(image courtesy: Dirk Van der Made, wiki commons)
Today I took some time out to review a book of Costa Rican wildlife. There were lots of photographs, much better than I could take. I had no difficulty identifying the creatures I had seen.
The most notable and noisy species was the howler monkey.
I hiked Tuesday along a dry river bed full of stones on the property neighboring Abercam.
The river bed made the hike easier as few plants could push through the stones and the ground in the "green season" is heavy with moisture. I passed guava and lychee trees barren of fruit and then came across "signs of animal life" (poop) that didn't come from one of the neighborhood's free grazing cows.
I walked toward the sound of rushing water and heard rustling at the tops of some mangrove-like trees with curly dangling vines.
Soon, a male howler monkey made his loud warning call.
The first part of the call sounded to me like air rushing into a huge hoarse vaccuum or a frat boy with a 20 inch mouth belching into a megaphone.
The second part is a rythymic exhaling version of the first part that sounds a little more like what you'd associate with a monkey.
I could see the howlers clearly, though they were above me by about 20 ft.
The howlers make a third noise which I heard at a distance as I passed them in route to a twin waterfall - a more cordial howl to one another.
Birds that frequent the Abercam property include Costa Rica's national bird, the clay robin, chestnut mandible toucans, montezumas, yellow bellies, and hummingbirds.
The clay robins are as familiar here as red brested robins are in the United States. They are a powdery rust color all over and fight aggressively with one another.
Of course, I expected toucans to look like the bird on a box of breakfast cereal. All toucans do share expressive eyes, a similar mandible shape. and a like size.
The ones flying about Abercam have white, red, yellow, and black markings with brown and yellow bills.Their eyes are a light green.
Ironically, they're not big on "froot". They prefer eggs, small rodents, and young squirrels. Today, I caught a pair eyeing a male squirrel making a lovenest in a tall tree: future lunch!
They make two calls. One is a clicking sound that immitates the gecco.
By far, the most impressive vocalizer is the montezuma or pendulum bird. It's call is seven notes long.
The call flutters up a chromatic scale by half-steps. Two half-steps, pause, repeating the second note and another half-step, pause. This pattern repeats two more times until the bird holds the top note and slurs down all the way back to the first.
The montezuma also creates nests that hang like long baskets from trees. It's roughly the size of a hawk, and has a trim of bright yellow feathers on it's long black tail.
The yellow bellies, have, well, yellow bellies. They cackle and tumble over one another in midair like the parrots of Telegraph Hill.
The broad variety of hummingbirds here impressed me.
Most all of them have the same irridescent green somewhere on their bodies, like the red breasted hummingbirds in my backyard in San Francisco. But there are some with violet ears, some that are all green, and a peculiar species with a hooked bill designed for sipping liquid from inside the clawlike flowers of haliconia.
The species of butterflies are also amazing. The biggest ones I've seen are about the size of my hand and as fleet as bats.
In English, we distinguish between butterflies and moths based on whether we feel the creature is colorful or ugly. In Spanish, size is a the determining factor between mariposas and pollios.
I have not yet seen Costa Rica's national butterfly, the blue winged morphos, but I have seen a "postman" butterfly, a large yellow species, and a species with a long body that resembled a wasp with monarch-like wings in four sections.
I was initially concerned by the presence of two large wasps nests near the pool, but I soon learned this species of wasp principally eats mosquitos. Instead of buzzing around your soda and sandwhiches they cluster near their nests listlessly waiting for their prey.
Unlike these surprising wasps, not all the Costa Rica creatures are changing my mind about what constitues a pest.
Tonight, I got up for a glass of water and came back to a squarish orb spider about as big as my palm dragging a dust bunny across my headboard.
I stayed up for a while writing across the room. I made my bed and the spider regrouped, cowering beside my pillow.
The standoff finally ended when I threatened to trap it. First I tried to trap it under a bowl, but the spider jumped. Two feet high and three feet out!
I was startled, but I laughed too. For someone who has a dangerous level of fearlessness this spider was freaking me out.
I swaped the bowl out for a steam cover.
Then I figured, if I came at the spider from above and behind, it would stay low and move in the direction of the front door.
I guided it as far as the kitchen, trapped it, and set it free on the front porch to eat beatles another day.
Earlier this week, I found an unpleasantly fat tick. I saved it in a bag in case I came down with something.
Oddly, I was nauseaous, had a mean headache, and even some shortness of breath. But none of my symptoms corresponded with the tick diseases I'd read about in my guide books.
I'm guessing the overplus of prophylactics the SF travel health clinic introduced to my bloodstream have taken the wind out of any tick germs I got.
No scorpions or snakes so far.
Wayne says the scorpions at this altitude in Costa Rica can fit in a spoon and give a sting no worse than a bee. Still not anxious to experience that bite!
Snakes are detered from the property by the presence of over 300 minature bamboo plants around the perimeter. According to Tim, snakes get tangled in the dense sticks and turn back.
Everywhere I go, leaf-cutter ants are stripping some tree of its green.
They are fun to watch. Little bits of leaf marching single file over the forrest floor. Cute!
And people love the story of leaf-cutters. These ants survive by eating a unique fungus they create in their nests from moldering plant material.
Did I mention their queens live up to eight years! That's five years more than drag queen Pollo del Mar will reign as longest Miss Trannyshack.
However, the leaf-cutters are a nuissance to a well-manicured property. Geraldo, the gardener here, follows them and burns out their nests.
The ants seem to be worst on Wednesday.
That's Geraldo's full day off. The leaf-cutters seem to know.
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