts of some gleaning insectivores and I’m looking forward to finding out what they are. The river by Sylvan Lodge has a nice calm pool for Greater Fishing Bats and numerous smaller species, and we hear the calls of Shaggy Bats and Northern Ghost Bats frequently – catching those two is hard but we will certainly try.

I expect we will encounter 30-40 bat species during the first workshop, including some good ones (we will definitely do some batting on the February workshop as well, but the extent will depend on group interest). Other mammals that are easily seen around Sylvan Falls include Red-backed Squirrel Monkey, White-faced Capuchin, Neotropical River Otter, Tomes’s Spiny Rat, White-nosed Coati, Central American Agouti, and more.

Birding is very good and there are numerous poison dart frogs and other herps on the property. It is also the gateway to the Osa Peninsula, the richest area for mammals in Costa Rica.

If you are interested in participating in either of these blitzes, please email me at fiona.reid7243@gmail.com for trip details.

Fiona Reid