Baby Great Potoo!

As big wet flumpy snowflakes pelt down on disconsolate Ohio goldfinches, I am headed back to Costa Rica, and I'm taking you with me. 

To La Selva, where a bold young collared peccary is grinding away on some hard tropical nut. Crounch crounch crounch crounch.

Where spider monkeys swing and leap through the trees, me open-mouthed below. The first thing you know of monkeys is a great swishing and crashing of leaves, a raining of things down from their foraging. They are hard to see and harder to follow. Being a monkey researcher would be taxing, as they can travel so much better and faster by brachiation than we can by walking. 

We watched this mother spider gather herself for a great leap across open air--with her baby, eyes squinched shut, hanging on for dear life. I was happy with this shot, with her brave bony fingers leading the way, her tail a question mark. They made it, to answer the question.

We had another afternoon of messing around at Selva Verde before we headed up to the Central Highlands. I got a bad shot of violet-headed hummingbird on vervain, my only sighting of the trip. Identifiable, at least. Hummer photos get better, I promise. Much better.

A striped-breasted wren flirted with me in the dark forest. There are so many wrens in Costa Rica, many of them giving sweet echoes of our beloved Carolina. Sweet Caroline DAH DAH DAH

We watched a green heron stalking frogs and dragonflies in a small pond.

And torch ginger drew the hermit hummingbirds in a little botanical garden across the road. It was bursting with beauty and color. Just the tonic I need today.

Soon we piled in our nice bus and headed up into the highlands. 

Our fabbo guide Mario would look out the bus window and spot itty bitty torrent tyrants in places like this. It's all about knowing what to expect. Spotting tiny birds atop rocks only added to his highly mysterious wizardy aura.

The crested guans perched near a rural mailbox were a bit easier to discern, as they flew across the road in front of the bus. 

I had two turkey gobblers fly across the highway in Maryland in much the same way on my trip back from New England yesterday. Always a treat to see them fly. Cracids are not turkeys by a long shot, but they're reminiscent. And they too have fabulous wattles!

Costa Rica is just so beautiful, with those mountains giving it relief both in a topographic and climatic sense. You can go up high and get cool, or go down to the lowlands and sweat a bit. Naturally, I liked the highlands. But the lowlands birds, ohhh. Well worth the schvitzing.

Mario holds his cards close to his chest. We were looking for something in the highlands on our way to Bosque de Paz, a private sanctuary/ecolodge. I didn't know what...

But we were happy to scan and watch whatever flew by. Finally he made a couple of cellphone calls and tightened up the directions a bit, and we drove a little farther up the road and came upon a big sign that read, "POTOO."

Which, when you've been fuddling around for about twenty minutes looking for something (you know not what), was about the funniest thing we'd ever seen. Oh. This must be what we were looking for.

It didn't take Mario long to spot the bird just a settin' up in the huge tree behind the sign. The lovely family who owns the land are delighted to share their potoo with anyone who comes by. Hence the sign.

We admired it and took digiscoped shots as well as this telephoto shot. What we DID NOT know was that this potoo was at that very moment incubating an egg she had laid on the bare branch. Mario went back with another group after I was back home, and sent me this phonescoped image.

Baby Great Potoo. Everybody squee together!!

Photo by Mario Cordoba

I have to say, being able to shoot images back and forth via email to my new friend Mario is the bomb. We've been puzzling out some bug and bat ID's that way. 

He knew I'd fall apart when I saw this photo, so he sent it. And I did. And now you can fall apart, too.

More Peccary Love

While the collared peccary is to be reckoned with when protecting its young, the larger white-lipped peccary is dangerous at any time, and I’ve heard stories of people treed for hours by a herd of white-lips. Perhaps it’s knowing that they’re dangerous that makes me appreciate petting these tame javelinas. "Javelina" refers to the spear-tip canines you'll see in a moment.

I love this photo, their crooked little incisors and pink medallion noses.

For their part, they seem to think my Snickers bar pieces are bits of heaven. Those who haven’t had one stick their nose discs right in the mouths of those who have, inhaling the chocolate scent, then turning to me with inquisitive nostrils.

When the treats are gone,  they wander off and lie down, and one yawns widely before he puts his head 

between his front feet, doglike. He's getting sleepy.

Every time I look at this photo I yawn.

I peek inside his pink mouth and see two-inch-long tushes, ivory white, razor sharp, lying at a 45-degree angle to his lower jaw, and wonder at my own temerity, massaging their ears and muzzles, cheerfully inviting a severed wrist. Holy tropical pork. I'm glad I've already done my javelinafondling for the day.

Looking at him dozing there, missing Chet Baker something awful, I know I'd do it again. Oh, how I want to cut a hole in their enclosure. 

In another life I'd be a socially irresponsible ecoterrorist.

See those bony projections just below the wire? Yowza. Fools go where angels dare to tread. 

This is how I go through life, trusting animals I shouldn’t, crooning to them, petting them, sniffing my fingers to catch their scent. Just for those moments, I’m making some kind of connection, reaching a caring hand across the species gap. I have been bitten before and will be bitten again, but for this golden green afternoon, I’m spared, left to love again.

Candid ambush photo of Zick getting all handfunky by Colene McKee, with thanks to her and Bill for this, the groovy little travel mugs, the yummy rum and conversation. We had some fun, didn't we?

Petting the Peccary

At Lake Yojoa's Hotel Las Glorias, I wander over to the little zoo that so many Latin American hotels seem to consider standard equipment, along with crowing roosters and barking dogs. (Those are vital to a good night's sleep, apparently).

Two white-tailed deer—endangered in Honduras—step delicately around their concrete-floored pen, dodging puddles of their own urine. The buck has knobbled antlers, still in velvet, and a heartbreakingly soft pink tongue, with which he cleans my fingers. I pull big handfuls of fresh grass for him and his slender mate, and leave them eating. I want to open their pen, but I know they’d be killed within hours by people hungry for protein. They make me deeply sad, these  creatures who were never meant to be confined, who for the rest of their lives will walk delicate circles on wet cement.

 

Next, I call to the captive javelinas, the little wild pigs that root and trot through the forests. Technically, they're collared peccaries Pecari tajacu, and they aren't actually in the Suidae but in their own family, the  Tayassuidae. They've got fabulous long oily hair, which acts as a water-repellent raincoat in their wet lush habitat.

 Distributed throughout Central and tropical South America, including the island of Trinidad, they are omnivores who live in family groups of six to several dozen. It's clear they're highly social. They interact freely, travel in a group, and seem to really dig talking with me.

 Their enclosure is large and grassy, though it’s littered with coils of barbed wire and garbage. They come over in single file and sniff my hands with their mobile pink discs, grunting softly. 

Feeling bold, I scratch the tops of their heads, and find one juvenile female who luxuriates under my touch. I rub all along her ears and jaw bars as her eyes close in delight. When I’m done, my fingers smell terrible—BO and onions. Here's the scent gland of a peccary--a mucky bare spot on the top of the rump.

  It's actually gooey with what must be an exudate to be rubbed on tree trunks and anything else the piggie wants to mark. They're otherwise such lovely little animals...I muse that the adaptive significance of a gooey scent gland might be to save the peccary from the pet trade.

 

 The pigs naturally exude a strong fetid odor, one I know because I have smelled it in the wild. You can usually smell white-lipped peccaries before you see them, and the odor, happened upon in a humid forest, always sends a chill through me. I look about for the nearest low-branched tree, which anyone who's ever been in humid tropical forest knows, is usually nonexistent. I eye the telephone poles all around me and wonder if I could shin up one if I were terrified enough. 

More peccary love anon...