Vincent Losasso

There’s always room for improvement. I can confidently say that I am better at wildlife monitoring using camera traps than I was five years ago, but that’s just the result of many small increases in competency over a long period of time. One of the things I’ve been trying to […]

Today we meet the long-tailed weasel, a high-energy predator that may be dancing for two very different reasons.The long-tailed weasel (Mustela frenata) is known as the comadreja de cola larga or more simply the comadreja in Spanish. They are one of the seven members of the weasel family to call […]

The best part of my job consists of making my way through the forest, usually alone, often a few kilometers from the nearest person, and reviewing camera traps which have spent the previous weeks recording all the strange and wonderful creatures that live in Costa Rica. That experience is the […]

I got to know Horizontes, more specifically Estación Experimental Forestal Horizontes, by accident. I had a contract to place camera traps on a few private farms in Guanacaste. Two of those farms happened to only be accessible by riding a rented horse named Superman on a six hour round trip […]

Costa Rica is home to a variety of herons, egrets, and bitterns. In general, they are birds with long legs and sharp beaks that search for prey in aquatic environments. Almost every one of these species keeps a diurnal schedule. They’re up nice and early, gobbling down some aquatic organisms […]

A decade is a period of ten years. The definition doesn’t change. I’m starting to realize that the sensation of a decade slowly changes as you age. A young person’s decade and a middle-aged guy’s decade are two different things. I know this for a fact. I assume the same […]

Today we meet the striped hog-nosed skunk, a little-known species that inhabits forests throughout Costa Rica. The striped hog-nosed skunk (Conepatus semistriatus) is known as the zorro hediondo rayado in Spanish. It is one of three species of skunk that call Costa Rica home and the only one that lives […]

Sometimes while working with children in environmental education programming, I’ll have a student comment that one animal or another is bad. I always tell them that no species is either good or bad, they’re all just trying to stay alive and pass on their genes to the next generation. Mosquitos […]

This morning, as I sat in my sweaty little office being slow-roasted by an incorrectly vented clothes dryer, my task, as it often is, was to review a couple hundred wildlife videos and enter information from each video into a database. It’s a repetitive, seemingly tedious task that for some […]

This was around ten years ago, so the details of the beginning of the day are a little fuzzy. My wife and I, in all of our kidless glory, were on a no-reason vacation to a goat farm on top of a mountain. We had a few days to explore […]