The Pizote & the Lion

The fallen leaves were dry. Crackling sounds of animal movements were clearly audible. Something was walking 20 meters below the ridge line trail where I was hiking, but the rain forest foliage shrouded its form. Although I didn’t know what it was, I wasn’t concerned. Few animals in the Costa Rican rain forest present a threat to people. As I continued several hundred meters down the trail, the crunching leaves seemed to follow me, always remaining about 20 meters off to the left, paralleling my path. What could be so interested in me? My imagination struggled to escape its normal bounds, at first lightly nudging and later dominating my senses. Most rain forest animals tend to avoid humans, not track them. An eerie feeling of being stalked seeped into my being like a light rain trickling through the thick jungle foliage. Turning my head from side to side, listening, looking, muscles and nerves tensed, I continued walking. I stopped... nothing... silence... forward ten more meters... stop... silence. I let out my breath and started forward, ashamed of my fear, determined to keep it to myself. Suddenly, the leaves rustled a meter behind me; a twig cracked. Whirling around I caught a glimpse of the first furry bundle hurtling across the trail, then another. More sounds from the other side. I whirled back to see another dark form whiz past. The next one collided with my leg, rebounded, stumbled and took off across the trail. A quick look told me that it was a juvenile coati. I counted sixteen of the long nosed, loop tailed members of the raccoon family in their headlong rush across the trail, but I’m sure there were others that I didn’t see. When the stampede was over and my heart slowed down to a normal beat, I was able to reflect on the event.
The group of coatis had been moving on a trajectory that would have taken them across the trail, but they encountered an obstacle, me. Not wanting to confront a human, they tried to get around me, but unwittingly walked in the same direction and found me moving with them, blocking their passage. Each step took them farther from their intended destination until near panic caused them to bolt across the trail, about half the group crossing in front and half behind me. Once across the trail the large group of females and young moved back the way they had come.

Called pizote locally, white-nosed coatis (Nasua narica) are found in groups like the one that I encountered and sometimes numbering more than 30 individuals. Juvenile males are tolerated in the troop until about two years of age when they leave to lead the solitary life of a male. Young males from the same troop may travel together for a short time, but soon venture off on their own. Dominant males will return to the group during the mating season when mature females are in heat and receptive to male company.
Closely related to pizotes are the raccoons, olingos and kinkajous, the former being both terrestrial and arboreal like the pizote and the latter two found strictly in the tree tops. All of these mammals are about the same size, all are omnivorous and all belong to the Procynid family. Coatis dig with strong claws and rip apart rotten logs in search of grubs, insects and small lizards. Those powerful claws serve other purposes too. Hacienda Barú guide Juan Ramón Segura says that when a dog takes chase, a pizote will immediately roll over on its back, feigning injury and inviting a naive canine to attack. When the dog lunges, the pizote bites down hard on the skin of the canine’s cheek or throat, quickly works its claws into the bite wound and rips the skin, opening an ugly gash. Few dogs come back for a second bout.

Though usually seen on the ground during the day, coatis are good climbers and sleep in the tree tops. Pregnant females make arboreal nests where they give birth to an average of four young. Coatis often feed in the tree tops as well. Strangler fig and cecropia fruit and royal palm flowers are some of their favorites. When fruit is abundant, I have seen them feeding side by side with white-faced capuchin monkeys (Cebus capucinus,) but on other occasions the two species clash. Hacienda Barú guide Deiner Cascante once observed a troop of monkeys grab a lone male Pizote in the top of a tree and throw him out of the tree. Fortunately, he fell through thick foliage which broke his fall and landed on the ground unharmed. White-faced capuchins have also been known to kill and eat helpless coati infants too young to leave their tree top nests.

In the late 1980’s some of the first groups of visitors to partake of rain forest hikes at Hacienda Barú were treated to a special coati show. Near the location where the hikers normally stopped to eat lunch was a wild papaya tree heavily laden with large round fruit. The soft, smooth trunk was riddled with scratch marks that told a tale of numerous coatis climbing to reach the fruit. There was so much competition for the treat that the papaya was never allowed to ripen. Any fruit that began to soften was ripped open and devoured by a struggling coati clinging to the tree trunk in a precarious grasp. Soon giving into the strain, the pizote would typically swivel its hind feet upward, grasp the sides of the trunk with rear claws and descend head first, leaving the fruit only partially eaten and making room for another to scramble up and take its turn. This spectacle took place daily, around lunch time, for a couple of weeks. Then suddenly all the pizotes disappeared from the area, leaving the tree with plenty of wild papaya which ripened and rotted on the tree. We couldn’t understand what had happened to the coatis. Almost at the same time, the Hacienda Barú forest guard, Gregorio, came to talk to me. I still remember the look on his face, brow furrowed with concern. He told of what he presumed were claw marks on a tree trunk near the lunch site for the hiking tours. He wasn’t sure what had made the marks. He said the grooves were much too high on the tree and too thick to be an ocelot or anything similar. A day or two later Gregorio took me up into the jungle to show me a paw print in some soft mud. The cat track was a little larger than my open hand. For two weeks we found scratch marks on trees and terrestrial wildlife became scarce. Then suddenly everything went back to normal. The pizotes all returned as if nothing had happened. A few days later a neighbor, several kilometers away, reported having seen a mature male puma (Puma concolor,) sometimes called a cougar. The large feline continued to visit Hacienda Barú twice each year, in March and October. Later we put all the pieces of the puzzle together and realized that the puma’s visits coincided with the times of year when there are lots of wild pigs, called collared peccary (Tayassu tajacu,) in our area. Pumas tend to follow and prey on the herds of peccary that migrate around the region, but they eat other animals too. Coatis are often killed and eaten by both the jaguar (Pantera onca) and the puma, the two largest cats in Costa Rica. The coati’s bite and rip technique used with dogs is useless with these carnivores. Few other creatures are a threat to pizotes, not even humans. Coati meat is edible, but not very tasty and, unless large groups of them are damaging corn fields, which they often do with great relish, humans usually leave them alone. In the absence of large felines, pizote populations can get out of control to the point that the imbalance can cause serious damage to other species.
For example when the Panama Canal was constructed in the early part of the last century, Barro Colorado Island was isolated in the middle of Gatun Lake. Within a couple of decades the jaguars and pumas all swam to the mainland leaving the rich tropical forest on the island without any large carnivores. A few years later, bird species began to disappear, one after another until over half of those originally present were gone. At first these local extinctions were a mystery, but researchers soon discovered a clue. Coati numbers had skyrocketed, reaching a population density of 20 times the level found in the Amazon rain forest. Raccoons and coatis are classified by biologists as opportunistic predators. They normally prey on grubs, large insects and abundant small vertebrates like little lizards, but they will raid bird nests when the opportunity arises, eating the eggs or nestlings. The elevated populations of coatis and raccoons had caused the demise of the birds on Barro Colorado Island.

Other species are affected by excessive numbers of coatis. At nesting time green iguana (Iguana iguana), females dig elaborate tunnels where they lay their eggs. Raccoons, coatis and domestic dogs, all strong diggers, are the primary predators of iguana nests. Too many of any or all of these predators can seriously affect populations of the long green lizards. The same is true of marine turtle nests. At Hacienda Barú we have carried out a project for the rescue of the Olive Ridley marine turtle since the mid 1980’s. This involves creating a protected hatchery. Turtle eggs are recovered from natural nests before poachers can get to them and are transplanted to the nursery where they are incubated. The most perplexing problem with these hatcheries has been keeping the raccoons and coatis out of them. We finally solved the problem by fencing the area with old roofing tin, which the Procynids can’t climb.

In the rainy season of 2001 a herpetologist (reptile and amphibian specialist,) named Mason Ryan from New York, was residing at Hacienda Barú National Wildlife Refuge while carrying out a study of frogs. His work involved a lot of wandering around at night in the jungle. One day he remarked that he had found some puma scat in a particular location. The cat feces was full of what appeared to be peccary hair. A couple of nights later he returned to the same area. Mason heard a puma he estimates was ten meters uphill from him. He is sure it was a puma because of its vocalizations, a low volume, high pitched screech. (Pumas don’t roar.) This put him on alert, but shortly thereafter he heard another screech a few meters downhill. He believes there was a cat on each side. This is the only time during Mason’s stay when he became frightened enough to stop searching for frogs and snakes and return home. He is certain that pumas were the source of the sounds, having worked as a volunteer in the Bronx Zoo cleaning the puma cages and listening to their cat sounds daily. The day after Mason’s scare, guide Juan Ramón visited the area and saw a group of about a dozen collared peccary. The rain had washed away any puma tracks that might have corroborated Mason’s experience. Nevertheless, a few months later a neighbor reported sighting a puma cub, a clear indication of the presence of a mated pair. This news is an encouraging sign that the ecosystem around Hacienda Barú National Wildlife Refuge is in excellent condition. You may have felt a twinge of sadness or indignation when you read about monkeys killing baby coatis, pumas killing mature coatis or coatis killing baby birds or eating iguana and turtle eggs. Nature, however, knows no bad nor good. Everything simply is. Every living thing must eat or die. All animal food comes from other life forms. Nature is an intricate matrix of checks and balances in which food is intertwined with population and genes. An abundance of prey attracts predators. The least fit die first. More genes get passed on from female coatis that do a good job of hiding their nests and from those that forsake the papaya treat when danger lurks. Try to observe nature, not judge its players. It makes more sense that way.


Article courtesy of Jack Ewing