March is the ‘last hurrah’ month of the dry season. April could bring some dry season like conditions but you couldn’t count on it. March is when the gardeners in all the villages and settlements along the rivers really got serious about burning off the garden plots they’d begun work on the end of last year. A few might wait till the first part of April but they’d be risking the beginning of the rains which would make the possibility of a good clean burn less likely.
Even though the rivers are still very low the peacock bass are getting harder to catch. The Piranha are still (and always will be) biting as faithfully as ever. Stringing ten to twenty balsa wood floats across the river is a good way to catch two species of the best eating catfish but it’ll be several weeks before the river is deep enough for that to happen. The hunting is still good and the turkeys are still singing away but soon they won’t be starting as early in the morning and they’ll be tapering off soon after daybreak. The biggest species of turtle will still be laying their eggs on the sand bars. Hopefully the wet season won’t begin earlier than usual and cover the eggs with water before they get a chance to hatch.
The country’s biggest river flows generally from South to North which means the river’s headwaters begin closer to the equator at about 2% and enter the caribbean at between 8% and 10%. The further South you are, that is, closer to the headwaters, the earlier the seasons begin and end as compared to further North and the river’s mouth. We lived in the jungle region which was further South than North which meant the dry season ended weeks earlier than it did on the Caribbean coast.
On the sand bars the jejen or no-seeums, tiny little bloodsucking insects, tended to be horrendous toward the end of dry season. In March they could be unbearable. For some reason they liked a person’s head and hair. It didn’t matter if you had a thick head of hair, these little critters wold get to your scalp in no time. Eventually a person could get more or less used to the larger blood suckers we called ‘gnats’ but I never saw anyone get used to the jejen. They would literally attack you in such numbers your head would be enveloped in a cloud So much for March.
Leave a Reply