We made a little compilation of the different birds and mammals that were recorded on our camera traps near the wildlife track. It's quite fascinating to know that all those animals roam around in the forest at night and day, just 50 meters away from the student house. Unfortunately one has to be very patient and quiet to see mammals in the reserve, but every now and then encounters like that also happen.

A couple of weeks ago my NatGeo colleague and friend Ross Weinberg visited us in the reserve. Ross is a photographer and filmmaker and when he offered to bring his drone and fly it over UPDC, I got very excited. He got some great shots on the houses and the reserve. It was pretty amazing to see our place from a totally different perspective. We even tried to fly the drone down by the river which almost ended...

Generally, the mornings of our Dutch intern Jaimie are rather unspectacular. As he is conducting a comparative study on the attractiveness of wild and domestic hummingbird pollinated plants in the reserve, he spends a lot of time “staring” at flowers and waiting for the occasional hummingbird visit.

But yesterday all this time sitting around quiet in the forest paid off in a fantastic way. When Jaimie was al...

Last week we had a short visit of a Banded Ground-cuckoo to one of our woodquail feeding sites. As we are monitoring the activity of the animals visiting the feeder we had placed a camera trap at the feeder. Our trap showed us that the Rufous-fronted Woodquails are still frequent visitors of the feeding spot. Other animals like agoutis, opossums and tayras also stopped by for a bite. 
To our surpri...

In our past few weeks at the reserve we (Alex, Philipp, Stephanie, Alwina, Dominik and Sophia) worked on a reforestation project. The idea was to take trees from our tree nursery and plant them on a neighbor’s former pastoral land.

The work began in the middle of the cloud forest, where we searched and collected seeds from different primary forest trees, like Teme, Pagche, Cascarilla and Tangare. We focused o...

After a couple of weeks of editing the Un poco del Chocó-Video is now ready and online.

Thanks again to Edwin Toone and Amanda de Luis from Little Miss Lola Productions who were so kind to produce this video for us.

We are very grateful for their support and so many hours of work they spend in order to help us promoting our work at Un poco del Chocó.

Please check out more videos from their Ecuador trip and Edw...

It is actually so exciting to write this blog post. We have been waiting for this day for over 14 months……the Banded Ground-Cuckoos have returned!!

Although we had quite a lot of army ants in the reserve in the past weeks and we even had an intern working with ant-following birds checking the bivouacs every morning there was no sight of the cuckoos. I was actually quite dissappointed and was wondering why th...

Earlier this year Edwin Toone and Amanda de Luis, a spanish-american couple from Little Miss Lola Productions contacted me. They were planning a visit to Ecuador and they were offering to shoot a promotional video for us on a voluntary base. Of course, we didn't think twice and invited them to visit us in August.

After exchanging another few emails and a Skype call, Amanda already wrote a script and planned a...

Since last year I spend part of my summer working as a trip leader for the wildlife & conservation on assignment with National Geographic Student Expeditions (NGSE). NGSE is organized by a travel agency based in a beautiful barn in Putney, Vermont, therefore called Putney Student Travel (PST). Besides their more recent involvement with National Geographic PST actually organizes world wide trips for high scho...

The Banded Ground-Cuckoo and other ant birds know how to prevent the attacks of the army ants. But everyone else who isn't fast enough gets quickly cut into pieces during the daily raids.
Especially the soldiers have very impressive mandibles you don't want to feel in your skin. In the afternoon the ants march back and transport the prey into the Bivouac in long columns.

This blog post was written by Christi...