Los Gemelos

One site the team goes to a few times per season is in the highlands where there are twin craters called Los Gemelos. The craters were formed when the chambers that held magma collapsed on themselves.The craters are quite large and beautiful, though they are overgrown with mora, or blackberry bushes, and invasive plant that produces delicious fruit.

Los Gemelos, or 'the twins' which are volcanic craters

The mora is so dominant an invasive species, we couldn't find the site the team normally samples at. Jaime and Joost literally bushwacked for quite a while before they gave up trying to access the original site, and we decided to sample at an accessible area near the original site.

Beside the lack of mosquitos because of the altitude (yah!), we caught two more species of finches native of the island - the woodpecker finch which can use tools to obtain food, and the warbler finch

Warbler finch

Woodpecker finch

We also caught a yellow warbler in our nets

The vegetation is also quite different from our other two sites

 

As always, we set up a base camp to measure the birds we caught.