Category: Rainforest

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“How beautiful the leaves grow old.”

“How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.”

~John Burroughs
“How beautiful . . . “

I have already done one post on dead leaves, titled: Beauty in Death about the final days of a Heliconia leaf in my garden with one of my favorite photos. Then the above quote of John Burroughs and some cool dead leaves at Playa Cativo Lodge motivated me to move on with another dead leaf post! 🙂

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Inside a Coastal Rainforest

I included “coastal” because it is a little different from an inland rainforest like I was in in May at Chachagua Rainforest Lodge – both with lots of rain and streams & ponds but the ocean front has more severe weather and a global warming rising ocean that is washing away the land and the trees one row at a time as shown in one of these photos. Further into the forest is dark and thicker trees and potentially more dangerous wildlife. I did not go too far! 🙂

I am still amazed every time I see a big tree with big roots.

Nine more photos follow . . .

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Cativo’s Other Wildlife

My nature experiences in a Playa Cativo Lodge this past week did include more than the birds & butterflies that I love to photograph! Here’s a few that I was able to “catch” in the camera and of course the biggies like Jaguar and Puma are there but seldom seen by us humans, even on night hikes! 🙂

DISCLAIMER/POSTPONEMENT: I did this post last night and couldn’t finish processing my photo-folders of Crabs and of Reptiles that I intended to include here, so now those two categories will come later in a separate post. 🙂

Mantled Howler Monkey, Playa Cativo Lodge, Golfo Dulce & Piedras Blancas NP

And more . . .

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Cativo Butterflies

Butterflies often liven a garden or forest as much as birds and that was pretty much true visually at Playa Cativo Lodge this week and of course also as usual, they were difficult to photograph! There were probably more than twice this many flitting about, impossible to photograph, but here’s 14 I managed to “capture,” even if not all very good photos. 🙂 And I’m including 2 cool moths from my cabin but could not capture the one Dragonfly I saw. I’m not as fast with the camera as I used be! 🙂

Here’s one to go in the emailed version of the post and the rest will follow in the continued post online . . .

Ash Sphinx Moth on a curtain in my cabin.
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BIRDS of Playa Cativo

There are a lot of both land and water birds at this rainforest beach lodge, and even though it didn’t give my highest count of birds, it is good! My favorite was the Red-capped Manakin which has been very difficult to photograph in other places and was easy here! 🙂

Though no “lifers” (first-time seen birds), it should no longer be expected for someone who has already photographed over 358 species of birds in Costa Rica. 🙂 Below are photos of 25 different birds of 23 species. Two of these species have male and female so different they look like different birds, thus a photo of each! 🙂 I saw more birds than this but have no useable photos of the others.

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Boat-billed Heron on Esquinas River, Parque Nacional Piedras Blancas, Costa Rica.

After my previous trip (Chachagua Rainforest Hotel) I did a separate post on each bird and decided not to do that this time. Enjoy the one photo of each species now and later I will have multiple shots of each in my trip gallery.

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