STL DPB ON THE ROAD - AVES

Aves is the Spanish word for birds. Yesterday we went with a guide for a boat ride on the lower Tempisque River. It's flat and tidal for a long way upstream and a great place for wildlife photography. The birds were out in force. From top to bottom, a tiger heron, a great blue heron and a pair of mot mots. We've seen the latter up in the mountains but never so close to shore. It is hard to see against the reeds, but look for the mot mots' unique tails. They look like two long, thin sticks ending in heart-shaped black paddles.

Nothing on the schedule for Tuesday and Wednesday. Ellie will be happy with the pool and the beach. I'll probably work on photos.             

STL DPB ON THE ROAD - RIO TEMPISQUE

Note carefully the horizontal shape at the bottom of the first picture. The snowy egeret doesn't seem worried.

We took a day trip with a guide yesterday to Palo Verde national park, including a long boat ride on the Rio Tempisque, the principal waterway in the area. If you will pardon an overworked phrase, the place is teeming with wildlife. These guides have amazing vision and experience, picking out things I could never see on my own.

We'll do a few birds today. I lost track of all the names. The second one is a boat-billed flycatcher. One of the other two could be a dag nabbit bootie shaker for all I know.

Many thanks to my photography patron saint, Bobbi Lane, for suggesting a work-around for using the Fuji until the problem is fixed.     

I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major General

I have loose associations, as the psychologists say, thoughts that don't directly relate to the stimulus. That's a good thing for being creative if you don't reach the point that they bring in the psychiatrists. 

That Gilbert & Sullivan number was the first thing I thought of when I finished editing these pictures. Adult male iguanas do have a certain haughty bearing and pomposity, clearly the most important and learned creatures in the neighborhood. This guy looks like he could calculate the square of the hypotenuse. 

Shot on the Tempisque River in El Viejo Wetlands.                      

Bite Me

So quoth Bart Simpson. When our son was a kid he used to like to say that when he wanted to be a little bit in our faces but not over the line. 

We went to this place called El Viejo Wetlands. Guanacaste Province, here in the northwest of Costa Rica, is a dustbowl at this time of wet season - dry season cycle. However, there is a river, the Tempisque, that gets wider and wider as it flows towards the Pacific, becoming more of a brackish estuary than a river. El Viejo (the old man) is a huge sugar cane plantation irrigated by its waters. You can drive out to the middle of nowhere (thank heaven for Google Maps and international cellular service!) to see the old plantation house, have lunch and take a boat ride on the Tempisque with a naturalist.

The place is crawling with crocodiles, the salt-water badass cousins of the alligators so common in the US around the Gulf coast and throughout Florida. Our guide and the boatman thought this was a safe distance, but I want to tell you, I was using a long telephoto.

More critters to see around there and some other odd things to do. More to come.                 

Hard, Hard Work

Costa Ricans used to build their houses from wood. Now the tropical hardwoods are protected so they have to use cement. Commercial cement is too expensive for many people there. Since the main ingredient of cement is a certain kind of sand, the Ticos have found an ingenious but backbreaking alternative.

On our way to Liberia, our guide, Esteban, took us down some side roads near the town of Filadelphia (no cheesesteaks in this one) along the Tempisque River. The river bottom has the perfect kind of fine sand for cement. Local men take ox carts down to the river, shovel the sand into the carts and shovel it out at designated yards along the dirt road. Then it is sold to make cement. There is no danger of theft. The community watches out for itself.

Dealing with the oxen is an ordeal. Once a pair is trained together it is almost impossible to replace one. Once they have worked on the right or left side, they will never switch to the other. And, as you can see, they are not always cooperative.

I took my pictures but felt like a bit of a voyeur with my soft American rear sitting in an air conditioned SUV.

Oh, and the Tempisque has crocodiles. Here's a picture of one I took downstream two years ago.