More from the world of make-Belize

Sunday, January 5

I was awake early. I took my camera and walked down to the Sibun River to see if I could find any birds. There was a bananaquit flitting about in the trees by the pool.

Bananaquit

I saw the sunrise through breaks in the clouds. It gave me hope that today would be less wet and drizzly than yesterday.

Sunrise at the Sibun River

Today was when Dave’s students collected data for their individual projects on stream sampling. Touch-sensitive mimosas were all along the river bank. The students were impressed with this plant, which defends itself by folding up its leaves to make it almost invisible. Here's a video.

There wasn’t much for Tony and I to do. Tony collared one of the guides to take him for a walk up the Sibun River. When they got back I joined them for a walk through an abandoned cacao plantation. Hershey started a number of cacao plantations in Belize in the 1980’s but pulled out a few years later when the price of cocoa dropped sharply. Most of the cacao trees were torn out and replaced by orange groves, but this little spot remained.

Cacao tree with unripe pods

Our guide found a ripe cacao pod and split it open by whacking it against the trunk of a tree. He offered the seeds to us and told us to suck the white part off the seeds and spit the seeds out. It was delicious! The texture was a little off-putting, being slimy and stringy at the same time. There was a tendency for it to wrap around one’s teeth. The seed is where the bitter cocoa comes from. I split one seed open and saw that it was purple on the inside. This is a classic seed dispersal strategy. The sweet covering of the seed entices an animal to carry the seed off; the bitterness of the seed itself causes the animal to leave that part alone. The seed survives and sprouts in a new location.

Cacao pod with sweet, white goo around the seeds

While the students were finishing up with their samples in the afternoon, we went for a walk with Neko, who was on a mission to get some tea vine and jackass bitters for a medicinal plant demonstration after supper. Neko taught us how to get water from the water vine, a species of grape. You have to be fast with the second cut because the water is moving up the vine so quickly that the piece of vine will be dry in short order. Once the vine is cut on both ends, the water can drip out in either direction. At that point, it’s all about gravity. We drank water from both the tea vine and the water vine. It really came out. Neko said that if we had cut a bigger water vine, there would be much more water in it.

Drinking from a vine

And a video:

We tasted a leaf of the jackass bitters. It was nasty. The leaves are boiled to make a tea that is used to treat all sorts of ailments. I suspected this practice was based on the general principle that anything that tastes bad must be good for you. After supper, I heard one of the students say the tea was ready. Somehow I never got around to finding out where it was.

Monday, January 6

Neko took us on a bird hike at 6:00 a.m. He promised that we would identify 40 or 50 bird species. I didn’t count. Most of the birds were identified by call. We saw hardly anything. Some of the birds were migrants from back home, such as Baltimore orioles, orchard orioles, and turkey vulture. I was able to get a picture of a black collared oriole, which I had never seen before. Overall, this experience merely reinforced my opinion that birding is a frustrating endeavor.

Black collared oriole

The day was pleasant. I was able to get a good picture of the Sleeping Giant. If you stare at it long enough you can picture the giant facing either way. An orange grove is in the foreground.

The mountain in the back looks like the face of a sleeping giant, or so they say.

We broke into smaller groups to do various activities today. I wanted to check ziplining off my bucket list. You may or may not recall that I was unable to zipline in Costa Rica because of a horrible sunburn on the back of my legs from snorkeling.

We started our day at the Baboon Sanctuary. The name confused me because baboons are apes that live in Africa. At the sanctuary, I learned that the Kriol had traditionally called black howler monkeys baboons. Belize was part of the slave trade. If you take people from a place where black apes are called baboons and put them in a place where there are similar-sized black monkeys, it is not surprising that they would call the monkeys baboons. They weren’t taxonomists, after all. I can imagine them saying, “Isn’t it funny that the baboons have tails here?”

Mom howler monkey with a baby on her back

We saw a troop of howler monkeys at the edge of the reserve. In the video, the woman’s voice is our guide and the man’s voice is the guide from another group. The most important things to note in the video are the cute baby monkey and the howling of the alpha male, which (as the guide says) can be heard for a mile.

One of the most spectacular and useful trees of this area is the cohune palm. The fronds are enormous. They are used for thatched roofs. The nuts are a source of oil, although our guide told us it is a lot of work to get at it. She also explained that the cohune palms are important to the howler monkeys, not as a source of food, but for shelter. When hurricanes come, the howler monkeys hunker down among the leaves to ride out the storm.

Tony looking at one leaf of a cohune palm

The ziplining was not at all scary. Our guides were thorough in their explanations of the safety precautions that would keep us from harm. The only thing we had to do was pick up our feet at the end of the line to avoid barking our shins on the landing platform. Unfortunately, I ended up paying more attention to the upcoming landing platform than the jungle beneath me. Oh well. Next time.

Geared up and ready to go!

The zipline

And a video of Tony:

Tuesday, January 7

We spent the morning at a green iguana breeding facility. The green iguanas are endangered because females with eggs are considered a delicacy. Selectively killing breeding females is never good for a population. The social structure is such that the dominant male gets about 80% of the matings. It would be much better to selectively kill the males. But old habits die hard. Our guide, Bert, took us into the cage with the adult iguanas, several females and a couple of males. As part of the experience, he put iguanas on our shoulders. “It’s cold today,” Bert explained, “the iguanas will really like you.”

It was cold, too. I had to wear a sweatshirt all day. To date, I have not received any sympathy at all from my colleagues back in northern Illinois, where the temperature was  19 below zero on Monday morning.

The iguanas, seeking the warmest part of our persons, soon climbed on our heads. Having an iguana on my head was not on my bucket list, but I’m checking it off anyway. Once was enough for that. They have sharp little claws!

The one and only time I will ever have a lizard on my head, I hope.

I was not keen on holding a baby iguana when we moved to the next room, even though they were much cuter than the adults. Bert passed the little ones out to those who wanted them. When our time was up, he took them back and stacked them in his hand. He told us that he always counted, especially with school groups. There’s always some kid who wants to take one home.

Bert with a handful of baby iguanas

After lunch, we visited the Mayan ruins at Cahal Pech (“Place of the Ticks,” named by the archeologist who discovered it in 1950). Our guide, Pedro, was Mayan and still spoke his traditional language at home. He looked exactly like a Mayan carving. The sheer magnitude of the ruins was mind-boggling. It is estimated that the site was occupied from 1200 BCE to 900 CE. How could people build such complex and magnificent buildings without metal tools? I don’t even think they had wheels. Cahal Pech was part of a far-reaching network of Mayan settlements that were connected only by footpaths. Wow.

We saw the throne where the king would greet visitors in Plaza A. The royal bedrooms had vaulted ceilings using the same arch construction that we saw in the doorways. The king’s bed was a stone slab 20 feet long and not very wide. It would have been padded with furs and palm leaves. Finally, we saw the ball court. Pedro said that originally the game was played for entertainment. The sacrifice of players at the end of the game came later on. The ball court was not as big as I had imagined. Perhaps the courts got bigger over time also. And all this stayed intact buried under the rainforest for a thousand years.

Plaza A: The king sat on the bench in the break in the wall at the top of the stairs to receive guests.

Arched doorway in a wall

The king's bedroom, bed on the left

Our Mayan guide in the ball court

After we were done at the ruins, we went to San Ignacio to do some shopping. It’s not a very big town. Some of the stores were obviously aimed at tourists. I got a refrigerator magnet to add to my collection in a store that claimed to have only items made in Belize. It says, “You better Belize it” printed, oddly, on the colors of the Bolivian flag (horizontal stripes of red, yellow, and green). Starts with B. Other stores seemed to have a motto of “If you can’t find it here, you can get along without it.” Tony bought a sports jersey for his son at a shop that also sold shoes, sexy underwear, irons, blow dryers, washing machines, and stoves. 

Something for everyone, from shoes to washers

  My favorite sign advertised “Quality Home Made Old Fashion Ice Cream Best in Town $2.00, Coke, Slush, Water, Candy & Cookies, Snakes, Chips, Juice, Old Navy Slippers-Flipflops.”  Really, what more could you want?

Ice cream and Old Navy slippers...

Wednesday, January 8

We went to the Belize zoo in the morning. Tony was not looking forward to it. “I’m not a zoo guy,” he said. “All the animals look depressed to me.”

At the end of the morning, I had to agree with him. I was disappointed on this trip that we had seen no mammals that were truly wild. The howler monkeys, while not exactly tame, were not exactly wild either.

It was hard to believe that our flights were right on time in light of the fact that the entire United States was pretty much shut down on Sunday and Monday. The flights were completely full with travelers who had been rescheduled from cancelled flights. It was a scramble getting through immigration and customs in Miami in time to catch our connecting flight. In the end, however, we got back to Chicago right on time.