a group of Coragyps atratus 

Karen McReynolds

On Isla Coiba: in pursuit of Ara macao

One of the conclusions the head of the Scarlet Macaw project on Isla Coiba reached by the end of his time there was that no one knows anything about the Scarlet Macaws on the island.  They only know that they are indeed present, because they can sometimes be seen at certain locations. This is both a bad thing and a good thing.  It is a bad thing because it makes research very difficult; there is nothing to start with or to go on in making decisions about how to allocate time, effort, and money (all of which are very limited).  It is a good thing because anything learned is publishable.  It is all new.

In studying the logistics of the island, it isn’t hard to understand why no one has studied the macaws present until now.  Coiba is not perforated with roads.  Even if it were, there are no vehicles on the island.  Access therefore occurs by boating to various beaches and rivers and proceeding inland from there, whether up waterways or by hiking on the few existing trails.   There are no docks on the island either.  This means that Feliciano the boat captain steers his panga as close as he can reasonably get to the destination on shore, and everyone hops out of the boat into the surf, carrying any gear, lunches, snake boots, etc. that they may need.  My time on Coiba gave me firsthand knowledge of what the term “inaccessible” really means. 

Isla Coiba contains minimal accommodations for its human visitors, but we remain very grateful for those that do exist. Now a Panamanian national park, park headquarters on the northern end of the island include a few simple dormitory-style rooms with tile floors and, thankfully, attached bathrooms. To my happy surprise, they also have air conditioners which come on every evening when the electricity for the whole place is turned on.  This made for far better accommodations overall than we were expecting.  This cheery discovery was dampened somewhat by the fact that dozens of black vultures (Coragyps atratus) of all ages are permanent residents of the far end of the residential complex. They lurk about in the trees near the kitchen area, quarreling over leftover scraps and roosting en masse at night, with young birds acting helpless and begging their parents for food (vulture regurgitant, yum yum) in the universal manner of juvenile birds.  But we bird lovers mustn’t be biased, or at least not too much.  Vultures fill a valid niche also.  The student of vulture lore would be elated.

Each morning we departed from our lodging at park headquarters courtesy of Feliciano and his panga.  Our first sighting of Ara macao occurred at what turned out to be the best and most reliable place to see them throughout our time on the island.  This was the Rio San Juan, a wide and winding river with its mouth on the southeast side of the island.  Tides on the Pacific side of Panama are significant and were always taken into account on our boat excursions.  Rio San Juan was only safely accessible as the tide was entering the river, raising water levels throughout, so the timing of our excursions upriver varied considerably.  But almost every time we visited there we discovered some screeching macaws.  Finding them amid the dense vegetation was difficult, especially toward the evening when they would find a roosting branch and settle down there.  But they remained noisy enough most of the time so that we would eventually be rewarded with a glimpse of color and an alert eye, well aware of our presence. 

We saw both mated pairs and at least one adult with a juvenile.  Juveniles are identified by their short tails.  Although they grow quickly and their bodies are soon the same size as the adults, they just haven’t lived long enough for their distinct central rectrices to reach the length of an adult’s.  In the same way, breeding females can be identified by their ragged and broken tail feathers.  Sitting in that nest cavity wears down their tails. 

As a result of our efforts on Coiba, there is now some fundamental data on the resident macaws.  But far more remains to be discovered. Where are their nest sites? How successful is their reproduction here? Why don’t they appear to feed in the same trees they gorge on in Belize? It seems to me that it would be a lot easier to study vultures.  Well, yes; I’ll grant them that victory. The vultures win the Accessible-and-Ugly-But-Still-Interesting award.  For the Raucous Splendor award, Ara macao wins hands down. 

Related: Ms Frizzle and the Ara macao

Karen E. McReynolds

On Isla Coiba: the tropics

I was privileged to be part of an exploratory research project this summer that occurred on Panama’s Isla Coiba.  This is the largest island in Pacific Central America, containing about 193 square miles.  (For comparison, Southern California’s popular Catalina Island covers only 74 square miles.) For eighty-five years, Coiba was a prison island much like Alcatraz.  The people who were there did not want to be there, whether they were prisoners or staff, and the sour reputation of the place kept other visitors away.  This resulted in Coiba becoming a significant home for wildlife.  Although there was some abuse of resources carried on by the people who were present – coerced nest robbing, for example, by prisoners who were forced to climb hundred-foot trees to obtain parrot nestlings for guards to sell for personal gain  – the island is large and not easily accessible, permitting wildlife to be mostly overlooked and ignored.   Scarlet Macaws (Ara macao) no longer exist in mainland Panama, but there are healthy populations on Coiba.  These are the birds we were there to learn more about.

After a six hour redeye flight to Panama City and an unexpectedly lengthy stay at the office of STRI, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, to confirm research permits and island visitation authorizations, we boarded a bus for the four hour ride to Santiago.  From there it took another couple of hours to reach the trending surf town of Santa Catalina.  This was our departure point for Isla Coiba.  We would arrive on the island after a ninety-minute voyage aboard a small panga, a modest, open, outboard-powered boat owned by a trustworthy local captain named Feliciano.  Joining us on board were Javier, our guide; Melvin, Feliciano’s son and assistant; and Viviana, our cook for the duration of our time on the island.  She was also Feliciano’s daughter.  The family had a good thing going there.

It was the very start of the rainy season, when the afternoon clouds were uncertain about their daily growth spurt and still occasionally neglected to convene and conspire to drench us. The green of the tropics, so vivid to anyone from parched California, owes its existence to that cloudy conspiracy but remains brilliant whether the rain falls or not. This vibrant green that is present everywhere you look offered the strongest impression to me about the island.  When I think back on my time there, I think green.  And damp.

When we prepare to visit someplace new we often look up photographs, videos, even movies that feature that place. It seems like a good idea to do our best to understand it as well as we can before we experience it in person.  It is indeed a good idea, I suppose, but visual images fall so far short.  Maybe they are better than nothing, but perhaps not much. Photographic images offer only one thing – a picture – and apply to only one of our senses – vision.  The reality of a place is the sum of its sensual offerings, and that goes far beyond merely what we can see.  I once heard a missionary comment that no news camera’s film images can convey the harshness of a riot, because the acrid smell of burning tires cannot be recorded by a camera.  In the same way, no photograph of Coiba’s lush green hills can signal the humidity of the air that is present.  It fills every pore with moisture and produces that constant trickle of sweat that the visitor or resident alike learns to live with.  Amazingly, the visitor who slowly becomes a resident does get acclimated; the humidity does become easier to cope with.  My previous experience in the tropics taught me this.  The far more brief experience of Isla Coiba that I had early this summer was by no means long enough for that acclimatization to even begin.  It was just green, vibrant, full of life, and full of moisture.

Related reading: 

Notes from Ms. Frizzle (Reflection on life, nature and death)

More Notes from Ms. Frizzle (Reflection on Nat. Science Teachers Association conference)

Notes from Ms. Frizzle (Zacchaeus and the Monkey Swing Tree)

Notes from Ms. Frizzle (Close Encounter with a Bimac)

Karen E. McReynolds

Zacchaeus and the Monkey Swing Tree

I was privileged to grow up in the country.  I was raised in rural Merced County, right in the center of the state of California.  My dad was a teacher, so he didn’t have to make a living from the cattle we raised or the fruit we grew; he just did it for fun, and to give us kids the chance to grow up in the country.  I will be forever grateful for this.  Those early experiences –  wandering in the fields behind the house, helping Dad move the irrigation pipes that kept the pasture green, playing with the innumerable batches of kittens the barn cats produced, wanting to be a meadowlark when I grew up – nurtured my love for living things and the out of doors.  On a more basic level, it gave me my love of fruit.  I owe that to Dad’s wisdom in planting one of each kind of fruit tree that would thrive in the San Joaquin Valley.   Nothing can beat fresh figs or plums or apricots or peaches, straight off the tree into the mouth.

My favorite tree on our ten acres of Merced County was a sycamore, Platanus occidentalis.  Although I knew that sycamore was the correct name of my favorite tree, I always thought of it as simply the monkey swing tree.  This tall, sturdy tree, equipped with numerous broad branches that reached out from the trunk at various climbable positions, was the home of the simple swing that provided fun for hours on end.  A thick slab of wood about ten inches across with a hole in the center, sanded thoroughly to avoid any scrapes or pinches, was suspended from a branch by a long sturdy rope with a fat knot on the bottom side.   It hung from the tree about two feet above the ground and could be jumped upon by any approaching child with ease.  The emboldened child, after becoming bored with simply swinging about by kicking herself into motion, could then grab the swing and climb the tree, stopping at any of various points to mount the seat and hurl herself into the air.  I knew every inch of that sycamore; I had jumped off every jumpable place with joy, puzzling and yet glad about the fact that I never pendulumed back far enough to hit the tree. 

Besides growing up in the country in an era when kids were encouraged to play outside, I was also blessed as a child to be raised in a church.  To this day I recite the Lord’s Prayer and the 23^rd Psalm from the King James Version, a legacy of my memory verses in Sunday school several decades ago.  The story of Zacchaeus, the “wee little man” who climbed a tree so he could see Jesus, was as familiar in Sunday schools then as I suppose it is now.  One Sunday when I was about ten and we were reviewing this story, I was quite startled to notice a detail in my Bible that made me sit up and take notice.   The tree that Zacchaeus climbed was a sycamore! It said so right in scripture! (Luke 19:4)  I was linked to Zacchaeus not only by a shared appreciation of sycamore trees but by our mutual desire to see and know Jesus.  This undoubtedly contributed to my decision to give my heart to Christ the following year.

For the first time, the natural world and the world of the Christ-seeker came together for me.  That partnership has grown to become my life work. I now seek ways to draw students into the love of Christ through the witness and the story of the natural world.  The legacy of the monkey swing tree and the man who climbed it back in Galilee abides.  May we welcome Christ as gladly as Zacchaeus did.

Related: Notes from Ms. Frizzle (1); Notes from Ms. Frizzle (2)

Close Encounter with a Bimac

By Karen E. McReynolds

It had been a glorious day.  Our whale watch excursion in the morning was exhilarating and yielded enough migrating gray whales to satisfy.  After a picnic lunch on the wharf, we drove a little further down the Monterey peninsula to placid Pacific Grove, home of migratory monarch butterflies as well as fabulous tide pools.  It was not the season for butterflies, but tide pool creatures are impervious to terrestrial seasons; they remain year round, so off we went to see what we could discover.  All of these natural treasures were new to my non-major general biology students, and they were easy to impress this day: perfect weather, great creatures of the deeper sea, and now smaller creatures of the rocky shore.

I had selected a date that offered us a minus tide in the afternoon, and the tide pool creatures were abundant.  As our time drew to a close, I gathered all the students together so we could compare notes and assemble our organism count for the tide pools.  In reviewing the list of hoped-for organisms that I had prepared ahead of time, I noticed that there were a few that we had not seen.  This wasn’t surprising – after all, it’s not the Discovery Channel, as I frequently remind students – but it was still a bit disappointing.  Secretive habits, camouflage, and nocturnal preferences successfully hide some creatures from curious humans quite effectively.  One of these was the Two-Spotted Octopus, Octopus bimaculoides, referred to in marine biologist’s slang as a bimac.  This is not a rare denizen of the rocky shores along the eastern Pacific, but they hide well and prefer darkness, so they are not easily observed.   I had only seen one of these on one previous tide pool trip, and it was a fleeting glimpse: a small cephalopod, immediately zipping out of view and into a crevice in the rock underwater, where it steadfastly remained.  On this day, however, we had indeed seen a good variety of organisms, so our time at the tide pools had still been valuable. 

Within seconds of my comment lamenting the absence of a Two-Spot, one student blurted out, “There’s an octopus!” And lo and behold, we all looked down at the small pool he was standing in front of, and there was indeed a slithery octopus, heading to the deepest edge of the tide pool to hide.  Impulsively, the student poked at the general direction of the creature with the point of his pencil, and then the fun began.  This octopus, unlike the shy specimen I had seen on a previous trip, was apparently an extrovert.  He or she scuttled across the tide pool, shooting a stream of dark brownish ink as it went, and headed up toward the surface at the opposite end of the pool.  When it got there, it ascended the rock surface with no hesitation and climbed right out of the water.  I can only describe its terrestrial mode of movement as “schlooping,” a word I admittedly made up on the spot, but it seemed to suit the creature well.  The octopus schlooped up the rock out of the pool and across a bed of barnacles, skirted a clump of greenish algae, and crossed a fair amount of red-brown rock before it descended into another more satisfactory tide pool.  As it moved over each different background, its color changed instantly so that it always matched its surroundings.  Its total journey out of the water, as witnessed by a class of gaping students and their equally astonished instructor, was about five feet.  It disappeared into the depths of its new tide pool residence shortly after its arrival and didn’t make any further appearance.

What a show! This creature of the not-so-deep gave us a tiny glimpse of creation that none of us had experienced before.  And what perfect timing.  The Psalmist says, “Yonder is the sea, great and wide; creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great.” (Psalm 103:25)  None of those students will ever think of “creeping things” in the same way. 

Thus, we learn the value of field trips.  Textbooks and lab assignments are not the only materials that come to life once we leave the classroom.  Nature provides illustrations of scripture as well: in this case, a small, schlooping thing, rainbowing its colors as it scuttled through our lives.   

Related reading: Notes From Ms. Frizzle (1)