Costa Rica Update Número Tres
Hey guys, here is my third Costa Rica photo update! There are some pretty cool ones in here, of bugs, birds, scenery, amphibians, etc. Browse as you wish, and comment much! :D
Teaser:
again, there are many close-up insect and spider photos in this post. it's cool! :)
So these pictures were all taken within the first few days of getting into La Selva. We all got into San Jose, had dinner at that Asian restaurant (lol), then the next day we were off on our "Turismo" bus with our nice driver, Jose I believe was his name, off to our first destination, where we would stay a week, La Selva.
on the way we stopped at the tiny little town of Sarapiquí and did some shopping.
Here you can see Josh in the foreground.
La Selva was like...oh...3 hours away or so? The roads were pretty good to La Selva (means the jungle en español). Later we experienced true Costa Rican "outback" type roads...but this was a good break-in; seeing as how I can't remember much about the trip there, the roads were obviously really good. hah.
In a journal for class later that week, I wrote about how crazy it was to be driving through the Costa Rican countryside, passing Great Kiskadees perched on fenceposts, lush green plants, little Tico children playing in a driveway....it was just so unreal, and I felt so incredibly lucky. blessed, really. it's so crazy, looking back on it. I look back on my time there with incredible fondness and passion. I have a few bad memories, but myriads more good ones.
Anyhow, here goes.
So this is the Stone Bridge:
titled "thisreallyisasafebridge.jpg". it's a suspension bridge and looks kinda scary but it's very safe. it moves when you are on it and other people start walking on it though. :D my mom wouldn't have liked it. haha
it's called Stone Bridge cuz it was named after this dude whose last name was Stone. This bridge crossed the muddy brown Sarapiquí river and connected the two areas of the biological station. on one side of the bridge were the cabinas and the cafeteria, and the driveway to the station. on the other side of the bridge were more cabinas and also all the classrooms, library, and the actual rainforest trails. very awesome. so walking across the bridge became one of the things that I look back on fondly when I look back at my time in Costa Rica. especially at night when the fireflies were flashing bodilessly from unseen trees and the stars above were bright.
So we were crossing the bridge one afternoon, Amy and I, and we start looking at the iguana sunning itself far off in a big tree with white bark. they called the tree Iguana Condominium, cuz the iguanas really liked to sun themselves.
spot the iguana!!
I think I posted that guy in my first Costa Rica photo post. this guy is actually before you get to the bridge, just hanging out. Counting their tail, these guys are like over 3 feet long!
So I am busy looking at the iguana with my binoculars, and Amy goes farther down the bridge, then says in a rather intense voice, "Oh my gosh, Holly, come here right now."
I hurry down to that end of the bridge and see this:
It's a Coati! more than one and they are called Coatimundi. I posted a picture of one in my first CR photo post.
and I'm like, wtcrap?! and we start to chase the poor thing. not really. you know me; I am NOT okay with animal harassment. but no, so we try to get closer. the little guy is just ambling along the bridge. Amy has this amazing ten times optical zoom on her camera anyhow (I haven't seen her photos yet but I am sure she has some freakin' amazing ones...) and I follow.
I get my best shot as I watch him go under the bridge, while I stand atop.
also on that same bridge, Amy and I spotted our (my especially, as she really isn't a birder, but liked all the nature, yay) life Crested Guan:
I took that through my binoculars. :D nice bird! not uncommon there, but heck, everything was a lifer for me. :D
So upon crossing the bridge you are very very likely to see wild boars. Now most of the other people in my class were fascinated by these. I did think they were cool, but I have seen them in Arizona and though they're fun to watch, they did not feel very exotic to me (as opposed to iguanas or monkeys). I call them Javelinas cuz that's what they call them in Arizona:
this view was from right when you come off the bridge onto the "jungle side" of the river. we didn't see the babies all the time but when we did they were so cute! ahhh!!
the sign says that only cabin residents are allowed beyond that sign, but the javelinas don't seem to notice. :)
so our first full day at La Selva we divided into two groups to go into the actual rainforest. I went with the guy that Joe quietly told me was the better birder of the two. we all had rubber boots in case of snakebite. really. hah. get this, the paths in the rainforest, at least many of them, were PAVED. not like with asphalt, but like someone had hauled in a bunch of 2 foot square blocks and lined them up to make a path. wow. I never thought I would have been walking through the Costa Rican rainforest on a paved path.
Heliconia. these are like the bird of paradise flower. various species of heliconia were all over the jungles, and in fact all over Cost Rica, to just about every habitat I visited. it's awesome cuz their flowers are shaped like that and then they are perfectly shaped for hummingbirds' beaks to dip into and get the nectar. :D
dude. this is that same Heliconia plant, with Kalie next to it for a size comparison. so tall!!!
nearby this anole lizard was shimmying up the stalk but it was just a bit too fast for my camera:
There were some really pretty flowers around there too, covering the ground:
we were getting really tired of Joel just talking talking talking for like half hour when we hadn't even entered the actual jungle yet! but we were rewarded when he showed us our first Poison-Dart Frog!!!
This is a Strawberry Poison-Dart Frog. they are so small! less than two inches long. they ribbited loud though!
some mushrooms around the area. :)
finally we got into the jungle. here is where one of the most amazing bird experiences that I had in Costa Rica occurred. You can read about it (and see awesome photos) here. I'm not going to say any more about it here cuz you really should check it out. :D :D
so we were finally in the jungle. Right after we saw the Great Tinamou, in fact some of us were still watching it, when Amy or somebody else was like, "hey look at that!" and we saw this amazing Katydid clinging, camouflaged perfectly, to the underside of a leaf:
with flash. check out his eyes!!! and his horn!!
I took this picture without the flash. check it out; he blends in so amazingly well!!!
this is a big tree.
crazy brown locust/grasshopper thing!!
this is a Walking Fig. they put out these....not roots, but kinda dangly liana-like things and then eventually they lose those and put out new ones and so they kinda can move over the years. :)
mushrooms on a tree.
this is the creek/river thing we walked over.
the floor on this bridge looked like this. ahh! kinda scary. but not really; it was just over a little creek thing. :) :
these are some hanging liana-things hanging over a tree's buttresses. many of the trees in the rainforest here had buttresses, the funny things sticking out from above the roots...scientists think they help support the tree. we actually did our project in La Selva on buttresses and their possible function, if larger trees tended to have buttresses verses younger and/or smaller trees. a HUGE project. Here are some pictures from our hike on our quest to ask "twenty questions" and get our minds started thinking inquisitively about the nature we saw.
we saw these flowers over a little bridge.
this was crazy; it looked like shiny plastic.
we stopped on this small bridge for lunch and we fed our potato chip pieces to the fishes below. it was pretty cool; the fish were big, like up to a foot, and when they saw the potato chip piece falling they would rush up and mull around on the surface waiting for it. you can see them in the picture.
dude so I am not arachnophobic but this photo scared the crap out of me; I had to resize it to make it not so scary. we determined it was actually just a shell of a spider: his exoskeleton. but boy did it look creepy! I wish I had gotten a non-blurry picture.
strange warty bumps on some leaves.
I love the rainforest....man I love it. :D
Army ants!!!
check out the dude in the middle with the bulgy head. very weird.
there were these lianas and vines hanging down from trees. this looks like a curtain here.
DUDE. check this out, then the larger photo below:
this was without a doubt the coolest insect I saw in Costa Rica. absofreakinlutely awesome.
leaf-cutter ants!!! each of those little green or yellow leaf pieces in this photo, is a little ant carrying a leaf! or some are just piles of leaves they abandoned, but there are also a bunch of ants carrying leaves too! we saw these allll over the place. they are absolutely amazing; they go up trees or other plants and cut neat little pieces off of the leaves, and then carry them back down, and all the way back to their nest and then they use the leaf pieces to grow a type of fungi underground that they use as a food source. I feel like I am making this up--it is so amazing but that's what they do!!! it was normal to be walking along the jungle path and see a line of many little ants scurrying busily across the path, carrying neatly-clipped leaf portions, or sometimes pieces of a flower, all running around.
their nest!!
here are a few more random photos from the rainforest and nearby:
here is Joel holding a fallen Oropendola nest. a bird about the size of a robin made that! they live in huge colonies and weave these amazing nests. they weren't nesting at the time and this nest had fallen to the ground. it was so heavy!
this is the Much-Feared Bullet Ant. They are BIG. they are like....I had to get out a ruler just now to check, but yeah they are def. at least an inch long, but really a bit bigger I am thinking. their bite hurts REALLLLLY bad, so I have heard. our guide Joel said that he got bit by one before and it hurt like for 24 hours, so so bad. later on in our trip our guide said that getting stung by a scorpion is not at all as bad as getting bitten by a bullet ant. We had to contend with these guys when we did our first field project in La Selva, where our group measured the circumference of various trees. luckily no one in the whole class got bitten by a Bullet Ant--good thing!
here is a much better photo:
this is a Matapalo, or a Strangler Fig, around its host tree.
^ some sort of lizard, probably an anole of one flavor or another.
amidst the leaves is a skink! you can see his bright striped tail. :)
and near the Skink in this picture you can see this big thing that kinda looks like a pineapple top; it's a bromeliad. bromeliads are a type of epiphyte that includes the pineapple family! :) very cool. the trees were just covered with bromeliads. especially in La Selva where it was very wet and moist outside.
Amy under a large arching tree.
the following pictures were taken near the classrooms and just around the station in general.
an anole checking me out.
I posted this guy's pic in my first CR post but thought I'd put it here again.
can you spot the toucan?
these flowers that reminded me of mint, attracted a lot of butterflies, and there were also big purple flowers really close to that that the hummingbirds LOVED. this was outside the cafeteria.
more orb weaver spider! I wanted to show how big he was, and how big their web was, but it was hard to show that.
I know this isn't in focus, but here is some of the spiderwebs they had. they kinda did two layers. very cool.
Orb weaver and maybe her husband in the background?
insects seen around various buildings:
I think this is a Blue Morpho butterfly. they are so, so so beautiful; an almost irridescent blue inside. but they are SO hard to photograph when their wings are open! it has a beautiful pattern though. awesome eyespot. :D
a katydid hanging out near our cabin. we saw SO many katydids.
this katydid's body is shaped and veined like a leaf. amazing.
here's lookin at you, kid!
I call this one "insects unawares".
Praying mantis!
he looks velvety.
Halloween colors! or more appropriately, OSU Beaver colors! :D
moth on the pingpong table! you can see how big he is cuz that is the net on the ping pong table that he was perched on.
and a close-up.
So one day, I think it was the second or third day, we had noise outside of our classroom. we looked outside and saw this:
toucans! there were like four (not all in photo): there were like two Chestnut-mandibled Toucans and two Keel-billed Toucans! how often can you see that outside your classroom?!
a dreadful picture, but this is how close they were: this pic is through my bins.
Amy, Kalie and I saw this toucan like the first or second day we were there. so crazy. this is a Chestnut-mandibled Toucan. not taken through bins. :D :D
one day in class we had a visitor:
Joe picked it up and we all got photos and were able to hold it.
it liked Danielle's hair! this is such a cute picture. I love the expression on her face. :D yay!
So I posted last time a picture of a Cane Toad. here are some more, cuz they were just so cute. big, too. they would hang out around the cafeteria at night near the couches on the porch. hehe.
he looks like a fat little buddha. I love the way he is sitting in this one. he looks so cute with his fat little belly.
"I am not amused."
Cane Toads were not the only one who took advantage of the bright lights around the cafeteria. geckos hung out there to catch bugs.
he really blends in!!
dude. hope this doesn't freak you guys out too much, but that is a cockroach near him.
LARGE Cockroach photo, click to see. I just thought some of you guys might not like to see it so I made it a clickable link instead. :)
Colossal Cockroach! I actually didn't know it was a Cockroach at first. it's pretty cool-looking. but creepy all the same. you know, most species of cockroaches, I believe, are not the gross kinds that hang out in your kitchen and carry tons o' diseases. that's only some of them. cockroaches themselves are actually very clean animals, at least that is what I have heard.
I'll finish off with some photos that I think will appeal more to the general public than cockroach photos do. :p
this is a female Basilisk lizard. she was lounging around near the cafeteria under a bush.
also near the cafeteria. this was a great spot for birds. check out the trees; they are so weird! you could see this out the cafeteria window.
this is why I brought my binoculars with me to every meal. in this picture you can see a Passerinus Tanager (black one) and a Great Kiskadee (Hufflepuff-colored bird! yellow and black]).
I love this picture. this is not a Great Kiskadee; its bill is too small. I am thinking probably a Social Flycatcher. it is perched happily on the OTS sign.
view from our cabin porch, watching the rain. it really came down!
just like Oregon! ;)
and one last bird photo:
A Laughing Falcon! I IDd this guy myself as a lifer. :D YAY! this is through my scope. while packing at home, my dad had asked me, "Holly, do you really need to bring your scope?" and I responded with a resounding "yes!!!"
I am so glad I did. :D :D
I hope I didn't put so many there that you guys got overwhelmed or tired of looking at the photos. That seriously took me like almost two hours to get all that down. wow.
Teaser:
again, there are many close-up insect and spider photos in this post. it's cool! :)
So these pictures were all taken within the first few days of getting into La Selva. We all got into San Jose, had dinner at that Asian restaurant (lol), then the next day we were off on our "Turismo" bus with our nice driver, Jose I believe was his name, off to our first destination, where we would stay a week, La Selva.
on the way we stopped at the tiny little town of Sarapiquí and did some shopping.
Here you can see Josh in the foreground.
La Selva was like...oh...3 hours away or so? The roads were pretty good to La Selva (means the jungle en español). Later we experienced true Costa Rican "outback" type roads...but this was a good break-in; seeing as how I can't remember much about the trip there, the roads were obviously really good. hah.
In a journal for class later that week, I wrote about how crazy it was to be driving through the Costa Rican countryside, passing Great Kiskadees perched on fenceposts, lush green plants, little Tico children playing in a driveway....it was just so unreal, and I felt so incredibly lucky. blessed, really. it's so crazy, looking back on it. I look back on my time there with incredible fondness and passion. I have a few bad memories, but myriads more good ones.
Anyhow, here goes.
So this is the Stone Bridge:
titled "thisreallyisasafebridge.jpg". it's a suspension bridge and looks kinda scary but it's very safe. it moves when you are on it and other people start walking on it though. :D my mom wouldn't have liked it. haha
it's called Stone Bridge cuz it was named after this dude whose last name was Stone. This bridge crossed the muddy brown Sarapiquí river and connected the two areas of the biological station. on one side of the bridge were the cabinas and the cafeteria, and the driveway to the station. on the other side of the bridge were more cabinas and also all the classrooms, library, and the actual rainforest trails. very awesome. so walking across the bridge became one of the things that I look back on fondly when I look back at my time in Costa Rica. especially at night when the fireflies were flashing bodilessly from unseen trees and the stars above were bright.
So we were crossing the bridge one afternoon, Amy and I, and we start looking at the iguana sunning itself far off in a big tree with white bark. they called the tree Iguana Condominium, cuz the iguanas really liked to sun themselves.
spot the iguana!!
I think I posted that guy in my first Costa Rica photo post. this guy is actually before you get to the bridge, just hanging out. Counting their tail, these guys are like over 3 feet long!
So I am busy looking at the iguana with my binoculars, and Amy goes farther down the bridge, then says in a rather intense voice, "Oh my gosh, Holly, come here right now."
I hurry down to that end of the bridge and see this:
It's a Coati! more than one and they are called Coatimundi. I posted a picture of one in my first CR photo post.
and I'm like, wtcrap?! and we start to chase the poor thing. not really. you know me; I am NOT okay with animal harassment. but no, so we try to get closer. the little guy is just ambling along the bridge. Amy has this amazing ten times optical zoom on her camera anyhow (I haven't seen her photos yet but I am sure she has some freakin' amazing ones...) and I follow.
I get my best shot as I watch him go under the bridge, while I stand atop.
also on that same bridge, Amy and I spotted our (my especially, as she really isn't a birder, but liked all the nature, yay) life Crested Guan:
I took that through my binoculars. :D nice bird! not uncommon there, but heck, everything was a lifer for me. :D
So upon crossing the bridge you are very very likely to see wild boars. Now most of the other people in my class were fascinated by these. I did think they were cool, but I have seen them in Arizona and though they're fun to watch, they did not feel very exotic to me (as opposed to iguanas or monkeys). I call them Javelinas cuz that's what they call them in Arizona:
this view was from right when you come off the bridge onto the "jungle side" of the river. we didn't see the babies all the time but when we did they were so cute! ahhh!!
the sign says that only cabin residents are allowed beyond that sign, but the javelinas don't seem to notice. :)
so our first full day at La Selva we divided into two groups to go into the actual rainforest. I went with the guy that Joe quietly told me was the better birder of the two. we all had rubber boots in case of snakebite. really. hah. get this, the paths in the rainforest, at least many of them, were PAVED. not like with asphalt, but like someone had hauled in a bunch of 2 foot square blocks and lined them up to make a path. wow. I never thought I would have been walking through the Costa Rican rainforest on a paved path.
Heliconia. these are like the bird of paradise flower. various species of heliconia were all over the jungles, and in fact all over Cost Rica, to just about every habitat I visited. it's awesome cuz their flowers are shaped like that and then they are perfectly shaped for hummingbirds' beaks to dip into and get the nectar. :D
dude. this is that same Heliconia plant, with Kalie next to it for a size comparison. so tall!!!
nearby this anole lizard was shimmying up the stalk but it was just a bit too fast for my camera:
There were some really pretty flowers around there too, covering the ground:
we were getting really tired of Joel just talking talking talking for like half hour when we hadn't even entered the actual jungle yet! but we were rewarded when he showed us our first Poison-Dart Frog!!!
This is a Strawberry Poison-Dart Frog. they are so small! less than two inches long. they ribbited loud though!
some mushrooms around the area. :)
finally we got into the jungle. here is where one of the most amazing bird experiences that I had in Costa Rica occurred. You can read about it (and see awesome photos) here. I'm not going to say any more about it here cuz you really should check it out. :D :D
so we were finally in the jungle. Right after we saw the Great Tinamou, in fact some of us were still watching it, when Amy or somebody else was like, "hey look at that!" and we saw this amazing Katydid clinging, camouflaged perfectly, to the underside of a leaf:
with flash. check out his eyes!!! and his horn!!
I took this picture without the flash. check it out; he blends in so amazingly well!!!
this is a big tree.
crazy brown locust/grasshopper thing!!
this is a Walking Fig. they put out these....not roots, but kinda dangly liana-like things and then eventually they lose those and put out new ones and so they kinda can move over the years. :)
mushrooms on a tree.
this is the creek/river thing we walked over.
the floor on this bridge looked like this. ahh! kinda scary. but not really; it was just over a little creek thing. :) :
these are some hanging liana-things hanging over a tree's buttresses. many of the trees in the rainforest here had buttresses, the funny things sticking out from above the roots...scientists think they help support the tree. we actually did our project in La Selva on buttresses and their possible function, if larger trees tended to have buttresses verses younger and/or smaller trees. a HUGE project. Here are some pictures from our hike on our quest to ask "twenty questions" and get our minds started thinking inquisitively about the nature we saw.
we saw these flowers over a little bridge.
this was crazy; it looked like shiny plastic.
we stopped on this small bridge for lunch and we fed our potato chip pieces to the fishes below. it was pretty cool; the fish were big, like up to a foot, and when they saw the potato chip piece falling they would rush up and mull around on the surface waiting for it. you can see them in the picture.
dude so I am not arachnophobic but this photo scared the crap out of me; I had to resize it to make it not so scary. we determined it was actually just a shell of a spider: his exoskeleton. but boy did it look creepy! I wish I had gotten a non-blurry picture.
strange warty bumps on some leaves.
I love the rainforest....man I love it. :D
Army ants!!!
check out the dude in the middle with the bulgy head. very weird.
there were these lianas and vines hanging down from trees. this looks like a curtain here.
DUDE. check this out, then the larger photo below:
this was without a doubt the coolest insect I saw in Costa Rica. absofreakinlutely awesome.
leaf-cutter ants!!! each of those little green or yellow leaf pieces in this photo, is a little ant carrying a leaf! or some are just piles of leaves they abandoned, but there are also a bunch of ants carrying leaves too! we saw these allll over the place. they are absolutely amazing; they go up trees or other plants and cut neat little pieces off of the leaves, and then carry them back down, and all the way back to their nest and then they use the leaf pieces to grow a type of fungi underground that they use as a food source. I feel like I am making this up--it is so amazing but that's what they do!!! it was normal to be walking along the jungle path and see a line of many little ants scurrying busily across the path, carrying neatly-clipped leaf portions, or sometimes pieces of a flower, all running around.
their nest!!
here are a few more random photos from the rainforest and nearby:
here is Joel holding a fallen Oropendola nest. a bird about the size of a robin made that! they live in huge colonies and weave these amazing nests. they weren't nesting at the time and this nest had fallen to the ground. it was so heavy!
this is the Much-Feared Bullet Ant. They are BIG. they are like....I had to get out a ruler just now to check, but yeah they are def. at least an inch long, but really a bit bigger I am thinking. their bite hurts REALLLLLY bad, so I have heard. our guide Joel said that he got bit by one before and it hurt like for 24 hours, so so bad. later on in our trip our guide said that getting stung by a scorpion is not at all as bad as getting bitten by a bullet ant. We had to contend with these guys when we did our first field project in La Selva, where our group measured the circumference of various trees. luckily no one in the whole class got bitten by a Bullet Ant--good thing!
here is a much better photo:
this is a Matapalo, or a Strangler Fig, around its host tree.
^ some sort of lizard, probably an anole of one flavor or another.
amidst the leaves is a skink! you can see his bright striped tail. :)
and near the Skink in this picture you can see this big thing that kinda looks like a pineapple top; it's a bromeliad. bromeliads are a type of epiphyte that includes the pineapple family! :) very cool. the trees were just covered with bromeliads. especially in La Selva where it was very wet and moist outside.
Amy under a large arching tree.
the following pictures were taken near the classrooms and just around the station in general.
an anole checking me out.
I posted this guy's pic in my first CR post but thought I'd put it here again.
can you spot the toucan?
these flowers that reminded me of mint, attracted a lot of butterflies, and there were also big purple flowers really close to that that the hummingbirds LOVED. this was outside the cafeteria.
more orb weaver spider! I wanted to show how big he was, and how big their web was, but it was hard to show that.
I know this isn't in focus, but here is some of the spiderwebs they had. they kinda did two layers. very cool.
Orb weaver and maybe her husband in the background?
insects seen around various buildings:
I think this is a Blue Morpho butterfly. they are so, so so beautiful; an almost irridescent blue inside. but they are SO hard to photograph when their wings are open! it has a beautiful pattern though. awesome eyespot. :D
a katydid hanging out near our cabin. we saw SO many katydids.
this katydid's body is shaped and veined like a leaf. amazing.
here's lookin at you, kid!
I call this one "insects unawares".
Praying mantis!
he looks velvety.
Halloween colors! or more appropriately, OSU Beaver colors! :D
moth on the pingpong table! you can see how big he is cuz that is the net on the ping pong table that he was perched on.
and a close-up.
So one day, I think it was the second or third day, we had noise outside of our classroom. we looked outside and saw this:
toucans! there were like four (not all in photo): there were like two Chestnut-mandibled Toucans and two Keel-billed Toucans! how often can you see that outside your classroom?!
a dreadful picture, but this is how close they were: this pic is through my bins.
Amy, Kalie and I saw this toucan like the first or second day we were there. so crazy. this is a Chestnut-mandibled Toucan. not taken through bins. :D :D
one day in class we had a visitor:
Joe picked it up and we all got photos and were able to hold it.
it liked Danielle's hair! this is such a cute picture. I love the expression on her face. :D yay!
So I posted last time a picture of a Cane Toad. here are some more, cuz they were just so cute. big, too. they would hang out around the cafeteria at night near the couches on the porch. hehe.
he looks like a fat little buddha. I love the way he is sitting in this one. he looks so cute with his fat little belly.
"I am not amused."
Cane Toads were not the only one who took advantage of the bright lights around the cafeteria. geckos hung out there to catch bugs.
he really blends in!!
dude. hope this doesn't freak you guys out too much, but that is a cockroach near him.
LARGE Cockroach photo, click to see. I just thought some of you guys might not like to see it so I made it a clickable link instead. :)
Colossal Cockroach! I actually didn't know it was a Cockroach at first. it's pretty cool-looking. but creepy all the same. you know, most species of cockroaches, I believe, are not the gross kinds that hang out in your kitchen and carry tons o' diseases. that's only some of them. cockroaches themselves are actually very clean animals, at least that is what I have heard.
I'll finish off with some photos that I think will appeal more to the general public than cockroach photos do. :p
this is a female Basilisk lizard. she was lounging around near the cafeteria under a bush.
also near the cafeteria. this was a great spot for birds. check out the trees; they are so weird! you could see this out the cafeteria window.
this is why I brought my binoculars with me to every meal. in this picture you can see a Passerinus Tanager (black one) and a Great Kiskadee (Hufflepuff-colored bird! yellow and black]).
I love this picture. this is not a Great Kiskadee; its bill is too small. I am thinking probably a Social Flycatcher. it is perched happily on the OTS sign.
view from our cabin porch, watching the rain. it really came down!
just like Oregon! ;)
and one last bird photo:
A Laughing Falcon! I IDd this guy myself as a lifer. :D YAY! this is through my scope. while packing at home, my dad had asked me, "Holly, do you really need to bring your scope?" and I responded with a resounding "yes!!!"
I am so glad I did. :D :D
I hope I didn't put so many there that you guys got overwhelmed or tired of looking at the photos. That seriously took me like almost two hours to get all that down. wow.