Animals in Honduras

Honduras is the second largest country in Central America, about 112,000 square kilometers, and one of the most mountainous, with ranges that cross it from west to east. Most of its roughly 10 million people live in the highland valleys around Tegucigalpa and on the hot northern plains around San Pedro Sula, while the far east, La Mosquitia, is a huge wilderness of rainforest, rivers and pine savanna with almost no roads. Few countries this size hold so many kinds of land, from cloud forest on the peaks and dry valleys inland to a long Caribbean coast, the Bay Islands on the edge of a great coral reef and a short Pacific shore on the Gulf of Fonseca, and each of these gives animals a different home. Rain falls mostly from May to November, and the Caribbean side stays wet into the winter.

The land shaped the economy. Bananas grown on the north coast made Honduras famous in the early twentieth century, and today it is one of the largest coffee producers in the Americas, with farms high in the mountains. Those farms and cattle ranches cleared much of the original forest, so conservation became a race to keep the rest. La Tigra, a cloud forest above the capital, became the first national park in 1980, UNESCO listed the Mayan city of Copán that same year and the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve in 1982, protecting one of the largest rainforests left in Central America. At Copán, a rescue center has returned scarlet macaws to the sky above the ruins.

Most visitors arrive for Copán, the Caribbean beaches near La Ceiba and the diving of Roatán and Utila, reached by ferry or short flights. The wildlife follows the same contrasts as the land: big cats, monkeys and macaws in the eastern rainforest, shining birds in the cloud forests, snakes and lizards in the warm lowlands, and manatees, dolphins and whale sharks along the Caribbean coast.

Most visitors to Honduras never have a problem with wild animals, but a few groups deserve respect. Venomous snakes are the main real risk. Pit vipers live in the humid lowland forests, riverbanks and plantations of the north coast and La Mosquitia, where they cause most serious bites and are most active at night, and others live in the drier valleys of the interior and the Pacific side. Bites happen mostly to farm workers, so boots, long pants, a flashlight at night and care where you put your hands are the best protection, and any bite needs fast hospital care with antivenom.

Big cats are powerful but avoid people, so attacks are extremely rare, and caimans rest in rivers and lagoons and are best watched from a distance. At sea, large sharks and barracudas live along both coasts and around the Bay Islands, although incidents with swimmers and divers are very uncommon, and the reef sharks that divers meet are usually calm if given space. Not wearing shiny jewelry in murky water, staying out of river mouths after heavy rain and following the advice of local dive guides keep the risk very low.

Honduras' best known animals are spread between the eastern rainforest, the mountains and the forests of the north coast. The jaguar is the great cat of La Mosquitia, where the Río Plátano reserve keeps the large, wild forest it needs, and the cougar lives there too and also ranges through the mountains of the interior. Both are very hard to see, as are the smaller cats, the spotted ocelot and margay, which hunt at night, and the plain jaguarundi, which is out by day along forest edges. The forests and mangroves of the north coast are easier: in places such as Pico Bonito and the Cuero y Salado refuge near La Ceiba, guides often find sloths resting high in the trees and white faced capuchins moving through the branches in noisy groups. The white tailed deer, the national mammal, lives in pine forests, hills and farmland across the country, especially in the east and the interior. Coyotes hunt the dry valleys and open farmland of the south and the interior, mostly at night, and rattlesnakes live in the same dry country near the Pacific, hiding from the heat of the day.