Other Animals

Sleeping gaudy leaf frog (Agalychnis callidryas) - hooray!



Another of those inch-long ants I mentioned ages ago. I found this one in the house. It is actually a type of wasp, confusingly called ‘velvet ants’, and the females are wingless and can inflict a painful sting.



Lovely tree lizard (Nyrops polylepis?), or anole to those in the know, and a smaller lizard.



A pizote (white-nosed coati) crossing the road



...and Osvaldo and Gloria bring home the plantain

Kimba the Ocelot

Undoubtedly the highlight of the week was meeting this beautiful ocelot, Kimba. She was found orphaned in the forest two years ago and brought to this house where she now lives.

Sadly, she is fettered, but was very curious and playful, thus leading me to believe she is very happy. Her teeth and paws were quite intimidating, her coat was lovely and soft and I know she was a cat because my eyes started watering alergically.

Leafhopper Focus

Not enough people talk about leafhoppers in pubs or even in their own houses, so here is a collage of Costa Rican leafhoppers to give you something to think about.

The ones in the UK are much drabber of course, but they are there. There’s probably one burying into your foot right now where it will lay many eggs. No, but seriously, most are less than 10mm long. Why not strike up a conversation right now with the person sitting next to you? Just put a pencil in your mouth, look whimsically into the air and say ‘did you know, leafhoppers are very interesting…’

Waiting for a Hummingbird…

A regular afternoon visitor to the flowers at the back of the house is a Little Hermit hummingbird, thus I decided to try and get a picture of the tiny thing. So I waited… and waited… and waited… and waited… and then did something else, thus this enigmatically titled section.

Look here. The contrast between the stillness of the tyre and the blurred trees – due to a long exposure - gives the impression of a windy day, which is what it was.



I noticed a tiny lizard on the wall in front of me. They were quite skittish so I had to move slowly. The orangeyness is due to an alga on the wall. I was experimenting with high ISO settings (3200) to give a very grainy effect, which I thought might be good for black and white shots. I forgot to change it back for this, hence the low quality. Ooh, a scarlet-rumped tanager, but damn that branch in the way. They are normally in thick vegetation so this is the best I’ve got.



Um… a stool. And the strangely branched Cecropia tree. Oh, and a papaya leaf. The odd effect (shadow) is because I hand-held the camera, used a long exposure (to expose the dusk sky) and fill flash to expose the leaf. The shadow is created by my movement after the flash fired.



Here is the back of the ranch, annotated for your enhanced enjoyment

Windy Birthday Week

On the pop last week in Cuajiniquil (Kwa-heeni-kill)

Then there was a gusanero reunion in Santa Rosa, you can probably see my pasty mug there at the back.

Ecological wizard, Dan Janzen, gave a lecture (in Spanish) about funding, work quality, biodiversity, DNA barcoding, parasitoids, new species and house-keeping. It was good. And he managed to fit in a quick Rolf Harris impression - amazing! Oh, and some deer at Santa Rosa

In order to make a better case for funding, which pays the gusaneros wages, we need to increase the number of new species we find, which means searching higher up trees, lower down in herbs and grasses, and on plants not normally investigated, such as epiphytes.

On the 4th of February, I did this at the back of the house. It was pissing down at the time.

The day after, unfortunately, I also had a birthday. The occasion was marked by much wind and some bastard nicking the radio from the rearing barn. No more 80s soft rock boohoo! On the plus side, Gloria brought some sponge cake and we went to a friend of Osvaldo’s and a guitar was there, waiting to be plucked. Osvaldo is just pretending of course

There were very high winds on Thursday night, so much so that I thought the windows were going to burst! Instead, however, the electricity went down and was out all day and night on Friday. So I sat in the dark contemplating the unity of all things, and then ventured outside. I shone my torch into a tree and two beady red eyes glowed back, those of a common opossum, which I present here in photographic form.

Oof! Too many pictures of me. I´ll have to sort that out.

Lovely Larvae (pt. i)

Here I am in the rearing barn (la galeron) dunging out the caterpillar bags. Some of the bigger ones produce maltezer-sized poo-pellets (in case you were wondering). They will be replenished with fresh food or, if they’ve pupated, moved into the ‘pupae’ section.

And what you´ve all been waiting for... a selection of larvae: from left to right, Acharia horrida, Archeoprepona demophoon, Colobura dirce, Narcosius Samson, Pachydota saduca, and Parasa sandrae. Acharia horrida inflicts an ‘extraordinarily painful sting when touched’. I don’t intend to find out.

Check out them urticating spines!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Last night Osvaldo took me to Cuajiniquil, his home town, for a beer where I was pleased to learn that ´only two´ means as much in Spanish as it does in English. Consequently, water is very appealing today! Here is me hard at work in the house amid jars of parasitized caterpillars (this is not last night)



For most of this week, it absolutely wazzed it down. However, in between torrents, a gorgeous rainbow emerged. I couldn’t fit it all in one frame so I had to stitch two together. The final image puts the house in a bit more context as well.

The road continues to the little village of Dos Rios. That’s ‘Two Rivers’ you know. Most of the rural villages around here have grandiose names taken from far off places such as Nueva Zealandia, Caribe, Buenos Aires, Brasilia and Los Angeles. This view is from Dos Rios and is of the volcano Cacao, the opposite side of the valley to Rincon. The forest edge is from the road to Brasilia, where we stopped to collect larvae (pictures in a future episode, oh yes!).

On Tuesday, Osvaldo & I went about 40km north to La Cruz to get gas for the landcruiser and ventured back on the picturesque coast road to Cuajiniquil (below).