Monkeys & Chickens

Monday – 31 July

The past week has been pretty routine here in Monteverde, at least to the degree that we’re now pretty settled in to our house, Niall is comfortably in school each day, and I’m still teaching at the Institute. We did get our second set of visitors on Thursday evening, as David Myers (one of my co-faculty on our course at the institute) and his daughter & her friend arrived for the next week or so. Things are a little cramped at mealtime, but otherwise we’ve got lots of room, and the hot water even seems to hold out fine.

It has been a good week on the wildlife spotting front. We’ve been seeing quetzals with almost annoying regularity (4 years and we never say one, now they seem to be hanging out by the local coop every day in plain view!), and our local Hummingbird population is skyrocketing now that the word seems to be out about our feeders. We’re going through about ½ gallon of sugar water every other day now! I also finally got a few good photographs of some howler monkeys while working on our trail at the Monteverde Reserve. For an animal that is so unbelievably loud, and not particularly bothered by human presence, they are surprisingly difficult to get a good clear look at in range of a camera. As an example, the one living just down the hill from our house (the one that wakes us up almost every morning at 5:45) I still haven’t actually seen... /the last cool picture is of a hummingbird on her nest in the Reserve. This one is a Purple-throated Mountain-gem, and they actually put their nests of moss and lichen together with spiderwebs that they eat and then regurgitate as a kind of glue!

As usual, most of the extracurricular activity takes place on the weekend, so this week we have several interesting things to report on. The first new cultural experience was attending our first ever communal chicken slaughtering (vegetarians & PETA members may now skip to the next entry) at Russ & Noemi Danao’s house. Noemi is the director of the Institute, and when they arrived here in February they thought having a few egg laying chickens would be a great way to teach their kids about food production, etc. Unfortunately, the person who sold them the chicks either didn’t have a clue about chickens, or more than likely just didn’t care that he was selling a couple of gringos “broilers” instead of “layers” (and mostly roosters, not hens to boot!). So needless to say, they now have some very nice fat chickens that don’t lay eggs, and at some point you have to “harvest” the food in order to eat it. When Noemi “invited” us to help, a sort of morbid curiosity if nothing else was enough to elicit a somewhat cautious “uhhh sure, why not…” Besides, this is rural Costa Rica, and chickens in the yard, and eventually on the dinner table, are unquestionably a deeply seated facet of local culture. So off we went on a damp Saturday afternoon to take part in preparing two chickens for dinner.

The two chickens in question were separated from the rest of the flock in their own cage, in solitary confinement as it were, unwittingly waiting for their culinary orders. Also gathered, clearly seeing this as a festive occasion, were 7 kids, ages 5-9, the six boys at least eagerly anticipating lots of blood and gore. The parents (five of us) got all the appropriate materials and tools together and exchanged gallows humor preparing for the messy but unavoidable process of transforming live chickens into coq au vin, Buffalo wings, and arroz con pollo. The procedure for butchering a chicken on this small scale is clearly something of a lost art among most people living in the United States, including present company, and unfortunately we didn’t have a local Tico here to guide us, so fell back on what all gringos do in this situation—we went on-line and found directions! The University of Florida Extension has a wonderful set of almost comical directions that sounds remarkably like the directions for assembling Christmas toys made in China at http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/AA188. Like the typical Chinese toy directions, there are, of course, almost no pictures or diagrams illustrating just what one is supposed to be slicing, grabbing, etc. in the process of “killing and dressing” your chicken. My favorite step describes the “removal of viscera” in terms that would lead one to believe that this is something most people should already know, kind of like mixing ingredients for a cake or downloading software! I’m now contemplating a new blog with real pictures and FAQ’s for the rest of us novices who need to kill and dress their homegrown poultry!

Without going into all the gory details (sorry, I couldn’t resist that metaphor!), our chicken slaughter was quite the event. As the weather deteriorated into a steady downpour for most of the afternoon, it reminded me of one of those classic scenes in the movies where everyone is waiting in the rain for the hanging to occur. The kids all watched in morbid fascination, and we used the most humane technique suggested, but it even so it was still a bit like a public execution. That said, no one swore off eating chicken after witnessing the somewhat violent demise of the two birds; and none of these kids will be so naive as to think their food just comes magically from the the grocery store!

Mostly the whole process was just messy, what with blood, feathers, innards, etc. all needing to part with the more familiar meaty sections of the carcass that typically gets eaten. It also takes quite a bit of time, with 2 adults intimately involved and 3 others in supporting roles for almost 3 hours! After the initial excitement, the kids seemed to find it all pretty boring, and managed to watch an entire screening of Peter Pan before the birds were finally ready for cooking!

Sunday was a much more wholesome day. In the morning, Norma, Niall, and I all went for a nice hike up to the Catarata de San Luis, a beatiful 80 meter high waterfall that drops from the Monteverde plateau down into the San Luis valley. The hike is only about 2 kilometers each way, and the trail is very nicely maintained. Norma characterizes it as “adventure-lite,” meaning the setting is wonderfully wild, and there is clearly a mild element of risk (if you do something really stupid), but you probably won’t get too wet or too muddy, or bitten by anything nasty, or anything else that you wouldn’t reasonably expect on a hike in the woods at home. In this case, the trail wanders uphill through coffee fields to the mouth of the San Luis gorge, then upriver for a bout a kilometer of walking on boulders and over small bridges to reach the base of a rather spectacular waterfall. Even in this enchanting and relatively benign setting, Niall can always manage to find something to get our adrenaline flowing, and characteristically managed to pinch a finger between rocks when we reached the waterfall. After deciding he hadn’t been mortally wounded (you never would have known from the howling and dancing around!), and Norma and I had re-gathered our wits, we were almost relaxed again by the time we reached the car at the end of our walk… Just in time too, as the rain began to fall hard within minutes of getting home. After the midday downpour, we all spent the rest of the day planting seeds in new parts of our garden. We now have cilantro, lettuce, and green beans that we’re picking from my planting 6 weeks ago or so (at least those that the horse didn’t eat), and we now hope to have spinach, tomatoes, and basil in another month or two.

That pretty well wraps up our latest week in the cloud forest. Next week is the last of my teaching, so we’ll soon be entering a new phase of our stay here… so stay tuned!