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Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Pripri de YiYi

Pripri de YiYi is a natural reserve 2 hours from Cayenne. Ideal for bird watching and caymans. We saw quite a few looking for the red eyes with our canoe. We could approach them at less than a meter, fortunately we haven't seen any big ones.



Swamps of Kaw




We stayed 2 days on the Swamps of Kaw, a nature reserve South of Cayenne. The reserve is famous for it's birds and the black caiman. You can see a Cacique, an Urubu noir and Urubu a tete jaune.

Schneider's cayman

While helping Eddy on the Jaguar program, checking for the photographic traps. I almost steppped on a Grey cayman, it's a smooth-fronted cayman wich can be quite aggressive if disturbed. It can be find in the forest and quite far from the water.
It's the second time that I work on the Jaguar conservation program, we have some photographic traps wich are essential to evaluate the number of Jaguars in the area. The traps are deep in the amazon forest, we stay 5 days and walk around 18 km per day to check the cameras and collect the films, we cover an area of 120 km2. So far the results are good, we are trying to evaluate the impact of human activities (pollution, hunting, gold digging, deforestation etc...) on some emblematic species in the amazon basin.

Eddy is also an entomologist, he just found a rare specy of longicorn, he's extremely excited, this specy only hatch in september and is mythic in French Guiana. I only had my phone camera with me unfortunately the longicorn doesn't show very well.
With Eddy I have learn quite a lot on beettles, we have put some insect traps on the forest and collected some longicorn larvaes for his researchs.