Monthly Achievement January

A new wind during staff training

Objectives

Training the new staff members to ensure a qualitative experience for the volunteers as well
to make preparations for the new Point Count project. With the new protocol we aim to
increase the volunteers birding experience and help us discover some additional bird species
to add to our ever growing species list. By taking part in this project our base becomes part of
an exciting new and still developing way of ecological research, citizen science. As a part of
this project GVI Jalova will try to make their volunteers familiar with citizen science and
engage them to participate in it even long after they left the program.

Summary

The new staff members familiarized themselves with the protocols of the currently running
projects in base. The jaguar and bird project leaders completed the EFR instructor course.
And preparations were made to increase GVIs efforts in monitoring the bird populations.

Report

During the first month of 2017 all the new staff

members familiarized themselves with the proto-
cols of the bird and forest biodiversity projects.
The Coastal Jaguar Conservation also trained all
the staff members in the jaguar project. After an
intensive training weekend, the new bird and jagu-
ar project leaders came back to base smiling after
completing the EFR instructor course and gave
their first EFR course to the new volunteers.

A lot of preparations were made this month to

increase GVIs efforts in the monitoring of bird
populations with a new project. GVI has been in-
volved in the monitoring and analysis of bird pop-
ulations in the southern tip on Tortuguero National
Park for over six years. Approximately fifteen
times a month, five volunteers and a staff member
set out to study a 2 kilometer long stretch of one of
the canals. During migration season volunteers
also performed surveys to monitor the populations
of the most common birds using the coast and es-
tuaries as resting and feeding grounds.

The new project will put more emphasis on birdsongs and other calls then the other projects
offered. Information will be gathered following the same protocol in the whole of Latin
America as part of a citizen science project called PROALAS (Programa de Amrica Latino
para Aves Silvestres). It was inspired on a similar project in North America which resulted in

GVI.2017.1
extremely interesting and easily comparable point counts. Experts can then examine and ana-
lyze this online database to further increase knowledge on regional species richness, commu-
nity composition, migratory patterns etc.

A strategy has been laid out to inte-

grate these point count surveys in the
already busy schedule of our motivat-
ed volunteers. Twenty-four locations
have carefully been marked with the
GPS on three of the already existing
forest trails, the nearby beach and
three canal sections following the
strict protocols of PROALAS. Every
day we are getting more familiarized
with the immense diversity of sounds
the birds make in the canals and for-
ests of Tortuguero National Park. A
training presentation, including the
aims of the project, the protocol and
general information about citizen science, is under construction. After this, we only need to
mark the locations in the field and the point count surveys can start to producing the first bits
of interesting information!

Thijs Claes
Bird Project Leader

GVI.2017.1