A month later…
A month later we returned to La Amistad, this time just me and Zuzka. We already knew what we were going to do, how difficult it would be, what to bring and what was not necessary. A biologist and her guide went with us, and they stayed far behind during the climb. Checking the photo traps went fine and surprisingly the batteries lasted beautifully, so we didn’t even need to do a replacement. The very first and second photo traps showed a jaguar at night and the third even showed our big dream, a black panther again at night. Absolutely awesome and we didn’t know how much more we could enjoy it. However, on the next and a bit more distant photo trap came the real bomb. A melanic jaguar, that is a black panther in the daytime and he still stopped and looked into our camera. Unbelievable!!! We knew at that moment that we would be back the next day with unique shots. There were still tapirs, deer or cougars on the other photo traps. We placed two more photo traps off the main trail during the ascent and one more on the descent the next day. Our goal is to place photo traps in new locations off the trail that people occasionally walk on. After all, black panthers must primarily walk in the forest and not on the trail, but we’ll see how successful our theory is.