Big flora, little fauna

5 March 2009

One of our unexpected findings in Costa Rica is that one simply does not see much in the way of animal life here. The nature of what we see is interesting and unusual. The quantity of what we see is modest. That is not only true for larger animals, like mammals, marsupials, and birds, but also for the bitty critters. Walk in the rain forest or in the cloud forest and the dominant sound is a hush. (If the wind isn’t blowing.) In the places that are more strongly human influenced, there are neither many pests (I can’t recall seeing a housefly here and mosquitoes were only an issue on one day of our first almost two months here) nor many other kinds of bugs.

I’ve posted in earlier entries some of my best pictures of “animals in captivity,” including butterflies, frogs, and hummingbirds. (Okay, the hummingbirds weren’t really “captive,” but they were effectively so by the use of the feeders.)

Here are a few shots of little critters in nature. These aren’t great photos, but the sightings have been so few that they seem worth including. One shows a millipede, about 3 inches long, which we spotted on the forest floor at the Santa Elena cloud forest reserve. A second presents one of perhaps 5 small frogs sighted on a night tour of the Monteverde cloud forest reserve. (He is about an inch long, perhaps, and illuminated using a flashlight.) The large insect in the third shot flew just ahead of me onto the path I was descending yesterday from Cerro Amigos. He’s about 2 inches long but didn’t stay put long enough for a good picture.