Quote Originally Posted by eliotl View Post
Hey Gio, I shot/edited/narrated this video. Glad to see it posted! To answer your question (posted in another forum) about this being in somebody's "front yard," this was taken in the admin area of a very large national park in Costa Rica. (Santa Rosa/ACG.) It was right in front of the tiny house (a former guard house) of Dan Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, two chief American scientists at the park. So, not exactly a residential area, but still human-impacted. (One important impact is that Dan and Winnie put water in front of their house for birds and agouti; and this was a month into a bone dry wet season.)

How I GOT the footage was a ton of luck. I walked by the boa on my way to do work in the caterpillar rearing barn behind Dan and Winnie's house. I was working as Dan's assistant at the time, and he encouraged me to take photos of the animals around me, as a way to communicate the biology I was seeing. So I always had my camera on my hip. I took some photos of the boa sitting there, then went over and checked on my pupas in jars, to see if anything had eclosed. Later, walking by the boa again, I saw two agouti on the ground near the boa, and I wondered whether they would exhibit this particular anti-predator foot-drumming behavior Winnie had described. So I got out my camera and started videoing. Then I noticed a dove surprisingly near to the boa, and so I started recording it (0:28). I zoomed in and then ONE SECOND later a dove flew up to the log and the boa caught it. My tripod was a hundred feet away, so I just kept filming handheld for ten or fifteen minutes until my memory card filled up. Then I ran and got my tripod and switched memory cards and filmed the last bit more stably.

I'm really not a snake expert, I just happened to get this footage. Had help from Dan and Winnie and Harry Greene in sorting out what I was seeing. Great reason to always carry your camera when you're in the wild!
Great back story and video!

You did a fine job of filming and really captured the essence of a wild boa constrictor.

We should all be so lucky to see something like this.
Well done!