Quetzals, lizards, & tarantulas

Sunday – 23 July

Well, as this was our first full week together here, there were lots of new things to do. On Monday, Norma and Niall, as well as the institute’s director’s kids Adrian and Anna-Sophia, all came along to the Monteverde Reserve to help some of my students and I lay out a new handicapped accessible trail. The trail is short (only about a half-kilometer long), but much of it cuts a new route through virgin cloud forest, so it is quite a challenge to work with survey equipment through all the vines and undergrowth. The kids all enjoyed the process immensely, especially the crawling, sometimes on hands & knees, through the mud & moss over fallen trees and through some of the densest jungle to be found anywhere.

On Wenesday, Niall had his first day at school, at the Cloud Forest School, a local bilingual private school (www.cloudforestschool.org). The school serves primarily local Tico kids (about 95%), and is pretty small by American standards (+/- 200 students in K-12). I’m on the North American foundation board for the school that helps to raise funds, and I’ve been involved with the school for about 4 years since our students at the institute did some design work on the school’s campus. As one of the main emphases of the school is environmental education, we’ve been looking forward to Niall having the opportunity to attend the CFS for years, but even so, there’s always a certain amount of trepidation over how he’ll react to anything new that is this much of a change. Fortunately, everything seems to have worked out well—so far, he loves it! He seems to be making friends quickly, and is enjoying even the more challenging aspects (learning Spanish!).

On Friday, Niall had a short day (all Fridays are ½ days at his school), so after school, he and Norma came up to the Institute for a lecture by a local biologist (Richard Whitten) who happens to have the largest private collection of insects and other arthropods (spiders, scorpions, etc.) in the world. He brought along lots of samples from his collection, and gave a nice presentation aimed at a very broad audience. Even the youngest kids got a big kick out of his stories. We then got to share something with him—one of our students had found a tarantula in a shoe earlier in the day, so we brought him out for a little show & tell. We then learned just how harmless tarantulas are, no matter how creepy they look. Apparently, the hairs on their bums are much more dangerous than the fangs they bite with ((they can cause a severe allergic reaction in some people, though he never did mention just how a tarantula might try to use those hairs!). By the time we were done, almost everyone had handled the little tarantula and let it walk around on their hands or arms, some even on their heads! Yes, that's actually Norma he's crawling around on in the photo... Pretty cool.

Outside of school, Niall has been a bit on the bored side at times, but that all ended late this week with the capture of a handsome green fence lizard. Instead of living in a cage most of the time, however, the lizard now travels almost everywhere around the house with him, sitting on his sholders, his head, or clinging to his shirt. For some reason, instead of running, he seems perfectly content to hang on for the ride and see what fortune brings. He has been christened "Garfield," after the cat, for two reasons. First, he is fat, like the cat; and second, he seems to have the same sly grin on his face as Garfield does in the cartoon (at least to the extent that a lizard can have any expression on his face!).

This weekend has been fairly laid back, with no big plans. On Saturday, we did some shopping and Norma began to get a hang for driving the car. After we had lunch with one of Niall’s teachers at the local coffee coop, we were amazed to see a pair of Quetzals in the trees right outside in plain view. These birds are absolutely amazing in their coloration, with brilliant scarlet breasts, emerald green heads, and two foot long royal blue & green tail feathers. Then, just as we had gotten over the shock of seeing quetzals right out in the open (Norma’s never seen one in 4 visits to Monteverde), a grey fox walked up to within 20 feet of us! Sometimes, the best stuff is right on the road, not way back on a trail in the deepest part of the could forest… In addition to the quetzal & the fox, we all saw a sloth and a whole troop of coatimundis this week too.

Today, we had a pretty lazy Sunday. We started out with our regular Sunday walk. Today we went about 4 miles out toward Canitas to the northwest. We stopped for coffee at the coffee coop again, and finally found some clothes hooks and towel bars for the house, at very reasonable prices. In the afternoon, we went to a place I had walked by a few weeks ago near Las Nubes that claimed to have trout fishing. When we first got there, Niall was a bit disappointed to find that fishing consisted of a little hand line into a pond about the size of a small swimming pool. It was a lot like fishing for catfish that he tried down at the beach in Playa Hermosa in March, and much to his dismay, didn’t catch anything. The water also seemed a bit murkey for trout, but sure enough, when he dropped the line in with a little bit of bread dough on the hook, wham! About a foot-long rainbow trout slammed into it with great gusto. Fifteen minutes and three nice trout on the bank later, and we were ready to have trout dinner. While it wasn’t exactly the same ambiance as fishing the Henry’s Fork in Idaho or the Beaverkill home in New York, Niall was one happy trout fisherman! The next best part was they cleaned and cooked our fish up on the spot, all for $4.00 a fish. And they tasted great too!

That’s about it for this week in Costa Rica, land of a multitude of surprising critters, right at your doorstep…