Bajo del Tigre and Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve

We’ve returned to the slopes of La Calandria, on the Pacific side of Monteverde. The wet and dry seasons are more dramatic here than in San Gerardo, which even in the wet season is made apparent by differences in vegetation. The landscape here is more familiar, with agave-like succulents and waist-high grasses to the west of our cabin. To the east is a forested patch, interwoven with trails. The trees here are roughly the size of their Texan cousins, but of unfamiliar species and growing in thick clumps in slippery, rust-colored clay. They are relatively unburdened by epiphytes, unlike those of San Gerardo, allowing us a less obscured view up toward the canopy.

On the morning of June 8^th, the relentless drizzle finally broke and we woke to a rosy-pink sunrise with only a little bit of moaning and groaning about the early hour to split up and check on the traps we’d set the evening before. Things didn’t get off to a great start. The mice proved to be unusually feisty and from one group, two escaped before we were able to take all the proper data, and in the other group once of the mice managed to bite someone hard enough to draw blood even through a layer of fabric! You know things are getting serious when Dr. Ribble pulls out his gloves, which he did for the next two. Worse, several of the camera traps were misbehaving and caught no footage overnight. While the issue appeared to be with batteries- unusual, given that the older models barely took any power and could be set for years, according to Ribble, with no trouble- Dr. Ribble decided to bring them back to the station for a few tests. So, disappointed and eager for coffee, we returned to the station. Little did we know that on one of the camera traps, we'd caught gorgeous footage of a mountain lion! You can see that here.

When breakfast was completed, we threw on our shoes, crammed into the car, and began the day. First thing on the agenda: a native plant walk lead by Willow Zuchowski through Bajo del Tigre “Jaguar Canyon.” The area was a thick rain-shadow forest, much of which was composed of wiry second-growth forest just barely into its third decade of growth. The morning was cold and dry, but as we moved into afternoon the sun came up, leaving the feeling of a crisp April morning in Texas.

Here, Willow introduced us to her greenhouse project, where she worked with community members to bring native seedlings into local gardens and explained the importance of gardening with native plants. In particular, native plants have co-evolved with local pollinators and other organisms, whereas nonnative plants may be ignored by these species and not take a role in the local ecosystem. Worse, the nonnative plants may actually thrive and become invasive, which leads to a decrease in valuable biodiversity and thus hurts the health of the ecosystem. Native plants are also adapted to the local climate, so they take fewer resources –particularly water- to care for.

After giving us a brief tour of the greenhouse, we set out to the trails, regularly stopping for brief introductions to a handful of particularly interesting native plant species. For instance, Willow pointed out the Cecropia tree, which has coevolved with a native ant species to make a symbiotic relationship in which the Cecropia tree provides cozy housing via notches in their trunks, while the territorial ants protect the host tree from invaders and clean it of heavy epiphytes. Monteverde also has a handful of endemic species, such as the avocado-relative Ocotea monteverdensis, which produces olive-sized fruits that are dispersed by birds. There were also just a few oddballs, such as the forty-foot tall Tebu tree, that’s closely related to daises and has been successfully planted in local cattle farms as a windbreaker. We were also treated with a handful of exciting bird and mammal sightings, including a handsome- and loud!- bellbird and our first Hoffmann’s two-toed sloth. Goodness knows how Maikol spotted it, to the rest of us it was little more than a ball of shaggy fur high in the canopy, nearly indistinguishable from the epiphytic mosses.

At noon, we finished up the walk and headed to lunch, where we were treated to delicious juices and generous portion sizes by a cute restaurant tucked into the back of a local women’s art cooperative. The courtyard filled with friendly dogs, some… erm, anatomically creative animal statues, and a cute café with fancy coffee and delicious deserts was just the cherry on top!

Reluctantly, we made the three-block or so walk to the Monteverde Institute, where we were given a warm welcome of fruit cocktails and free t-shirts before being ushered into a presentation over the history and ecology of Monteverde through a lens of cultural, economic, and environmental sustainability, as well as the role of the Monteverde Institute. Monteverde is situated along the continental divide, with the Caribbean Sea to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Monteverde itself has several definitions: the political boundary of the Monteverde District, the Quaker-founded village within the District of Monteverde, the larger economic zone formerly defined by cheese production and presently defined by tourism, and the biological zone of Monteverde that encompasses six life-zones at various altitudes along both the Pacific and Caribbean slopes. Monteverde composes approximately 0.03% of the world’s land area, but has about 4% of the world’s biodiversity, with about 3000 distinct species, about 2500 of which are plant species. About 900 of these plants are epiphytes, as well as about 800 orchids and 800 trees!

Monteverde receives about 120 inches of rain annually (for reference, San Antonio receives 15-20 inches annually), which drains into four primary watersheds on the Pacific side and many more on the Caribbean side. As Monteverde is situated at the top of these watersheds, whatever people do here to the water affects the people and ecosystems downstream all the way to the ocean.

Historically, Monteverde was sparsely populated by Native Americans on the fringes of the Inca and Aztec empires. It later became a safehaven for people both involved in and escaping piracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the 1920s, Spanish-descended Costa Ricans began to settle the area and set up subsistence farms and rumors of gold began to spread. The first ever-hydroelectric system was created here in Monteverde as a part of a gold planning scheme downstream. Little ultimately became of this and the community continued to be small until 1948, when Costa Rica abolished their army, which made Costa Rica attractive to Quakers fleeing the draft in the United States. In the 1950s, a Quaker community settled in Monteverde and began a cheese factory. While this operation was initially devastating for the local environment, in a strange twist of history the former chainsaw seller turned into an environmentalist and rallied his community to donate land and money to promote cloud forest research.

In fact, by the 1970s, Costa Rica was the most deforested country in Central America, and the conservationist movement began with an economic shift toward promoting tourism. In 1972, the first research and tourism center in Monteverde was opened and accommodated 471 people in that first year. By 2017, this number has swelled to over 200,000 annual visitors to Monteverde, far beyond the first teams of bird-watchers and researchers who were initially drawn to this unique ecosystem. In the place of cattle farms, tourism operations such as zip lines and canopy tours have sprung up and brought challenges of their own. Namely, Monteverde has only about 6000 permanent residents, and the rapid influx of tourists has put strain on the town’s infrastructure, particularly for its water use and pollution-management systems.

From there, we transitioned into a tour of the Monteverde Institute grounds. The Monteverde Institute opened in the 1980s to educate the community on sustainability issues and create opportunities for local people who don’t directly work with the tourism industry. In keeping with this goal, we were shown their grey water system and water-harvesting system, both with the intention of preventing water pollution and runoff. Even their outdoor classroom was built by harvesting non-native trees and using their wood, then planting native trees in their place. Throughout the talk was a running theme of mistakes made and learned from, with an emphasis put on how current and future generations of students were needed to find creative solutions to sustainability issues.

Next, it was back to the station to reset our traps, grab some dinner, and go to bed, feeling spoiled from the warm showers and delicious food prepared by the “House Moms.”

June 9^th began much like the day before, with the highlight of the morning being an escaped mouse of indeterminate species. Oops! Thankfully we got all the data we needed for the remaining seven mice. After packing up some sandwiches and juice boxes, we were hurried back out to the bus to head to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, where we split into two groups and began a guided nature walk through the cloud forest and up to the elfin forest. The cloud forest is what one would think of a classic tropical rainforest, with massive trees, long creeping vines, and hundreds of epiphytes covering the trees; the undergrowth is a tangle no man could get through without a machete. It differs from a rainforest both in its cool temperature and that the majority of its precipitation is from horizontal rain, fog, and mist, which permeates the air. This horizontal precipitation keeps the forest moist and vibrant throughout most of the year and allows epiphytes to remain moist without a root system.

Some sights were familiar, such as the massive strangler figs we became acquainted with in The Osa, while others were new. For instance, we were introduced to a species of fig tree that is pollinated by wasps, that enter the fig through a natural opening, lay their eggs, and die. The males emerge from the eggs first and fertilize the females, then leave the fig and die. The females then hatch, already fertilized, and exit the fig. They become covered in the tree’s pollen on the way out, such that when they find their own fig in which to lay their eggs, they pollinate a new fig flower on the way in. Even more exciting, we’d barely 30 feet from the park entrance when were treated by the sight of a resplendent quetzal male and it’s adorably little chick. Making this sight even more precious was its rarity, quetzal hatchlings have a 85% mortality rate!

As we climbed in elevation we left the cloud forest and entered the elfin forest, a unique ecosystem in which the high winds stunt tree growth and create a relatively epiphyte-free, dwarfed forest with wind-shaped tree branches and hardy, squat birds. The elvin forest is placed right on the top of the mountain, along the continental divide, where the trade winds blow from the Caribbean to the Pacific. As water-laden air from the Caribbean is pushed up the mountain, the air pressure drops and causes a drop in temperature. This colder air can’t hold as much humidity, so the water condenses into clouds, then rain, keeping the Caribbean side consistently moist. By the time the air reaches the Pacific side, most of the moisture has already been lost, creating a rain shadow and dramatic dry season on Costa Rica’s western coast.

Here, with the high winds whipping around our hair and threatening to take any loose items of clothing with it, we settled down on a creaking overlook to eat our sandwiches and meditate on elevational differences and life-zones across the two slopes we straddled. Chilled and damp, we started our descent toward the cloud forest, where we were treated with another quetzal and sloth, as well as an aww-inducing baby mouse climbing up a tree. We made a brief detour onto a suspension bridge overlooking a patch of canopy, where the more adventurous of us tried their best to sway and bounce it around, while the more cautious classmates hung on for dear life and tried their best not to look down.

The two halves of the class met back up, of course, in the gift shop, before jumping over to a little coffee shop famous for their strategically placed hummingbird feeders that set their air alight with fluttering green-and-blue wings and offered a welcome respite for our feet.

At 2:00PM, we shifted to a classroom where Dr. Alan Pounds, an influential local biologist, gave us a talk about the effects of climate change on endemic species. He introduced his lecture with an explanation of the cloud forest, particularly how the trade winds from the Caribbean Sea blow in moisture laden air that condenses at the top of the mountains. He transitioned to conservation by introducing the now-extinct toad species, the golden toad, which was famous for its brilliant orange coloration and endemism to Monteverde’s elfin forest. When first surveyed, the golden toad numbered 1,500 individuals, but in 1988 and 1989, only one male Golden toad was found in the elfin forest. It has not been seen since 1989. Other toads, such as the Monteverde harlequin frogs and the golden eyed leaf frogs have also disappeared in the same, sudden manner. Eventually, these disappearances were tracked to the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, which is responsible for a global crash in amphibian populations. However, according to Dr. Pounds, the fungus was never the only threat to amphibians, as similar declines are being seen reptiles and birds.

Dr. Pounds’ most recent work involved the Harlequin frogs decline, where he and a handful of his colleagues showed a correlation between the disappearance of the Harlequin frog and unusually warm years. His research also expands into reptile species, such as the cloud forest anole, the montane anole, the ground anole, the banded canopy anole, the blue eyed anole, the lichen anole, and the dry forest anole. Over the past few decades, these anoles have experienced changes in their ranges: lowland species have spread upward in elevation, while highland anoles have shown an overall decline in both range and overall abundance. This ripples up the food chain, as the bird species that are dependent on anoles as a food source, such as our beloved quetzal, are now threatened. While new anoles are spreading into the range of the quetzals, the overall abundance of the anoles is declining. The current environmental pressure even spans to mammals. For instance, squirrels were also shown to have the same trend of increasing range elevation. These trends are most clearly explained by anthropogenic climate change.

To support this hypothesis, Dr. Pounds provided graphs of local rainfall patterns, temperature changes, and humidity, all taken daily since 1973 by a Quaker schoolteacher. Ultimately, the graphs boiled down to the fact that, in recent years, both temperature and rainfall fluctuations have become more extreme. In particular, while the total amount of rainfall has increased by 600mm over the past 45 years, the dryer days are getting dryer and the wetter days are getting wetter, causing more stress for the organisms that live here, particularly species like orchids that depend on consistent moisture to avoid drying out. In the conclusion of the graphs, Dr. Pounds explained his theory of the lifting cloud base, where the increased temperature leads to increased transpirations, which in turn leads increased moisture content in the clouds. However, the air temperature is warmer, so instead of dumping all the water on the Caribbean side of the mountains due to the trade winds, the clouds pass over the mountains and dissipate rather than bathing the Caribbean side of the mountains in consistent cloud cover and horizontal precipitation. At the end of the presentation, Dr. Pounds explained what he most wanted was to avoid the worst case scenario, an increase in global temperature by several degrees, and called for us to work on solutions to climate change.

After thanking Dr. Pounds for the presentation, we returned to La Calandria and the evening passed unremarkably, with reset traps and a delicious dinner. Next up: Monteverde Biological Station and Crandell.