costa rica animals Archives - Gainfully Unemployed

March 30, 2018

Monteverde: Time at Home

I thought I’d end my series of Monteverde posts by writing a little bit about where Elani and I stayed for the last five days there. It was a little place we found on AirBnB called Cabinas la Montana. A wonderful local family had built three little cabins on their property, and it was somewhere on the spectrum between a bed and breakfast and a homestay. Usually, I’m not too invested in where I’m staying while traveling. It’s a place to sleep, maybe do a little writing or reading, and sometimes cook. Nowadays, it needs Internet and a workspace for Elani. As long as it has the stuff we need, I don’t think much more about it. But this place ended up being one of my favorite parts of the trip.

The cabins were a bit out of town, about a half an hour walk or a $3 cab ride, and at the end of a full day, we pretty much always took the cab ride. It was set off from the road in a nice chunk of forest, with several paths to explore on the rare days when we had free time during daylight. It wasn’t quite the stunning lush greenery of the nature reserves, but it was fun to explore nonetheless. There was a pretty amazing ficus tree:

Me in front of a epic ficus tree
Taken by Elani

And hosts of leaf cutter ants making lines all through the forest as they carried leaves back to their hives:

Leaf cutter ants hard at work
Taken by Elani

The most impressive animal sightings we had were the birds. They had figured out that after breakfast, there would pretty much always be fresh fruit scraps added to the compost pile. That meant that we got great views of the little emerald toucans almost every day, and some motmots made an appearance one day as well:

An emerald toucan preparing to raid the compost pile
Take by Elani

A motmot waiting for scraps
Taken by Elani

But the things that really made our stay a memorable experience was the time spent with the other guests and our host family. The day started out at with breakfast, which was a great home cooked spread of coffee, fresh fruit, sausage, plantains, eggs, pancakes, and gallo pinto. Gallo pinto is a mix of beans and rice, and it’s in pretty much every Costa Rican breakfast. It’s usually just the sum of its parts, but Terri’s (the mother of the host family) gallo pinto was above and beyond, and I was excited to eat it every morning. This was also a great time to talk to the other guests, a Germany couple traveling with their 4-year-old and a nice middle-aged American couple. All of them were great folks, and it was fun to compare our adventures around the Monteverde area. Our host family was amazing. They did an excellent job of making staying there more like a homestay then a hotel, while still giving us a private cabin to retreat to at the end of the day (that’s a very nice feature if you’re an introvert like me). As I mentioned, Terri was the mother of the family. While everyone pitched in and were very helpful and friendly, Terri took on most of the running of the bed and breakfast, so she was the one me an Elani got to know best. She was also one of the most mom-ish moms I’ve ever met. Her daughter described her mothering as “extra”, which was said with a fair amount of teenage exasperation, but was apt none the less. She cooked a hearty breakfast every morning, put up with Elani’s limited and my even more limited Spanish, helped us navigate Costa Rican transportation, did a load of laundry and refused money for it, tried (unsuccessfully) to pay us for moving some computer files around for her, took a morning to teach us the secrets of cooking her amazing gello pinto, and was just generally kind and caring towards us. When we left, Elani said she almost teared up. I of course didn’t, why would you even think that (sniff).

Watching the sunset at a spot a short walk from our cabin
Taken by Elani

March 15, 2018

Monteverde: Nature Reserves

Elani and I went to the two main forest preserves in the area – La Reserva Bosque Nuboso Santa Elena and La Reserva Biológica Bosque Nuboso Monteverde. I’m just going to refer to them as the Santa Elena and Monteverde reserves to make life easier. We nicely bookended our trip by going to the Santa Elena reserve on the day after we arrived and the Monteverde reserve the day before we left. Both the reserves are in cloud forest – so named because they’re on the top of mountains and in the clouds a lot of the time.

To get to the Santa Elena reserve, we had our hotel reserve us a spot on one of the little shuttle vans that go scurrying around a few times a day, picking up folks at their hotels and driving them 20 minutes on rough dirt road through the jungle. They charge a whopping $2 for this service. So getting there was cheap and easy.

We paid our entrance fee (the standard $15 that Costa Rica seems to charge for popular parks), then grabbed a map from the front desk and set out to explore. The jungle here is lush. I’m going to say it again for emphasis, L-U-S-H. The plant life is dense and plentiful, emerald green leave of every shape and size pretty much fill your vision in any direction you choose to look, broken up occasionally by a few bright tropical flowers here and there. And the plants didn’t just restrict themselves to growing out of the ground, oh no, they grew out of other plants. The trees were covered with a multitude of other plants. Thick layers of moss on hung off of their upper branches, broken up here and there by bromeliads and the occasional orchid. A wide variety of creeping plants scaled up their trunks from the ground and vines hung down from their canopies. It was pretty intense. Time for some pictures to illustrate my point:

The dense jungle of the Santa Elena Reserve
Taken by Elani

Trees provide a platform for other plant to grow on
Taken by Elani

Berries I think – probably best not to eat them
Taken by Elani

The fauna in Santa Elena was a bit more elusive. It was a pretty wet day when we visited, so some of the creatures may have been hunkering down to stay dry. We saw a couple of insects and several large millipedes. Birds were scares, but made the best showing. The most impressive (and certainly the easiest to photograph) was the black guan, a chicken-sized ground bird that seemed pretty much indifferent to our presence.

A brightly colored beetle
Taken by Elani

The final stop was the lookout tower. Not only was it fairly rusted out, it was fairly poorly constructed in the first place. It hurt me a little as an engineer. Is it really so hard to make a decent welded structure? I’ve had that thought several times in Costa Rica, but this was definitely the worst example. Oh well, we climbed anyways and were rewarded by quite a good view of the trees from canopy level and the surrounding hills.

Great view, terrible tower
Taken by Elani

The trip to the Monteverde reserve was a bit less convenient, but equally cheap. There is one large bus that runs from the center of town to the reserve, but the real issue is that there is a bus at 7:30am, then no more until 1:20pm. Which is to say there isn’t a bus at the time when a sane human being would want to go there. But whatever, we had to wake up early to see breathtaking natural beauty, boo hoo. Much like Santa Elena, Monteverde is a lush dense, jungle. The crowds were a little larger, and we had to pick our way past a few clusters of people on guided tours, but once those cleared out, it wasn’t so bad. There were a few more attractions in this park, including a waterfall, a lookout platform (with great views of the surrounding hills), and a hanging bridge (which was an excellent way of getting a view at canopy level).

Tropical flower – Monteverde Reserve
Taken by Elani

Tree fern flower/fruit? I don’t know tree ferns are weird
Taken by Elani

View from the lookout platform
Taken by Elani

Another view from the lookout
Taken by Elani

Waterfall at Monteverde Reserve
Taken by Elani

Elani on the canopy bridge
Taken by Geoff

Trees as seen from the bridge
Taken by Elani

The animal life was a little more active in Monteverde, I think in large part because the day we went had considerably more sunny stretches then our day in Santa Elena. Several varieties of colorful song birds were out, insects were more plentiful, and some mammals made an appearance. We saw a couple of aguti (a large rodent that looks something like a cross between a rabbit and a guinea pig) and a coati. Though that was after we popped out for lunch at the nearby hummingbirdcafé. So I was kind of “coati-ed out” at that point. If you want to know how our lunch went, read this post.

One of the most colorful damn bugs I’ve ever seen – and I’ve seen a lot of bugs
Taken by Elani

Even though the jungles may not have been quite as teeming with wild animals as I would have liked, being able to wander through dense, vine-covered jungles and catching views through the mists of the vast rolling hills of full of trees fading off into the distance was a truly amazing way to spend the day. If you ever find yourself in that part of the world, I recommend making the trip to one – or preferably both – of these wonderful nature reserves.

Me at the Santa Elena Reserve
Taken by Elani

March 9, 2018

The Coati: mysterious jungle animal or the dick who’s trying to steal your bread pudding?

Perhaps the title gave it away, but I’d say they’re closer to the latter. In my experience, most animals have a certain mystique about them, whether deserved or not, until you get to learn about them first hand. Until actually being in Central America, a coati was something I’d only seen in zoos or on nature documentaries. My first sighting was a brief glimpse from a shuttle bus as it pulled away from the Santa Elena Reserve parking lot. I remember thinking how cool it was to see one and hoping that I would run across another one while I was in Monteverde. Well, turns out wishes do come true. Elani and I had taken a break from hiking in the Monteverde Nature Reserve to grab coffee and snacks (the bread pudding mentioned in the title), and as the server was making our cappuccinos, a coati casually strolled pasted the front door. Well, casually trundled, coatis definitely trundle as their main mode of locomotion, but I digress. Anyways, I exclaimed, “Coati!” and me and Elani dashed out the front door, camera in hand like this might be the last chance to ever see one. I’m sure the server thought we were a little nuts. But hey, we did get some decent pictures:

Yep that’s a coati alright
Taken by Elani

Who does this coati think he is anyway
Taken by Elani

After the Coati wandered off, well, trundled off, we went back, paid for our coffee, and took a seat outside to watch the hummingbirds at the feeders outside the café:

Three hummingbirds and one impostor at a feeder
Taken by Elani

It didn’t take long before I heard rustling in the tree behind me and turned to see a coati climbing down the branch that overhung the bench. We got up and moved out of his way. Seemingly unfazed that his master plan had been thwarted, he then proceeded to climb down and attempt to trundle into the gift shop next to the café. In response, the guy at that counter good naturedly shooed him off, and when he was persistent, came out with a bucket of water and splashed the little guy with some to get his point across. He gave us a smile and shrugged: I got the impression that this was not even close to the first time he had had to do that. So we sat down at another bench to watch some more hummingbirds and it wasn’t much longer another coati came up to Elani, looking very interested in her coffee. After she pointed a finger and sternly told the coati, “no!” several times, it finally got the idea and wandered off with a slightly disappointed look in search of a less well-guarded snack, stopping on the way to lick the spilled sugar water off the railing below the hummingbird feeders.

Coati scoring some sweet sweet hummingbird food
Taken by Elani

Well, there you have it. After an hour-long coffee break, the coati had moved in my mind from being an exotic animal from a faraway locale to being basically a more mild-mannered and slightly dopier version of their cousins from back home – the raccoon. We ran across another coati when we got back on our hike in the cloud forest. Though, since we didn’t have any food, this one seemed to have very little opinion as to our presence one way or the other.

Oh, speaking of raccoon relatives, another one made an appearance at the hummingbird café, the more dainty and agile olingo (kinkajou). It was a bit more wary of us human than the coatis. It seemed to mainly be interested in raiding the smaller feeder for sugar water, which it managed to do with style and grace.

All in all, the hummingbird café was actually one of the high points of our stay in Monteverde (even though the coffee and bread pudding I would say earned a solid “okay” rating) and had a greater density of animal sighting then either of the two cloud forest reserves.

March 7, 2018

Monteverde: Night Walk

So as not to let any time go to waste, we signed up for a night walk on our first night in Monteverde/Santa Elena. Night walks are guided wildlife tours through the jungle that happen – as you may have guessed – after dark. The shuttle picked us up from our hotel and dropped us off at an office on the edge of the forest right after sunset. We paid and then waited around with a group of about a dozen other tourists to start. The guide gave us the spiel (don’t wander off, no flash photos, blah blah blah…). Then he handed us each a flash light and we set off.

This was, I should say, not in one of the nature preserves or anything. I’m pretty sure some company bought a piece of undeveloped land a little outside town, made a few paths, hired some guides, and started making money.

The wildlife density was quite high. The highlights reel included: toucans, frogs, onlingos (small lemur – like relative of the raccoon), a tarantula, a tree viper, and a sloth. The photo opps were, well not great. Our guide stressed making sure everyone got a look before we busted out the cameras. Good advice, since night time photos rarely come out that well. Here’s one of Elani’s better ones of a toucan:

Toucan spotted on the night walk
Taken by Elani

Though seeing all these animals was great, the encounters felt a bit – well – scripted. The guides seemed to know where everything was almost a little too well. At one point, he hopped off the path, grabbed a specific leaf next to a stream and turned it over to reveal a tree frog. He had some good facts about that species of frog – including that it’s endemic to Costa Rica. Not that I’m complaining, it was a cool frog, and I enjoyed seeing it, not to mention it is easily the best picture of the night (in part because the guide took my phone and he was a master of cell phone photography):

Costa Rican tree frog at night
Taken by a night walk tour guild (who I’m afraid I don’t remember his name)

As another example, we saw one of the real crowd pleasers – a young two-toed sloth – as the last sighting on the way out. It seemed like a bit too good of timing to be purely coincidence. I’m not sure how they did it, though all the guides (there were several groups) had radios and were talking, and I’m sure some of the animals have their favorite spots that the guides all know about. It did detract a bit from that marvelous feeling of running across an animal by chance in the wild. Despite that, it was still a great way to see some animals in the wild and at night when some were more active. All in all, a great way to spend our first night in the cloud forest.

February 10, 2018

Wildlife Photos from Playa Copal

All in all, I’d say there are really three things to recommend a stay in the Salinas Bay area: the kiting, the views, and the wildlife. Which is by no means a criticism. Usually, Costa Rica is associated with lush tropical rain forests, but the northwest coast is actually quite dry, giving it a more deserty feel. There are plenty of cactuses interspersed with trees. I’m going to go through some of the critters my trusty photographer Elani and I saw on our stay there, focusing mostly on the one we have pictures of.

Birds were probably the most visible and stunning of the creatures we encountered. There was a host of marine birds. Magnificent frigate birds were quite common, though very hard to photograph, and it was quite common to see the pelicans diving for fish right off shore.

Of course, there were inland tropical birds as well. I went on in some length about the parrots in this post. So I’ll spare you any more other than to set the record straight and say that they are actually parakeets, not parrots. There were also a goodly number of magpie-jays flying around and making weird and varied noises to each other. One landed on the railing of our deck and is now getting his fifteen minutes of fame.

A species of small dove was quite common as well. This one had made a nest and was raising up an adorable little family in the cactus hedges that lined the road up to our room.

Speaking of nests, on a walk, Elani and I found a whole colony of what we’re pretty sure (after a bit of internet research) are montezuma oropendolas. Very beautiful crow sized birds with bright yellow tails that make hanging basket nests. Unfortunately, the birds don’t come through very well in the photo, but the nests were quite impressive.

Montezuma oropendola nests
Taken by Elani

The mammals were a little less prominent – or possibly more sneaky – than the birds. We saw some sort of possum one night, and heard the raccoons digging around in the trash on a number of occasions, though we only saw them once, in the trash of course. There was an interesting type of lanky squirrel that Elani was able to photograph.

Of the sea creatures I saw, the rays were most impressive. I only saw them while out kiteboarding, though, and didn’t get any pictures. In the time I was there, I saw five eagle rays, and four of what I’m pretty sure were cownose rays. Crabs, though not quite as impress as the rays, were a bit more cooperative photography models. Elani ran across a rather photogenic specimen at low tide. This is actually my favorite of the wildlife pics she got.

This hermit crab was a somewhat shier subject and it took a bit of patience to get him to come out of his shell – figuratively and literally.

The lizards made a good showing in Playa Copal as well. Of course there were tons of geckos, including at least two making their home in our room. They were fairly plain, light gray and around four inches long including their tails. And they were noisy! I’m not really sure how a lizard the size of my index finger can make so much noise. Anyways, they only come out at night, so getting a picture of a roughly wall colored lizard in low light was kind of a fool’s errand. There were two species of lizard that frequented the road down to the beach; a little red cheeked one, who you’ve see before in an earlier post , but I’ll include again, because, well. he was quite a looker.

And secondly, a little variety of skink. This one we found warming up for the day right by our front door.

Then there was the iguanas. Back home in the Pacific Northwest, it’s such a rare surprise to see even a tiny lizard that to see regularly see lizards measuring well over a foot scurrying around the walkways to my room kind of blew my mind. This one was particularly fond of sunning itself on the roof of the pool hut, which could be seen from our back porch.

Iguana on the roof of the pool hut
Taken by Elani

But really, you didn’t have to leave the room to see pretty interesting animals. Of course, there were the scorpions I found in the shower. They were some of the more exciting and less fun of the creatures that made their way to our room or back porch. There was also a tailless whip-scorpion, which I was actually pretty excited to see, but Elani was less enthusiastic about.

To give a sense of scale, his body was a bit over an inch long. She warmed up to him once I named him Heraldo Rodriguez (there no joke to that name, I just like it). Also, Heraldo was chilling on the ceiling about 10 feet off the ground, so there was not much to be done about him. Some other visitors included several large green grasshoppers, who could have passed for leaves if they didn’t insist on flying full speed into windows and deck chairs, this friendly praying mantis…

…and the largest insect we saw, by length but probably not by weight, this walking stick insect. We were sort of amazed that something so spindly didn’t just blow away in the constant gusts of wind there. But it looks like he managed. We agreed to both make stupid faces for the picture, but he coped out last minute. Moral of that story is don’t trust a stick bug.

Well, that pretty much covers our animal adventures for our two week stay in Playa Copal. Costa Rica is known for its wildlife so I’m sure there will be more from our next stops. Stay tuned.