Hot but hungry

We just had a week of record high temperatures in Madison. (And no, I'm not used to this from living in Costa Rica because we live in the cool mountains there.) Our drought continues, but this week the temperatures have moderated a bit from unbearably hot to just plain hot. Even with grass and plants drying up, there were welcome signs of life. In a tree branch extending over Lake Monona, an Eastern Kingbird pair raised and fledged their chicks. Some mornings I managed to get out and check them before the heat got too much for me. There were three hungry chicks. Kingbirds are flycatchers and the parents brought a variety of damsel flies and other insects. Both parents were in constant attendance.

Since the nest was without any shade, sometimes one of the parent birds would sit over the chicks with wings slightly extended to provide shade.

 Then it was off to catch more insects.

Cultural immersion

   Visiting a big U.S. city after months in tiny Monteverde, Costa Rica is both exciting and a bit overwhelming. On our trip back to Wisconsin this year, one of our stops was several days in Washington DC, where we gloried in the wealth of the various Smithsonian museums. The Smithsonian is the largest museum in the world; in fact it is really 19 separate museums, most on the Mall in DC. What better place to immerse oneself in culture and history? (Note to frugal travelers: while food and lodging in DC are pricey, all the Smithsonian museums are free.)
   In a few days, it is impossible to see all the museums or—depending on one's style—possibly impossible to see all of a single museum. We met someone who lives in the area and claims he is still working on a single floor of the Museum of American History. I prefer to dip and dabble and the lack of entrance fees encourages that. Our favorite museum on this visit was the relatively new National Museum of the American Indian. (It helps that their cafeteria is amazingly good, with inspiration from native foods.) The building itself is curvaceous and lovely inside and out. One exterior wall has a huge series of waterfalls.

Around it are planted native plants and trees, such as the Liriodendron, or Tulip tree that dropped these leaves. This is quite an exotic tree for a Wisconsinite.

  We spent a lot of time getting visually overstimulated at art museums. While we were looking at the Vermeers in the National Gallery of Art, some very important people came in. I have no idea who the VIP foreign couple was, but I couldn't help but notice that the small room got quite crowded with tall men trying to look casual. I guess they were bodyguards. Not the sort of thing one can snap a photo of but an interesting experience. The National Gallery has three Vermeers and a painting that is attributed to Vermeer. It's fun to examine compare that painting to the others and try to decide if it is a Vermeer or not.
  At the Hirshorn Museum, I loved Chromosaturation by Carlos Cruz-Diez. It is an installation of colored light tubes in a very white space that viewers are allowed to enter.

   Outside of the museums, we found this knit graffiti in the Dupont Circle neighborhood. Thanks to who ever installed this cheery bit of knit art. You can never go wrong with the rainbow sequence.

   It felt like an art installation but it wasn't: riding in an empty Metro car. Usually the cars were quite full. Suddenly we were in one that was completely empty other than us.

 The nitty-gritty: All Smithsonian Museums in DC are free. May is school trip season. Museums are less crowded on weekends but even on weekdays the art museums were fine. It's best to go to the most popular museums on the weekends. (We visited the Museum of American History on a Sunday and the popular simulation rides in the basement had no line at all.) The National Gallery of Art and the National Museum of the American Indian both have very good cafeterias. The Textile Museum near Dupont Circle isn't part of the Smithsonian and requests donations; it's a must see for fiber lovers.
 

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.

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.

Lighting the long night

  Here in the north, the wonderful long days of summer are balanced by lots of darkness in the winter. The winter solstice is the day the sun stops its apparent journey to the north and starts heading south again to bring us longer days. It's no wonder that northern people are so happy get past the longest night of the year. This week we went to the solstice celebration in our local park. There were hundreds of people there by the lake, gathered around a huge bonfire, listening to some lively drumming. It was so dark, I never even saw the drummers.

 There were candles in ice that had been frozen in large buckets and many lanterns carried about on poles. I think most of the lanterns had LEDs in them: pagan ritual meets modern technology.

There was a tree walking around. It's over 9 feet/3 meters tall and two little boys ran up to it and requested permission to hug it. The tree agreed and hugged them back. This is a picture of the tree at a daytime parade on another occasion. (Night-time solstice festivals are difficult to photograph.)

    Having a cheerful green tree inside with lights also reminds us that life goes on, even if most of the trees outside look completely dead.

   Here in the north, we are happy to know that from now on, each day will get a little longer. Meanwhile, we gather around a fireplace and eat high calorie foods to get us through the cold and dark. Happy holidays to you all.

Playing with colors: Autumn

I've been stitching a series of temari with autumn colors. Here is a temari with some mini pumpkins. The temari is about 3.25"(8 cm) in diameter. I've seen photos of gigantic temari, but I'm not at all ready to do one that is the size of a big pumpkin!

In this series I've been coming to terms with an aversion to tans and browns. They are really quite a nice colors, not bland and boring as I sometimes have thought. I am drawn to tans that have a bit of yellow in them, adding a hint of honey.

On these balls I've learned how to stitch both interlocking spindles like the ball with the blue background and layered or woven spindles like the one on the cinnamon background.

The more I look, the more I realize there are some wild and wonderful color combinations in the autumnal northern woods. I don't know if it will be possible to capture green and red together in a way that is as lovely as on leaves but it is inspiring to think about.

The nitty-gritty: The stitching instructions for these balls can be found in Japanese Temari by Barbara B. Suess. The color choices are mostly my own.

Remembrance of falls past

Autumn brings back some of my fondest childhood memories such as the aroma of leaves when kicked. This week is more suited to sitting by the fireplace but last week I was riding a bike through golden coins of leaves.

They were so lovely I stopped my bike to kick a little gold.

This week is very blustery and the leaves are quickly coming off the trees. Recently it was very still. Autumn is the season of change.

Easy being green

Green: the natural color. A color that is hard to recreate in paintings. A color that is easy to take for granted. The color of grass.

 The color of Wisconsin in the summer.

 A good camouflage color for a small cloud forest moth. 

A color that has an affinity for blues.

A color that comes in many shades and loves purple.

Leaping squirrels!

   Anyone with a bird feeder has squirrel problems—and that includes fruit feeders in Costa Rica because tropical squirrels love bananas as much as northern squirrels love sunflower seeds and are just as gluttonous. Bananas are quite inexpensive close to the source so we put out as many as 8 in one day if we are home all day. The birds come in droves. We've had 16 different species come to the feeder. Now that the trees I planted nearby are large, birds feel much safer hanging out nearby. Here's a big flock of Blue-gray tanagers.

 The Güitite trees (Acnistus arborescens) themselves provide a lot of fruit during part of the year. They are in the Solanaceae family and their fruits look like tiny tomatoes. They provide nectar to hummingbirds and attract many insects, also eaten by the birds.  The squirrels see their branches as convenient super highways to run along the branches so they leap onto the bird feeder.
  Here's a Palm tanager and a Blue-gray tanager at the feeder.

  The squirrels here are a tropical species called the Variegated Squirrel (Sciurus variegatoides) which means they come in different color combinations in different parts of Costa Rica. Our local variety is very handsome. Our tactics to defend the bananas against the squirrels include running out on the balcony waving a broom and yelling. I like to yell "Jump!" and see them perform like trained monkeys...I mean trained squirrels.

 Unfortunately they still require some training: sometimes I have to push the squirrel with the broom. Mr. Rududu's preferred weapon is a pea shooter. I was worried it would hurt the squirrels but even when he makes a direct hit they don't really seem to care that much and only retreat for a few seconds. And truth be told, Mr. Rududu needs more practice with the pea shooter.  The sling shot was a total bust due to problems with accuracy.
  All this jumping makes a squirrel very tired. Sometimes he just needs to lay on a branch and take a siesta.

Aglow

Words can't describe well the beautiful glowing colors of trees in a Wisconsin autumn.

The light seems to come from within the maples.

 

The smell of fallen leaves takes me to childhood memories of jumping in big leaf piles or kicking them along as I walked to school. 

Soon the brilliant explosion of colors is over and trees begin their winter sleep.