Bugs, Bugs, Bugs!
Trip Start
Jun 09, 2008
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3
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Trip End
Jul 15, 2008
Palo Verde, Costa Rica
Sunday, June 22, 2008
thing I noticed when we arrived was the multitude of huge green
dragonflies. We have mosquito nets around our beds, and on our night
walk, we saw two scorpions, millipedes, two tarantulas, fish in an
abandoned cattle trough, fish-eating bats and millions of spiders.
Yuck! Actually it was pretty cool. We saw a colony of army ants. It
was a trail of black ants two inches wide and they were consuming every
bug in their path. Some of the workers were carrying their brood with
them. The are nomadic, meaning they don't have a permanent nest, and
at night, they rest in a large ball of workers. When they come into
your house, there is nothing to do but go stay with some friends for a
few days. People here consider them a good thing because they take all
of the other bugs out of the house and then move on. During our soccer
game, I saw a coati, which looks like a cross between a raccoon and an
anteater, two deer, four raccoons and some rabbits. (The deer,
raccoons and rabbits are the same as in the US.) Today, we took a
river tour, and we saw scarlett macaws in flight with their long red
tails trailing behind them. We saw two baby crocodiles (and some big
guys, too). On the underside of a tree, there was a roost of about
fifty tiny bats that looked exactly like the tree bark. They were the
same color brown, and it looked like the bark was peeling off the tree,
but we could see their furry little faces and once in a while, one
would stretch out a wing. We also saw white-faced capuchin monkeys and
howler monkeys. At the station, right outside the dorms, there are
about six green iguanas sunning themselves on the grass nibbling on the
leaves around them. This place is much warmer, and even though it is
considered a dry forest, there are huge swamps of water where migratory
birds stop, and the wide Tempisque river runs through the reserve.
There are many more critters and animals here, and it is awesome to be
so close to them!
