Santa Rosa and Nancite Adventures

On Friday, January 4th, we drove to Santa Rosa and along the way we saw a Scarlet Macaw. Once we arrived to Santa Rosa we began seeing all different types of animals including white-faced capuchin monkeys, spiny-tailed iguanas, an anteater, agoudi, Pacific screech owl, among other birds, and various snakes.

The following morning we set out on a long hike of 10 miles to Nancite, a turtle conservation beach. It was a struggle climbing over a very steep mountain towards the end of the hike but the reward that followed was well worth it. We immediately went to the beach and were surprised to see a female Olive Ridley sea turtle laying her eggs into a hole she dug up. We were very lucky to see such an amazing event. Little did we know, that very night we set out in search of baby sea turtles hatching and found over 800 of the Olive Ridley females coming onto the beach and leaving the beach to lay their eggs. This event only occurs 3 days in a month for only a few months and we were so thrilled to have seen it!

While at Nancite we set up wildlife trap cameras to see if we could find any mammals. We were able to get a picture of a coyote and raccoon. We also helped cleaned the beach and practiced our spanish with the locals.

On January 7, we hiked back to Santa Rosa and relaxed. After dinner we had class and went over all the wildlife species we had seen over the past few days and recorded it like field biologists.

Photos by: Micah Walker, Jen LoDico, Dom Scaffa