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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A matter of perspective

   Birdwatchers often remark that there should be guidebooks showing the undersides of birds as that is often all you can see. When we heard something fall right next to us on the path and looked up, we didn't need any special guide to know that the bird right over us was a Black Guan (Chamaepetes unicolor).

We could still see it's blue facial skin and red eye, but most impressive were the fluffy thigh feathers that guidebooks don't even mention.
   On the same outing, we saw this Striped palm pit viper (Bothriechis lateralis) sleeping in a tree at the entrance to the Santa Elena Reserve. Fortunately for the sake of identifying it, we could see the thin yellowish line bordering it's belly.  Twan Leenders' Guide to Ampibians and Reptiles of Costa Rica says this snake is "common in Costa Rica, but because it is camouflaged and usually immobile, it is rarely seen."

Agreed. Even after someone told us which tree it was in, it took us a while to find it.
   Sometimes it's not the birdwatchers that are looking up. This Golden-browed Chlorophonia (Chlorophonia callophrys) seemed to be checking out what its friends were doing. It was in a large ficus tree with a couple dozen of the same species, feasting on the abundant fruit.

Frogs sitting in their little pond inside a bromeliad plant really has no choice but to look up. This little tree frog happens to have a home on a low branch and we've visited him twice and seen how much he can grow in a week. A guide said it was one of the smilisca frogs that are very common in Costa Rica. This is the first I've seen in the wild; I think a lot of them live in bromiliads that are well above human eye level.

Finally, it's fun to get down to bug level when possible. This leaf mimic was recently walking across the porch at The Ecolodge at UGA Costa Rica.

By the way, if you are really curious about the weather in the Monteverde area, check out UGA's weather site. Just keep in mind that around here elevation really affects weather, so it can be warm and sunny in the upper San Luis valley and cool and misty at the nearby Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve.

The tale of the Jaguarundi

  Yesterday we went to a new reserve in Monteverde called Curi-cancha. They don't have a web site yet, but you can find them on Facebook. The walk started out with the exciting spotting of a Red Brocket Deer (Mazama americana), an animal we had never seen before. Unlike the common White-tailed Deer we see so often in Wisconsin, this deer freezes completely immobile for several minutes when it feels in danger. That made it an excellent photo subject.

  Within minutes we were watching a group of six Golden-browed Chlorophonias (Chlorophonia callophrys) in a single tree.  We've never seen so many of this pretty little bird in one place. They were hopping about quite excitedly, so I was delighted that Mr. Rududu managed to get his photo.

  A little farther along the trail, we saw our first Resplendant Quetzal of the year, a beautiful male. He wasn't quite as easy to take a picture of since he was high in a tree full of leaves.

  It's easier to find a quetzal if you know where the fruiting wild avocado trees are. This quetzal was near a tree with fairly large fruit for a wild avocado. The layer of flesh is quite thin; the pit is very large. The quetzals swallow the fruit whole and then regurgitate the pit.

   Later, a fairly large mammal crossed the trail. I didn't see it and Mr. Rududu only saw the tail. Looking it up later in The Natural History of Costa Rican Mammals by Mark Wainwright, he decided it was the tail of a large cat called a Jaguarundi (Herpailurus yagouaroundi). There's no photo of this fleeting experience so I'm calling it the tale of the jaguarundi. Maybe that's just because I'm extremely envious. We've been told they are common in the reserve and it is the most commonly seen wild cat in Central America.
  It is always amazing to those new to tropical birding that it can be very difficult to see a parrot (or many parrots) in a tree when the air is filled with their raucous calls. Their bright green feathers make them very hard to see among the leaves. Even in this photos, it's a bit hard to see the White-front Parrot (Amazona albirons).

I'm really looking forward to exploring Curi-cancha Reserve more. Perhaps I will return with a tale.

What we saw from the porch

   It's exciting to get back to Costa Rica every year. It's not just leaving the cold and snow of Wisconsin behind—it's also the profusion of new things to see. On our stay at the University of Georgia Ecolodge this week, some of our best nature sightings were in the immediate vicinity of the main building, thanks to the general profusion of nature. I saw an American Redstart, the first one seen on the property. I have no photo of it flying past me, I'm afraid, but it lifted my heart to see it.
   There was a marvelous large praying mantis wandering about the porch. See how cunningly the wings look like leaves and the legs like twigs.

There was a lizard in nearby plants that was shedding its old skin.

Soon there was a lizard eating the praying mantis because it jumped into the plants where the lizard was. (The lizard was not fooled by the mantis's cunning camouflage.)
    One of the most common birds in Costa Rica is the lovely blue gray tanager. One just doesn't get tired of looking them, especially when it's been about seven months since the last one.

Waterwatching in a big way

The Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta is the world's biggest.  It contains a total of 8.5 million US gallons (31,000 m³) and the largest single tank in the world (6.3 million gallons or 24,000 m³). The smallest fish in the big tank is really big. The largest—whale sharks—are about 30 feet (10 meters) and growing.

This week the aquarium might also have set the record for number of kids on school field trips. They were so excited that at times we wished we had earplugs. In spite of crowds and the sound level, we had a great time. (Our top tip for dealing with groups is to look at whatever is less crowded. Kids' groups move quickly and there are always lulls between groups so eventually we saw everything in reasonably calm surroundings.)
   One of my favorite tanks held lots of jellyfish drifting about.

I also liked the colorful Brazilian river fish. I feel inspired to stitch a temari with these colors. I seemed most attracted to creatures with stripes and spots.

See what wonderful things you can do just with stripes and a limited palette!

Beautiful rot

Being continually moist, a cloud forest has many kinds of fungus. They are important in the breakdown and recycling of material such as fallen trees. Besides doing important work they are very interesting to look at.

I liked the circular design of these shelf fungi.

The fruiting bodies of most fungi are ephemeral, making a continually changing show in the cloud forest.

This one reminded me of an abstract painting.

Someday I want to see some of the fungus that glows in the dark.

A multitude of small things

Sometimes small things distract us from birdwatching. On a recent day in San Luis we kept finding interesting little animals. Insects are more noticeable when they clump together.

Each of these fascinating small creatures has a place in the ecology of the cloud forest; perhaps some of our favorite birds depend on them. Because of the vast number of insects in a cloud forest, each time we see a particular species it might be the first and last time we ever see it. (The number of insects species in Costa Rica is estimated to be about 365,000!)  Irridescent beetles are especially attractive, even when tiny. This one, found dead and missing an antenna, was collected and taken to join the study collection at the University of Georgia Costa Rica campus.

 These insects made me want to use their colors in some knitting or other craft project.

Tip for insect watching: if you stand back a bit and use your binoculars you might be able to see more details than if you just look at them. Most modern binoculars have excellent close-focusing. We also use our spotting scope to look at them.
This insect looks like it's had a paint job.

Even a toad, if small enough, is cute.