Close encounters with Belize's wildlife

One of the (many) things that made our time in Belize outrageously spectacular, was how close we could get to the wildlife. You'll see, this is partly because there is so much of it in this relatively undeveloped country, and partly because, unlike America, things are much less regulated.

At the Community Baboon Sanctuary (CBS), we took a brief tour of the sanctuary to meet the Howler Monkeys. Our guide, Robert, told us about the medicinal uses of the plants, pointed out the many birds, and then showed us the monkeys. This particular group of monkeys lives close to the visitor center, and our guide plied them down from the trees with a banana, and had them sit on my shoulders while we took pictures. Crazy! We were so close to the village at this point, you could still hear the Baptists singing Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Howler monkeys are really fluffy, not nearly as big as their scary noise would lead you to believe, and they have the cutest featheriest hands and faces.

I mentioned also the croc tour we took from the Lodge we were staying at. Our guide used lights to highlight the eyes of animals on shore, we saw many cool birds, lots of crocs (a creepy amount of spiders- their eyes glow blue), iguanas, and a porcupine. One of the agreements of the CBS is to leave vegetation on the riverbanks, so although we moved quite near villages, it felt like we drifted off to the middle of nowhere. Just before our tour was over, our guide, Russel, pulled the canoe to shore and pulled out a baby croc, barely over a foot long. It makes a kinda of dog toy squeaky noise. Amazing!

One of the reasons we went to Caye Caulker was to see the manatees. We took at little fishing boat to the sanctuary at Caye Chapel. Our captain turned off the boat, and asked us all (14 all told, including a couple families with kids) to take our shoes off. We were trying to make as little noise as possible, so we could catch a glimpse of the manatees. He asked us to be patient, but shouldn't have bothered. By the time we sculled through the entrance, there were half a dozen feeding on the weeds.

The water is shallow, and manatees aren't... well, shapely. But they are easy to see when they surface to breathe. And they are giant! After this, we went to the site of a major Britain vs Spain battle for control of Belize, and then snorkeling. Fantastic.

Another place with MAJOR encounters was the the Belize Zoo. Even though they had some damage to habitats as a result of Hurricane Richard, the animals were still healthy and out and about. We saw the national animal, a Tapir (a sort of pig/anteater), all kinds of wild cats (puma, jaguarundi, jaguar...), the coatimundi (a kind of raccoon) and some beautiful birds. The cats were beautiful, so I am sharing all those videos with you in the next post. While we were there, as I said, we ran into one of the families that was with us on the manatee tour. We were also approached by the zoo staff to participate in a "Jaguar Encounter." I was getting overheated, but Matt convinced me that this would be awesome, and I am SO glad we did it. The staff removed the reasonably domesticated Junior Buddy, and we entered his enclosure, and locked ourselves in a cage in the center. Then Junior Buddy came by to interact with us... and well, you just have to see this... watch both these videos.



The jaguar is soft like a cat, but has giant scary paws and feet.

Junior Buddy's mom was brought to the Zoo because she was a problem jaguar. 3 days later, she gave birth to Junior, and in the stress of captivity abandoned him. He was raised by caretakers, so he learned to like attention (which is why there is so much clapping and talking in the video), and hasn't ever attacked anyone (but the zookeeper did say by the time he was 3 months old he "played too rough" for the zoo keepers to just go into his enclosure to play with him).