This post is about animals that we've encountered lately, dead, alive or fictional.
Gray hawk greeted me up in the tree behind our house one morning. I took quickly a couple of pictures with my zoom lens and then got my tripod to get an even better picture. Once I had it set up, the hawk had flown away.
We have also seen a squirrel cuckoo. The rainy season makes bird watching a challenge because of the foliage.
One more Izzy-Lizzy.
This poisonous cascavel, rattle snake, was not a welcome guest on our deck. I tried to shoo it away with a broom and it just curled and hissed at me. Then I tried my luck with the pool net, but no success. It just didn't understand that I wanted it to leave and I did not want to kill it. Well, then some workers came to our deck, saw it "muy malo!" and chopped it into pieces.
We had tons of bugs at the beginning of the rainy season. In the evenings we saw them flying against our screen door and most mornings I could sweep half a liter of dead bugs from the deck.
And some of them were quite big! But one gets gradually used to them, though I did scream when I opened a kitchen cabinet door and out crawled a bug almost 10 cm long.
We called these the mac-mac frogs. When the rainy season started they were everywhere. Literally thousands of them squished on the roads and singing their never-ending mac-mac-mac-mac-mac mating song in the night. For the first couple of nights we could hardly sleep. When one started with a short innocent mac-mac he was soon joined in song by thousands. We had one in our bathtub, too. DH tried to get him out with a broom, but it just hopped 1 m up on the wall.
I had to look twice at this insect before I was sure that it wasn't a leaf. A beautiful creature.
Huge moths are regular night guests.
Red snapper with garlic and butter, que rico! I just don't like their eyes.
Anorectic fish on the beach.
This cute puff fish was getting quite crispy on the beach. No wonder it was attracted by the fly.
Opossum in 2D.
There floppy-eared cows are everywhere. They have a gentle gaze, but I keep a distance or preferably a fence between the bulls and myself.
Our bat family has one more member. See the baby underneath the mother!
I spotted this huge wasp nest high up in a tree. Apparently they are a very nasty type of wasp, over an inch long and venomous. The nest itself was well over 1.5m long!I've been riding quite a few times at a nearby finca. One Saturday we rode on the back roads, over the hills in the forest surrounded by all the mysterious sounds, dozens of butterflies and even a few mono congos, howler monkies. We ended up on Playa Panama, galloping on the beach! The boys are too inexperienced to join on these rides, but Risto and Tuomas took one lesson which was unfortunately interrupted by thunder and rain. I took Tuomas another time. He gets frustrated very quickly, but is willing to learn more.
Tuomas riding Tuto.
Risto riding Palo.
Me on Milennium. Note: no saddle!
Results of art class. The penguin on the left is Tuomas', the one on the right is Jaakko's. Risto's elephant is top left, Tuomas' on the right and Jaakko's at the bottom. Art classes for Tuomas are very frustrating. The blank white paper just scares him and nothing is accomplished without tears. I'm trying to help him to get over this, but it is not easy. For either of us.
1 comment:
Hi Laura,
My name is eoghan and it was my Travelling Journey that you wrote in.
Than you all very much for taking part in it!! You have all defenetly spent a lot of time on it, and it has been really interesting reading about your life in Costa Rica.
You all sound like a very nice family who live life to the full!
I thought it was very nice that you mentioned you could maybe pay a wee visit up here to uist. But what every you do don't come in the winter, come in the summer. It can be very stormy here and roughly 6 years ago, a massive storm hit us. The place was ruined!! A famly of 5 that i knew who lived a few miles away from me were all killed.
Archie Macpherson, his wife Murdina and their children, Andrew John and Hannah, of South Uist and Murdina's father, Calum Campbell of Benbecula all perished during the gales that swept the Western Isles on January 12, 2005.
They were swept away in two cars while trying to escape the winds lashing the Macphersons' home in South Uist.
We have quite a small population of roughly 7000. So that tradegy was quite a shock. we all knew them!!! the kids were only in primary aswell.
Anyway, i really enjoyed the bit you all wrote in my Journal!
I would love to pay a visit to Costa Rica somtime in th future!
thanks for sending it on and i hope to keep in touch!! my Email is: eoghanmacdonald@googlemail.com Once again thank you very much. I will be writing about Costa Rica in a project i'm working on in school. Your info will be really useful. I'll be writing it in my first language which is Gaidhlig (gaelic) which you seemed to be interested in. Thanks, Eoghan, Slainte ( cheers ) :)
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