Honduras – Off to a flying start!

Written by and Photos Courtesy of Alex Tozer

The 2015 season in Honduras, our 12th expedition here, is off to an excellent start. We have our largest ever team of staff in the forest (around 100) to make sure that the volunteers are well looked after, and have opened a new site (Capuca) on top of the other 6 forest camps, in order to get the most out of the manpower available. We are also opening a new marine site on Roatan, another of the Bay Islands which can be accessed, like Utila, via a ferry from La Ceiba.

We are only a week or so in to the season, but so far some excellent progress has been made and we have some very happy campers. The first week saw some of the heaviest rain the area has had at this time of year for a long time, but recently the sun has been shining (ensuring plenty of sunburn amongst the pasty forest folk). This year the name game has been highly prevalent around base camp and in the satellite camps, along with various other games (including a strange version of hide and seek that saw about 45 people trying to hide in the generator house in Base Camp while the rest of the camp tried to find them), keeping morale high. On the science side we have a potential new species for Cusuco (a dragon fly which was annoyingly buzzing around my tent which I was about to squash before Merlijn Jocque pounced on it) and the small mammal team have caught several samples of the potential new species of watermouse.