Qiviet: yes, I know what it means!

   One day at our weekly Scrabble get together in Monteverde, a player browsing through the dictionary read out, "Qiviet, the wool of a musk ox" and said "Who on earth would know THAT word?" Happily, I am among the lucky few with qiviet experience. Qiviet is a gloriously soft and quite rare fiber. The arctic muskox sheds its thick undercoat all in a very short period in spring and it is combed, not sheared from the coarser guard hairs. Native people used to collect tufts of qiviet that had caught on plants. That was probably easier than cornering a wild animal that as an adult weighs an average of 285 kg/630 pounds. In fact, some qiviet is still collected in the traditional way.
   Friends that visited the Large Animal Research Station in Fairbanks gave me an ounce of a blend of 70% qiviet and 30% merino wool. The merino adds some spring that qiviet doesn't have, so it's an excellent blend for knitting. Qiviet itself is softer than cashmere and eight times warmer than sheep's wool.
   One ounce of my yarn was only 135 yards; we are talking a seriously rare and expensive fiber. After much thought I decided to knit a lace cowl because of the wonderful softness and because that way I won't lose it. I used a  pattern called Abstract Leaves Cowl by Deb Mulder. It's available free on Ravelry.

    Knit up, the yarn is much softer than in the skein. That's saying a lot because the skein is pretty darn soft. A sort of haze or halo develops around the yarn and according to the Large Animal Research Station website, the halo will continue to develop. On their web site you can see a fascinating video of an animal being combed. The fleece comes off in a big sheet or fleece. They also have yarn you can invest in.
   I love looking at the cowl close up. The color was called Blueberry but basically it's muskox color with undertones of bluish purple. I usually block lace but I'm going to wear this scrunched up on my neck so I didn't bother.

  While knitting this cowl I made use of my handy little electronic scale. For example I weighed my ball of yarn before and after a row of knitting and determined that one row took .5 grams of yarn. Thus I could calculate how many rows of the pattern I could do. I could also calculate when to change to the garter stitch border so that I would have enough to finish. It worked out very well because I had less than a yard left when I cast off. (I even have a project in mind for that little bit: it should be enough to make one or two knit acorns.)

 

  This cowl is probably the warmest garment you can make with an ounce of yarn. With the unusually cold weather we are having this week it's reassuring to have this luscious garment available.

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.

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.

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.

In the dry forest

   Some Tico friends just took us on a two day odyssey to the dry tropical forest on the Nicoya Peninsula. The cabin near Paquera where we stayed belongs to friends of our friends and is rustic in the extreme. The rooms are on the second floor and if anyone rolls over in bed, the entire structure shakes. We love going there not for sumptuous accommodations but because the cabins are deep in the forest near a river and we are the only people there when we stay. At dawn we awoke to Mantled Howler Monkeys roaring from the trees near the cabin. It's a wonderful wild sound. Some people find it scary, but one should keep in mind that they are vegetarians. During the day, Mr. Rududu took this portrait.

  On the ground level of the cabin is a cooking area. The essential piece of equipment for a trip like this is the electric rice cooker. Unfortunately the cord was forgotten at home, but with typical can-do spirit, Juan found a live wire up in the rafters and wired the cooker directly into the cabin.

You can see some of the drinking straw left after he cut pieces of it to use as little insulators where the wires were connected. The beans were cooked over a wood fire, a method that Ticos believe makes them much tastier.

   In the morning, we went for a long walk along the river. We must have crossed the river about two dozen times and Michael, the local friend who guided us there, kindly built a lot of bridges of stepping stones and helped us gringos across so we wouldn't get our feet wet.

We saw many interesting birds and this Kinkajou. It's a member of the raccoon family and difficult to see as it's mostly nocturnal.

After the hike, we went for a dip in the swimming pool filled with fresh river water that pours in so fast that there is a complete water change every hour or so. It's very hot there and it's wonderful to swim in such clean, chemical-free water.
   On the way home, we made a stop to get mangoes from a friend's tree. Our friends have a big family and lots of friends to share mangoes with. We're lucky to be among them.

Monkey business

  A large mammal recently came to our bird feeders. It was a White-throated Capuchin (cebus capucinus) monkey. Although it has a pink face, it is usually called the white-faced capucin or mono cara blanca. The corner of our lot has trees adjacent to a large wooded area running down to a stream so there's no reason that monkeys can't travel from tree to tree right up to our house. Monkeys have not come to our house often and we had personally only seen one at a distance which was acting quite fearful. Extreme alertness and caution is normal monkey behavior around people.
  Thus, I was surprised to look out the bedroom window and see one staring back at me from a branch a few feet away. He jumped up onto the roof, ran down the downspout and leaped onto the little platform where we put fruit out for the birds.

When he arrived, only peels that the birds won't eat were left. He took these banana and papaya peels to a nearby tree and seemed to relish them.

Then he came back for desert: a long drink from the hummingbird feeder. When he approached me as I snapped photos, I found his lack of fear of me a little alarming. Monkeys that have become habituated to people can be a real nuisance and although some people feed monkeys, it's not a good idea. Seeing monkeys is fun, but I would rather see them acting normally in the wild.

He unhooked the hummingbird feeder and took a long drink. When he was done, he unceremoniously dropped it. Next stop was back to the balcony and the other hummingbird feeder. When he dropped that one, a couple of perches broke off. Then he spent a long time licking off his hands and feet, where were covered in sugar water. Having taken a bunch of photos, we decided it was time to discourage his bad habit of associating with Homo sapiens. He didn't seem to really care, but a garbanzo bean from the sling shot was enough to make him retreat a bit. Also, all the food was gone.
   Mr. Rududu had a clever idea to discourage vandalism of the hummingbird feeders: backpack clips. Time will tell if they can use their partially opposable thumbs and intelligence to unhook them. If monkeys come often, we will need to completely reassess our bird feeders.

We mammals like a sweet drink

   Lazy or tired birdwatchers can take a seat and enjoy the Hummingbird Gallery just outside the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve. You can sit and watch dozens of hummingbirds zipping around to numerous feeders. As far as I know, no one has ever been impaled by a hummingbird but they often fly close enough to graze your head with a wing. (The Hummingbird Gallery also has a nice gift shop and a great free exhibit of nature photos by Michael and Patricia Fogden.) Sheltered from the wind, the patio where the feeders are is nice and warm if the sun has come through the clouds. It's particularly nice to grab a cup of the best coffee in the area at the Cafe Colibrí next door and do some birding from a seated position after a morning of serious hiking.
  When we were there recently, an olingo (Bassaricyon gabbii) came to one of the feeders and had a nice long drink of sugar water. Martín, who works in the gallery, told me the olingo usually visits once a day in the months of January and February. As he remarked, this particular olingo must be the most famous in the world because it makes such an easy photographic subject.

Before you typecast this mostly nocturnal mammal for its fuzzy cuteness, consider this information from Mark Wainwright's The Natural History of Costa Rican Mammals:

"One in Monteverde was seen chasing down a variegated squirrel and killing it with a series of bites to the back of the head. Another Monteverdean individual, which frequently arrives to steal sugar water from feeders at the Hummingbird Gallery, also snags the occasional hummingbird, a demonstration that has horrified more than one group of feeder spectators."

We did not witness any predatory activity but we were quite amazed with how much sugar water he consumed. Olingos also drink nectar in the wild, but I'm sure they never find any other source that is so large. 

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.

Big numbers

I’m sure you’ve heard it all before on public TV: the tropics are home to tremendous diversity. Still, it’s just kind of cool to know that sixty-plus species of bats are in the small area where we live (within 10 kilometers or so) even if I rarely see any. I know the number because today when I picked up my weekly bag of vegetables I saw Richard LaVal, renowned local bat expert. His wife owns an organic veggies-by-subscription business and sometimes when I pick up my bag I see Richard and get to ask him something. It may be about the number of bat species, or it may be if he has change for a 5000 colones bill so I can pay for my veggies. Costa Rica has 0.03% of the world’s land surface and 12% of all it’s bat species. Visitors to Monteverde can learn more about bats at Richard's very well done and entertaining exhibit, the Bat Jungle.

The veggies, by the way, are excellent and it’s always fun to open the bag and see what we got. 

A friend recently suggested I learn about the ferns in Costa Rica. I just can’t get my head around the fact that there are over 1100 species of them and some 350 species in my immediate surroundings. Somehow I feel too intimidated to begin. But I do enjoy the towering tree ferns.

I also find charming the idea that there just in the Monteverde area there are over 500 species of orchids, even if most of them are tiny and up so high in the trees one only sees most of them if a branch they are living on falls down. We tend to concentrate on the big showy ones.
Our friend Lelo has this magnificent collection of Costa Rica's national orchid, the Guaria morada (Guarianthe skinneri) legally moved from various trees on his own farm. Each flower is up to 11 cm. in diameter, or more than 4 inches.

 Or there is this common terrestrial orchid called Bandera española (Epidendrum radicans) which grows on dry sunny hillsides.

 Also in the reserve are over 100 species of  amphibians and reptiles, and tens of thousands of plant species.  All of this diversity draws a host of students and researchers that adds to the wonderful diversity of our human community.
We’ve seen 469 species in Costa Rica. It’s getting harder and harder to do add a bird to our Costa Rican list without traveling elsewhere in the country but I managed to do just that yesterday when a guide friend pointed out an Ornate Hawk-Eagle soaring high overhead. Now we have to find it again so we have hawk-eagle parity. (We’ve both seen up close elsewhere though, so I guess it didn’t hurt quite as bad...) Because there are over 400 species of birds in the Monteverde reserve we sometimes don’t see a particular species for years; there’s a lot of species but not necessarily a lot of individuals. And there are all those leaves getting in the way.
Here's a White-throated Robin. We're seeing a lot of them right now but sometimes they're hard to find.

Goodbye friends....see you soon

We tell people here we are pajereros migratorios. Pajerero is the local word for birders--in other parts of the Spanish-speaking word it means various other things, including someone that is sort of good-for-nothing. Mmmmm.... But in any case we are in Costa Rica when neotropical migrants are here and we enjoy many of the same species in Wisconsin's summer. I sometimes like to imagine that the very same Baltimore Oriole that has been fattening itself up at our banana feeder here for the long journey north might be the very one that we hear singing in Madison. This is an immature, so perhaps we don't hear him sing until the following year. He will be an adult male next fall.

  As a little project this week I've been keeping track of which days we saw at least one oriole. In January and February we saw lots of them everyday. Last week there were suddenly fewer and the last one we saw was on Sunday. Next year I'll have to pay more careful attention because it seems to me that the females disappeared first.
  To learn more about Baltimore Orioles and their migration, go to the Cornell of Laboratory of Ornithology site.

Our fruit feeder is a simple wooden platform that fits over our clothesline pole. It has nails pounded into it (heads up) and I impale bananas or the skins of pineapple, papaya, or mango on it. After many taste tests, the birds have let me know that bananas are by far their favorite. Fortunately bananas only cost about 6 cents each. That's about double what it was 4 years ago, but still not expensive. Which is good, because I've put out up to 8 bananas a day. Cheap entertainment.

Like any feeder, we have a long-tailed furry bird that comes regularly.  Isn't he cute? This is a Variegated Squirrel (Sciurus variegatoides) which comes a great variety of color forms throughout Costa Rica. We are training him to jump off the feeder and into the nearby bush. Then he comes right back.

He has recently performed a very important service. One of the bananas he tried to steal fell to the ground and rotted unnoticed, except by a blue morpho butterfly that came and fed from it at length. Since we rarely see morphos in our yard, we were delighted.