Unexpected Rivals on the Lagoon

 Early in our visit to the Caribbean side of the country, we took a canoe ride across a lagoon on the Rio Estrella and learned about an interesting rivalry that I never would have guessed had we not been told. This further reinforces the notion that nature is beautiful on the surface and red in tooth and claw the instant you look a little closer.

 One frequent sight along the banks of the lagoon were Northern Jacanas. We had seen Jacanas in Africa, but these were a different group altogether, the common feature being that they have enormous pads on their feet that let them walk across loose vegetation floating on the tops of lagoons which lets them wander out further on the water and escape predators. When not doing a Jesus impression, they are also notable in that the males hatch and raise the eggs and they have a polyandrous mating cycle. Below is a proud father herding his brood of chicks along the water surface.

 In the same area we also saw several Purple Gallinule, also known as "swamp hens," which are very striking and beautifully coloured birds. Unexpectedly they are also omnivorous and one of their favorite meals in the area is Jacana eggs and chicks, such that Jacanas will frequently attack them on sight. So while they look lovely to us, they are the arch enemy of the Jacana and an unexpectedly sinister sighting in such a peaceful place.

Snakes Everywhere (except in sight)

Costa Rica is home to 137 species of snake, but before most of you get nervous, the good news is that only 20 of them are deadly poisonous. For those of you that are still nervous, the Fer de Lance is a meter long and drab brown while being staggeringly deadly and of course constrictor snakes don't need venom because they're designed to choke the life out of you.

Nearly every walk would start with Mario reminding us "Don't walk ahead of me, don't go off the path, look wherever you put your feet, and try not to touch anything" and then we'd hike in the bush for 3-6 hours. To illustrate the point, the photo below is a typical patch of path side rain forest which (may or may not but quite likely does) contain several dozen snakes.

 After all those warnings, we only saw 2 wild snakes in our entire visit and when you see the photo of this one, you may wonder how we ever missed it, but its only as thick as your finger and a foot or so long. And horrifically poisonous. This eyelash pitviper was a few dozen feet up the side of a tree at Cahuita and is one of the most dangerous snakes in Costa Rica.

 

 By comparison, this Cloudy Snaileater is a non-venomous snake, which is just as well since we encountered it at night when one of our group nearly walked into it hanging at face height. It was similarly a little over a foot long and as thick as your finger, so finding these buggers is more than a bit difficult.

Sloths

 Sloths are quite common in Costa Rica, but can be surprisingly difficult to spot. Since they spend so much time nearly motionless it can be tricky to locate them, and the forests are full of termite mounds and clumps of leaves that look very similar to resting sloths. There are 2 species in the country, including the Hoffman's Two-Toed Sloth shown below. These are allegedly the rarer of the two species, but we saw many more of them by far.

 The three-toed sloth (fun fact, all sloths have 3 toes, but the Hoffman's has 2 claws on its arms and old naming conventions die hard) was less common in our sightings and very distinctively different with its face mask, darker fur, and stripes on the back of the male. There are a surprising number of taxonomic differences between the two species, including the very strange exception that Hoffman's have 5-7 neck vertebra while the three-toed has 8-9. Funnily enough, they are the only mammals on Earth (along with the manatee...?) to have more than 7 neck vertebrae. Humans, blue whales, and giraffes? 7 each.

 Other fun facts about sloths:

• they have a symbiotic relationship with both an algae that lives in their fur and a species of moth which spends its entire life cycle with the sloth.
• despite having a low energy-output lifestyle, they only sleep 9-10 hours a day
• they only come down from the trees to defecate in a hole which they dig with their butt and cover afterwards.
• they are ridiculously adorable when they're babies.

Toucans!

 Our trip to Ecuador was a bit of a bust for toucans, yielding only a single photo of an unidentified bird, so it was a huge relief for us to see toucans nearly every day of our visit to Costa Rica. The keel-billed toucan you see below posed very nicely for us completely out of tree cover on one of our first walks and set the expectations for use nicely.

With two coasts separated by lofty mountains, Costa Rica frequently begets variant species found only on the Pacific or Caribbean (get used to this concept, there's lots of variants in the posts to come - Costa Rica is a checklist paradise) such as this chestnut-mandibled toucan from the Pacific side.

 Rounding out our set, my "favorite bird I never knew existed until I saw it" was the aracari. This toucan-relative (also with 2 coastal variants) really stole the show for me when a group of 7 or so collared aracari collected on a feeder at the lodge "La Quinta de Sarapiqui." Their striking plumage and gregarious nature really won me over and put them near the top of my list for neat animal sightings on the trip.

 Our guide Mario commented several times that he felt he had done a good job when people were calm about seeing something by the end of the tour that had really excited them at the start. While we NEVER got bored of toucans, we did gradually spend more time enjoying them and less time panicking about getting the perfect picture.

Team and Transport

 Before we bury you all photos of birds and sloths, we think its really important to take a moment and thank the two guys without whom we wouldn't have seen a fraction of the things we did.

Our driver Nicolas (left) and our guide Mario (right) did everything they could, every single day, to make our trip unforgettable. They were both endlessly patient with our requests to stop along every roadside to take photographs and answer all our questions about nature, politics, geography and their country. Having worked together many times over the years, they joke around together like a pair of brothers and quickly got a group of strangers laughing and chatting along with them.

 Our transportation throughout the trip was this little while bus which are quite common sights as tourist vehicles in Costa Rica. It carried all of us, along with our assorted gear, up hill and down dale from the ocean shore to the heights of the cloud forest. Weirdly enough (though not shown from this angle) there is a driver-side door, but the front seat on the right has to be reached by getting in the side door and then vaulting over a platform and into the seat.

 There were 6 of us at our peak and there aren't too many photos of the lot, but I was very happy that Mario had a fellow guide take this picture of us all during our first hike in Cahuita national park. From left to right we have Lisa, Sue, Sam, Mario, Kathryn, Janet and George.

Lisa and Janet were a daughter-mother team from California and Michegan. Sam and Sue were a son-mother team from Montana. Both mothers were very keen on botany and knew a lot about the various plants and flowers of the country. Lisa and Sam were both young and funny folks. We had a great little group and each of them has a special place in our memories of our time in Costa Rica.

Costa Rica

We recently returned from a 3 week getaway to Costa Rica, a small country in Central America. While there, we had a 14-day eco-tour in the countryside, followed by 4 nights in the capital San Jose. There was also an extra day on either side in Phoenix, Arizona to allow for flight timing. Around the size of West Virginia, Costa Rica offers a wide range of ecosystems and environments since it has 2 coastal areas separated by a series of volcanic mountains.

 We traveled with Wild Planet Adventures, and the map below was lifted from their website to give you an idea of the route we took and the wide range of places we visited. While we chose to do the entire tour, there were shorter options available and some of our group only going as far as Carara or Manuel Antonio and only Kathryn and I went all the way to Corcovado.

Costa Rica is a very friendly and safe place to travel with a predominantly Spanish-speaking Catholic populace. They boast a 95% literacy rate, disbanded their military in the 1960s, are proud of their country and democracy, and are rated as one of the happiest countries on Earth. However, no nation is perfect and Costa Rica has problems with regional poverty, urban congestion, inequality for its indigenous peoples, and a very high reliance on trucking for all materials transportation after the railways were shut down by a former President (who happened to own a trucking company).

We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves there, and would highly recommend Costa Rica to fellow travelers who want to experience a new part of the world :)