Today I headed back into the Jameikari Indigenous Reserve with the jaguar team. As this is the rainy season in the tropics, the clouds were looking like they would baptize us—and remind us why this is called a RAINforest. Man, did we get it. It doesn’t just rain here, it comes down in sheets, which is why there is such an abundance of life.

I always carry a big umbrella so I can shoot as I’m walking.  I love the experience of walking through torrential rain – though today, the thunder and lightening got close enough to make me nervous. I’ve had a couple of close calls in past. On my first story for the magazine, working in the mountains of Guatemala, a bolt of lightning struck so close that my hair was singed and I couldn’t hear out of one ear for a few days.

Today we headed into the Jameikari Indio Reserve. This is part of the “conflict” area of the new jaguar corridor, an area dotted with human settlements and slash-and-burn farms. The jag team was on a fact-finding mission here, trying to get a sense of how many jaguars roam the area, and how accustomed the animals have become to grabbing an easy meal of the locals’ livestock.

We set off up a mountain and trudged for many hours through steamy heat. I was so sweaty that I looked like I’d stepped into a shower fully clothed. We trudged up and down through incredibly lush rainforest. Strangler fig and ceiba roots snaked across the forest floor; the trees were hung with thick vines and shrouded in bromeliads, orchids, and other plants. The canopy formed a woven green ceiling far above. When you walk into the forest, you enter a wall of sound made by cicadas and other local insects. The screeching buzz of the bugs is punctuated by the musical squawks of brilliant green perricos (parrots) talking to each other – which brings back great memories of previous trips here, as it is my wife’s favorite sound.

What a day! Alan, Tom Zeller from NGM and I flew from Newark to San Jose, Costa Rica, and hit the ground running.  We jumped into a rented 4x4 and headed off to meet the jaguar team, Kathy Marieb and Roberto Salom, in eastern Costa Rica. We drove through one of the most beautiful rainforests in Costa Rica, Braulio Carrillo National Park—a perennially wet, unbelievably green landscape—and it was, or course, raining frogs and monkeys (the CR equivalent of cats and dogs.) The windy “highway” that runs through the park is the main road to the east coast; we followed it to an area about 40 miles west of the Caribbean town of Limon. We spent the rest of the day getting up to speed with the team and getting ready to leave the next day.

— Steve Winter

Welcome! As someone who wanted to travel around the world as a National Geographic magazine (NGM) photographer since I was eight years old, I am very happy to be able to bring you out into the field with me to share my adventures shooting stories for the magazine.

It’s 8 o’clock on Saturday night. A taxi will be coming to pick me up at 5 a.m. for a flight to Costa Rica for a “quick” shoot—two weeks. I just flew in from India Tuesday morning at 4:30 a.m. This is the quickest turnaround I’ve ever done over the 12 years I’ve been working for the magazine. I’m barely over jet lag and I’m leaving again!