In search of unknown fruit

  I love fruit and in Costa Rica I've tried quite a few that were new to me. Let's start with what is a favorite fruit and one I've only seen in Costa Rica: caimito. It's a sphere, purple on the outside and shading from purple to white on the inside. I like to eat it with a spoon as the texture is a bit like custard. A lot of Costa Ricans don't like it because it has some latex which makes your lips sticky. A tip I haven't had a chance to try yet: after eating caimito rub your lips with some oil to remove the latex. I find the flavor so beguiling that I don't mind some stickiness.

   Did you know that the cashew nut we eat grows on the outside of a fruit? Every nut represents a fruit, perhaps explaining what cashews are so expensive. Native to Brazil, Ticos and other Spanish speakers call the fruit and nut marañón.  People make a juice of the fruit and it's one fruit I just don't like. It smells bad to me. I'll stick to eating the delicious nuts.

 

   The following photo shows two fruits: the red manzana de agua or water apple and mamón. Water apples, originally from the Malay peninsula and nearby areas, are quite bland and juicy. I guess they would be really good to quench a thirst on a very hot day. Not a frequent need in Monteverde so I don't eat them often. Mamón, a South American native,  has a crisp shell around a large seed. In between the seed and the shell is a small layer of tart flesh. It's fun to peel the shell off with your fingernail and pop the insides in your mouth so you can gnaw the fruit off the seed. The fruit doesn't come off the seed easily so it's a good way to pass some time.

 Here's another picture of water apples, a grenadilla and some green jocotes. A fruit from the cashew family originally from Central America, jocotes are now also cultivated in Asia. You eat jocotes whole, skin and all. Perhaps I would like them better if Costa Ricans let them ripen but here they are sold while still green so they are tart. I think maybe people sprinkle salt on the them, the way they do with unripe mangoes.
  Grenadilla is a fruit related to passion fruit. The outside has a crisp, papery layer. Inside the many small seeds are each inside a small packet of juicy fruit.  I scoop the insides into a blender and run at top speed briefly. Next I use a sieve to remove the seed particles. The seeds are edible so a few bits of seeds getting through isn't a problem. Then I make a smoothy with some yogurt, sugar, and ice. It's very aromatic and quite similar to passion fruit.

 The following fruit is the one that inspired me to write this post. One of my English students brought some as a gift for me from her family farm. It is called rose apple or manzana de rosa. I've never seen this fruit for sale. It's  peculiar in that the seeds are inside a hollow space. The fruit is a bit crunchy and has an astonishing perfume like roses.

Rainbow season

In Monteverde, especially in January and February, there is often both mist and sun. Something I didn't realize before living here is that rainbows in the morning slowly sink as the sun rises and rainbows in the afternoon rise as the sun gets lower. Of course one needs long-lasting rainbows to notice this. Here are a few photos I took this rainbow season, which sadly, is now over.
  From our house.

 

Over the shopping center.

  

From a farm in lower San Luis.

From a coffee farm in upper San Luis, a rainbow that is about to set.

A small selection of insects

  I find insects quite fascinating. That's a good thing for anyone that lives in the tropics because there are a lot of insects about. (I had less positive feelings about the scorpion in our bathroom last night, but that's a different story.) On a recent walk in the Santa Elena reserve, we saw several particularly interesting insects. First was this pair of dung beetles rolling their ball of dung along the forest floor. They were in the cleared area next to the path, heading for a dead end with a 10 cm/4 inch cliff looming ahead so I used a leaf to transfer them over to the leaf litter farther from the trail.

Then we saw this very large insect trucking along at a phenomenal rate of speed. A friend who knows about such things said it is a species of cerambycidae or long horned beetle. Note for future reference: beetles with long antennae are likely to be cerambycidae. This one was over 10 cm. or 4 inches long.

Morpho butterflies are quite easy to see in many places in Costa Rica including Monteverde. Their iridescent blueness and their crazy flight pattern never ceases to lift my heart. It's quite unusual to see one perched with it's wings open. Usually you see the camouflaged under wing.

Moths, on the other hand, are often sitting around waiting to be photographed during the day while they sleep. I like this subtle elegance of this fuzzy individual.

 I wish I had some fabric printed with this this motif of  spots within circles.

The best thing about looking for insects in the tropics is that you never know what you will see next because there are so many different species.

The other side of the ball

   One of the fun things about stitching temari is that not all sides of the ball can be seen at once. If one doesn't do so well on one side of ball, it can be displayed with the preferred side visible and the other side as unseen as the dark side of the moon.
   I just completed a 16 face ball with kiku or chrysanthemum stitch in the four hexagons and the other shapes filled in with swirl stitch.

I tried both solid color swirls as above and swirls where I lightened the color as I got close to the center of the shape as in the next picture.

I enjoy trying different color combinations of different sides too. (Perhaps I just have a low tolerance for boredom.) I also tried different greens with the same blue on the various kiku sides.

This was my favorite color combination.

The colors of this ball were inspired by a little bird found in Monteverde. While not extremely rare, it's very difficult to see because it hides in clumps of mistletoe high in trees. It's the Elegant Euphonia (euphonia elegantissima).

The nitty-gritty: I learned how to mark this ball by following a tutorial in the Temari Challenge Yahoo group. The marking is called C8 to pentagons and hexagons. The 16 faces consist of 4 large hexagons and 12 pentagons. Thanks again to Joan Z., who led the tutorial.

Where are all the sloths?

   Considering that sloths are one of the most common mammals in the tropical forest, they are surprisingly difficult to see. A study cited by Mark Wainwright in his excellent Natural History of Costa Rican Mammals found that sloths accounted for two-thirds the biomass of terrestrial mammals in a study area in Panama. Despite their abundance, it's not easy to see a sloth, especially the nocturnal Hoffman's Two-toed Sloth (Choloepus hoffmanni), the only sloth species found in the Monteverde area. Consider this sloth sleeping less than 3 meters (9 feet) from our bedroom window.

 It was mid-afternoon before we noticed it was there. I don't feel quite so lacking in observational skills after reading in Wainwright's book that " Biologists have found that even individuals that have been precisely radio-located can be impossible to see" because they like to spend the day sleeping in the middle of liana tangles.
  So it's always fun to get a really good view of a sloth. Just looking at a sleeping sloth makes me feel like taking a nap.

 One way to see a sloth is to go on a twilight walk with a guide. Guides often search out a sloth before the tour and sloths are apt to become active around dusk, making them easier to see. The easiest way to see a sloth is to know someone caring for a rescued baby. Babies sometimes fall from their mother and are abandoned. Caring for a baby sloth is a huge commitment as baby sloths stay with their mothers for up to two years.

   Even though two-toes sloths are generally nocturnal, this one was active during the day. Perhaps that special flower was tasty enough to wake up for.

Orioles before breakfast, motmots before dinner

   In our annual migration as birdwatchers, we have returned to Monteverde, Costa Rica to escape Wisconsin's cold. Although it can be cool and misty here in January due to the altitude, today was perfect for being outside in shirtsleeves. Before breakfast I spotted another migrant, a Baltimore oriole. I wonder if it's one that delighted us with its song in Wisconsin's summer.

This isn't a photo of the one I saw this morning although it was probably in the same tree near our house. We've been too busy unpacking and organizing to do bird photography so the photos in this post are from Mr. Rududu's archives. During the day I put out the fruit platform and soon had birds coming to it. The first to arrive were the Blue-gray tanagers.

Before dinner, the Blue-crowned motmot showed up for his (or her) last minute snack just before dark. The motmots are surprisingly regular about the times they come to eat. Last year we had a nesting pair that came twice a day every day. I couldn't really see the details at dusk today, but this is what the bird looks like in better light.

Ah, it's so nice to be back in Monteverde!

Mountain of death?

   This past weekend we went to Cerro de la Muerte in southern Costa Rica. Many tourists wrongly assume the highest mountain pass on the Inter-American Highway is called the mountain of death because of the condition of the road. The road is quite good now and the name comes from earlier times when people walked or rode horses from their hot, lowland homes and sometimes died from hypothermia in the mountains when they over-nighted at chilly high elevations. Fortunately, just before we pulled out of the driveway I decided to run back into the house and grab a wool stocking cap and gloves which I ended up wearing most of the time. We were birding at elevations of 2200-3640 meters (7218-11,942 feet). Even in the tropics it is cold up that high.
   My "target bird" — the one I most wanted to see on this trip—was the Long-tailed Silky Flycatcher. I don't know how we missed it on our other trip to this area, because it was almost the first bird we saw when we got out of the car and we saw it very frequently for the entire 5 day trip.

    Sometimes birds were hard to see due to fog. This was the way it looked when I saw my first Silky. There's a reason they call them cloud forests.

   We stayed at Savegre Hotel in San Gerardo de Dota and were extremely pleased with our cabin, the food, and the extensive trail system. The primary cloud forest above the lodge is made up of mostly oaks but if you are used to oak forests in the U.S., you will find they look very different in the tropics. Notice that it can be sunny in the cloud forest.

Tropical trees often don't have branches until an incredible height and this tree was so tall I couldn't get any of its branches in the photo. This particular Quercus bumelioides was named tree of the year in 2010 by InBio, Costa Rica's National Institute for Biodiversity.

    Many people go to San Gerardo de Dota to see the Resplendent Quetzal. We saw quite of few and enjoyed seeing them fly high above us. Easier photo subjects were the wonderfully comical Acorn Woodpeckers that come to the lodge's garden to eat bananas at the feeder.

   We were amused by how these Sulfur-winged Parakeets liked to sit so close to each other.

Continuing the humor theme, check out the "beard" on this ferocious little ball of fluff. He's the Talamancan version of the Volcano Hummingbird, one of the smaller hummingbirds in Costa Rica. It's hard to believe that such a tiny bird can live in the cold páramo above the elevation where forests can grow.

Forest abstracts

Among the many organisms growing on cloud forest trees are a multitude of fungi and lichens. They can make very beautiful abstract designs.

Home sweet home

   As we approach the beginning of the rainy season, many birds in the Monteverde area are starting their nesting. Finding good real estate is not easy in Monteverde, even for birds. Cavity dwelling birds need a large tree with a rotten center that they can excavate. We recently saw this Resplendent Quetzal working on this nest hole.

Here's a picture taken a few years ago of a Quetzal emerging from his nest hole.

Both parents of this species work on the nest, incubate the eggs and feed the chicks. The Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve and others provide artificial nest boxes that are sometimes used by Quetzals. The nest boxes are filled with wood chips so the birds can "excavate" them.
   In San Luis we recently saw a female Masked Tityra working on a nest in a dead snag as the male perched nearby.

For the last several years we've seen several species nesting or attempting to nest in the same trunk. The top of this tree broke off this season and its potential as a nest site must be almost over as it continues to rot away.
   Of course most birds don't want their nest location known and the cunning little nests of hummingbirds are particularly hard to find.  Besides being small they look like a little ball of moss, just another of many epiphytes growing on most cloud forest trees and plants. By the way, any hummingbird sitting on a nest is a female as the males don't contribute anything to the nesting effort. This is a female Purple-throated Mountain Gem.

   Other birds also camouflage their nests, such as this Slaty-backed Nightengale Thrush, a cloud forest bird that is difficult to see but whose beautiful song is frequently heard.

Birds generally will sit very tight on their nest without moving in the hopes of not revealing their location.  Too much disturbance by curious people is very stressful for birds and could result in them abandoning a nest. The photos in this post were taken through a telescope so as to not disturb the birds.
  Even the ubiquitous Clay-colored Robin has a beautifully hidden nest.

Finding nests is a challenge—Mr. Rududu is very pleased if he gets a few good nest photos in a year.

Keep looking down

  Walking in the cloud forest, one tends to look up to see the majestic trees—and the birds and monkeys. Looking down can be very rewarding as well. One can see interesting leaves that have fallen.

 In the tropics,  most of the nutrients and energy are stored in the forest itself.   Fallen material recycles very quickly so the soil is thin and not rich. (That's why cutting down a tropical forest and trying to grow crops or pasture on it is not a sustainable idea.)
  One might see flowers that fell from a vine at the top of the canopy, or perhaps a very large seed.

 The most interesting category of fallen objects are bits of branch. Most branches in the cloud forest are loaded with epiphytes, or plants that use another plant as a support. They are not parasitic.  Over 400 species of orchids live in the Monteverde area and most are tiny and live high in trees. Intense winds cause many branches to break, creating orchid viewing possibilities without the bother and danger of tree climbing. This piece of branch is a miniature garden of several species, including orchids.

   This fallen branch had one of the larger species of orchids found in the area. The flowers were about 1 inch/2.5 cm across.

Odd happenings

  Last week seemed to be the week for odd nature sightings. Consider the Long-Tailed Weasel (Mustela frenata) that ran up to my foot while I was sitting very still. Mark Wainwright's The Natural History of Costa Rican Mammals notes that "Mustelids see poorly, sometimes failing to notice motionless, quiet observers".  What seemed particularly odd to me was that I was sitting inside the library at UGA Costa Rica at the time. There's a lot of wildlife around the campus but I really didn't expect to expect to see an animal that Wainwright calls "shy and rarely seen" inside. Unfortunately it startled me so much that I moved my foot and it left before I had time to really look at it in detail much less take a photo. The plus side of that was it didn't run up my leg. By the way, the weasel is in the Mustelidae family, which includes skunks. Many mustelids have large scent glands. There was an extremely unpleasant musky odor in the library after the weasel left perhaps because it was just as startled as I was.
  Another unusual sighting was a White-Throated Capuchin monkey that was traveling along at tree top level with its troupe of about twenty when it chose to jump to a branch that was just too small. I watched in shock as the branch broke and the monkey fell some 10 meters/over 30 feet. Since there was a lot of brush underneath I couldn't determine its fate but it was quite unsettling to watch it fall.
  To end on an upbeat note, one strange sight of the week was merely amusing. This male Three-wattled Bellbird (Procnias tricarunculatus) had a momentary wattle problem.

 Fortunately he was very soon back to bonking freely.

Recent sightings of the famous and not so famous

  Most people coming to Monteverde want to see the Resplendent Quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno). And who could get tired of seeing this emerald green and red trogon which is indeed resplendent?

The long feathers over the tail can be up to 30"/76 cm longer than the squared-off tail itself. The best way to see a quetzal is to know where the fruiting wild avocado trees are. In this photo of a quetzal we saw this week, you can see a few of the small avocado fruits. They like to perch in or near such a tree for long periods of time. Once in a while they sally out to grab a fruit. They swallow the fruit whole and digest the thin layer of flesh before regurgitating the seed. Here is a picture of an unusually large wild avocado. Many are only half as long.

    Another sought after bird is the Three-wattled Bellbird (Procnias tricarunculatus). Although the metallic call it makes can be heard for a kilometer, it's surprisingly difficult to see one even when you are so close the call is almost deafening. The males call from the tops of tall trees to attract females. (Apparently the females also find their long black wattles attractive.) It was a pleasant surprise this week to find a male calling from a perch on the UGA Costa Rica campus that was easy to see and photograph due to a path up the hillside from the base of the tree. Since Bellbirds tend to use the same perches through the mating season, we hope to see him again next week.

  I don't get tired of seeing these beautiful birds whenever possible but I also enjoy seeing some of the less famous and flashy species of the area. It was fun to see the normally shy Green Hermit (Phaethornis guy) perching. This is a female.

Even rather unexceptional looking birds do interesting things. We recently found a group of Dusky-capped Flycatchers (Myiarchus tuberculifer) catching drone Azteca ants as they emerged and flew away from their host Cecropia trees. The flycatchers hovered briefly near the hole in the tree where the ants were coming out and grabbed them out of the air when they took flight.

No matter how many times one goes in the cloud forest, there are new things to see. The entomologist we shared this sighting with said he had never seen the drones emerging and we would have never noticed it without seeing the birds' unusual behavior.