Tropical colors

Green is a predominant color in tropical forests. Small splashes of color have a big impact. Here are some recent photos Mr. Rududu took recently in the Monteverde area. Blue-gray tanagers sometimes puncture flowers and drink nectar from them without doing any polinating.

This insect was inside a plastic bag; the photo shows its fuzzy underside. It was awaiting identification inside a plastic bag so the background looks kind of artsy.

For some reason, scorpions look blue under a black light flashlight. It sure looks prettier than under normal life—and it makes me want to get a black light flashlight to inspect my house with.

Vertigo ball

I started a temari last year that is completely covered in stitching. In fact it's really two layers thick. No wonder it took me almost forever to finish, especially as I was in a different country from it for seven months. It is stitched on a C10 division, so it has 12 regular pentagons and each of those pentagons has 10 lines crossing it. The pattern is built up with a series of pentagons stitched in alternating colors. The outside blue pentagon in this picture has its corners lined up with the corners of the pentagon I was filling.

 Here's the white stitching that I did on the alternate support lines.

 And here's the (finally) completed temari.

It makes me feel a little dizzy to look at this ball but I love it. It would have been cleverer to have the thread base be a color that didn't contrast as much with the blue and white, such as a light blue. I didn't worry about exactly how many rows of each color I used but just made sure the area was filled.

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!