Have got a little bit behind with writing this, which is a bit problematic as I can't entirely remember waht I've been doing this week but I'll try! Every day we've had to check the traps and bait at big falls. As there hasn't been any rain this week we were hoping that the chances of us catching something would be quite high, but no luck so far other than catching a toad and an opossum. Sadly neither is of any use! On monday we had to move out of our rooms as a massive group was arriving and were driven down the road to stay at Monkey Bay, which is the other place we could have stayed instead of TEC. We made the right choice as Monkey Bay seemed very american, and also we would have had to cook our own food. However they did have an awesome hammock bit with enough hammocks for all of us. Becci and Bart came down to meet us so we could discuss projects, and I now have a project! It's all about studying rainforest cayes (islands) within the savannah and whether they are used as a refuge for wildlife. We have four weeks to collect all the data which is a little bit intimidating but everyone is helping out with each others projects so we should be able to get it all done. Once I'm back home it will be a lot of GIS computer map stuff and analysing data but it's all pretty exciting and useful to the corridor project.

The rest of the week passed as usual, checking the traps at big falls. I stayed one night with Clare and Arturo and then had friday off so we went to Belmopan for more supplies but mainly to go to Perk up. This is a new discovery cafe which does amazing food and most importantly has a sofa! We stayed on their sofa for a very long time! Sadly Becky has had to go home back to England, the doctor said that she was unlikely to get completely better here and definitely wouldn't be ready to start the new term at uni. For her last night with us we took a night tour of the zoo, this meant all the nocturnal cat species were much more active and we saw puma, ocelot, marguay and the jaguar very close. We also stopped to feed the tapirs again and make the howler monkeys howl. For something not that big they are ridiculously loud and make quite scary noises; somewhere between a dinosaur and zombie noise! Josh nearly got attacked by a peccary while taking a picture over the cage, they are still my least favourite animal here much scarier than any snake! We aslo got to hold the massive boa constrictor.

As its dried up, we've seen a lot more snakes just around where we're staying. It's given a few people a scare as we keep misidentifying them and thinking they're coral snakes (venemous) when they actually turn out to be harmless coffee snakes. One of the days, I was out with Arturo setting up new traps, he was picking up palm leaves to cover the cage and just called over to ask if I had my camera with me. I did so I headed over to see what he'd found and there was a massive Fer de lance just lying on the ground under where he'd picked up a palm leaf. If he'd moved the leaf too fast and scared the snake he probably would have been bitten which would have been very serious. Pretty scary, but a good reminder that there are dangerous animals in the forest and just because we don't see them doesn't mean they aren't there. I've decided that I'm not going to pick up any palm leaves in the near future! Exciting to see one in the wild though!

We're now having to divide our time between project work and sorting out the traps. On monday we start learning how to burrow survey which is important for mine and a few others projects. Zoe is busy sorting through jaguar scats (poo) and others are looking at camera trap photos. It's four weeks today until we leave TEC which is insane, it's going so fast and there's so much still to do. Still hoping to catch an animal in the traps and we might be setting up tapir traps this week so we can have some tapirs collared.