Not having enough questions is not usually my problem – and after a day or two of utilizing the quintessential sampling method known as poking things with a stick, it began to become clear that a head too full of them would be a distraction from gaining traction, much to my dissatisfaction. My investigative companion and I slowly whittled away at the long list of potential problems to attack, both through intense discussion and abject failure in our pilot experiments – underestimating by an order of magnitude or several how many species we would find in the cavities of the buttress trees, or being thwarted by agouti too ungrateful to accept our offers of food/trap bait. We finally realized we’d have to stop beating around the bush and get down to business.

After throwing around a few ideas about agouti foraging for our conservation project, we eventually settled on looking into the foraging preferences of agouti. We’re interested in finding out whether they selectively forage in areas with open or closed understory cover, and whether they choose differently between them depending on the time of day, which is an interesting question for a few reasons. First, we know that they alter their foraging behavior depending on predation pressure, which understory cover may effect – either it could provide protection when it’s thicker, or it may likewise provide cover for potential predators (like the mountain lion we caught on one of our camera traps). There’s some suggestion that they like to feed in open areas, but it doesn’t seem to have been quantified yet. If predation is a factor, then we might expect the difference in preferences between open and closed areas to vary when predation is strongest, in the very early morning and later in the evening after dusk. Anthropogenic factors, such as logging activity, are likely to affect the level of and heterogeneity in cover, so the project is potentially interesting from a conservation point of view as well as from a purely behavioral standpoint. To do this, we’ve set up several sites where agouti have been spotted, in each of which we have a matched pair of open and closed patches with bait and a camera trap. It sounds simple enough, but when you factor in camera malfunction, human error (a nice euphemism for my carelessness), rebaiting, opossum, paca, and spiny rats eating all our fruit, and of course Murphy’s law, it’s actually ended up being a pretty challenging project to maintain.

However, in both projects, even all of the failures we’re experiencing aren’t all that bad. I was once told that reading papers, it can seem that every research project is a perfectly executed sequence, but that failure is one of the most important steps to reaching a better answer and finding the right methods. Like every bit of wisdom you get, it’s just a string of words until it’s illuminated by experience, and I’m starting to appreciate the truth in it. Even with the occasional panics over not being able to answer our questions to the fullest extent in the time we’re here, I’m starting to realize how much I enjoy doing this.