And this would be my favorite “holiday” though I see every day as a “Get Outdoors Day!” 🙂 Again from the Washington Post article on strange and silly holidays that in this case I don’t see as either strange or silly! 🙂 June 10 – National Get Outdoors Day!
U.S. National Get Outdoors Day, June 10
This day is part of a month-long U.S. celebration of the outdoors and the benefit of spending more time there. Picnic with your family at a local park. Go kayaking or paddle boarding. Ride on a bike trail you have never explored. Whatever you do, do it outdoors.
I’ve been way too busy in the past month and looking forward to slowing down and spending more time photographing nature! BUT, in all the recent “busy-ness” I did walk through parts of my gardens each morning and though early for the peak of butterflies here, I’ve seen quite a variety. Here’s5 or 6 different species in my gardens recently . . .
One of the Epimecis Group of Moths – possibly a baby Epimecis hortaria, Tulip Tree Beauty. This was only about an inch wide at most. Continue reading “Recent Butterflies”
I mentioned earlier about being very busy with several projects like changing doctors, renewing residency, and helping start the new “Artenas Galleria” that all have seemingly taken the leisure from my life – but not for much longer! 🙂 This morning I had my leisurely 30 minute walk to El Fogon restaurant for an Avocado Toast breakfast before grocery shopping at La Coope across the street. and the two shots in this post are from my morning walks in the garden over the last week+, with more photos coming! 🙂
My last Plumbago plant just keeps blooming, though I got rid of others because they crowd out other plants. 🙂
And the feature photo (at top online) is of one of the recently budded “Maracas” or “Shampoo Ginger” flowers that I will have even more of this year. They are coming just as the other Maraca plant (orange) in my front yard has its flowers dying out, so I have one of the Maraca plants blooming almost all of the time on one side of the house or the other! 🙂 I will share more flower shots later along with very few birds and butterflies the last week. We finally got a reasonably good rain yesterday afternoon, but this is starting out to be the driest “Rainy Season” in my 8.5 years here! And somewhere I read that much of the entire globe will be dryer this year, including Central America.
No – though the first time I saw these bright pink flowers on top of the cactus plant at a house I walk by frequently on my way to town, I thought is was going to be a beautiful cactus! But it seems that the owner of that house has allowed his Bougainvillea to climb over from the wall to the cactus and from a distance, the second photo, it looks like it’s blooming. And some cactus here do bloom, but I’ve not seen that one bloom yets.
Bougainvillea on a cactus makes it look like the cactus is blooming.
I went to San Jose this morning to renew my residency with an attorney and 3 other American expats in Atenas. Since we were all three “Adultos mayores” or senior adults, we did not have to stand in that long line in my photo, but instead were escorted to the front of the line where we got the next available window to finish processing our paperwork (having paid in advance the fee amounting to a little over $100 USD, 66,000 colones). Then they photograph you and your new plastic card is ready in 30 to 40 minutes while you wait in an outside patio with coffee available. 🙂 Plus at the same time they email you the new (since my last renewal) electronic card that you keep on your phone and can use just like the plastic card. Getting too modern for me! 🙂 It is pictured below this Immigration Office line photo with my numbers scratched out. The actual blue plastic card is pictured in the center of the electronic one. Plus the plastic card is also electronic for card readers like on the public bus and government offices.
Waiting in line for residency cards at the Uruca Office of CR Immigration.
And as I expected, it is very modern or contemporary and seems to be geared to preschool and younger primary school kids. My feature shot at top shows a young couple holding up their child to see the installation. Below is a shot of the workers installing the new play things and artificial turf which I guess is better than the gravel base installed earlier. 🙂 I made these shots yesterday and expect it to be several days before it is open for the kids to play on when I will make another cell phone shot of an active playground. 🙂 For new followers of this blog, this one area of the Atenas Central Park is just one of many very slow steps in this small town’s renovating the Central Park here for 3 or 4 years now. You can see all of my Park Renovation photos in the photo gallery: Remodeling Central Park Atenas.
Workers installing playground equipment and artificial turf in the new playground for the Central Park Atenas.
Not really a new species, but this is first time I’ve noticed any iguana with blue lips! (Okay, I just looked in my gallery and one at Punta Leona had his whole head blue! 🙂 ) It is an immature Spiny-tailed Iguana and I have no explanation for the blue lips or earlier blue head! 🙂 Here’s 3 shots of him the other day in my Guarumo/Cecropia Tree . . .
Not as colorful as other butterflies but still an important part of the ecology of our planet where there are more insects than all other animals and people combined and the rest of the earth depends on them! 🙂 Plain Longtail Skipper, Urbanus simplicius. And for you who are identifiers, let me add that I had some trouble identifying this one, with the side view, to me, being more like the Teleus Longtail but I think the fainter white lines on the tops of the wings is what makes this one a “Plain Longtail,” along with the location of the white on his antennae. Here’s 4 shots from different views . . .
My best printed source of butterfly identification is the book A Swift Guide to Butterflies of Mexico and Central America by Jeffrey Glassberg. In that book this butterfly is labeled as a “Bright Scintillant,” but rather than giving a scientific name, it just says it is one of the “Calephelis species.” The butterfly website I volunteer for (butterfliesandmoths.org) does not have Bright Scintillant nor does its backup website, butterfliesofamerica.com, therefore I and others have put this one in “Rounded Metalmark, Calephelis peritalis,“ a part of the “Calephelis species” as the book says. But according to the Glasberg book, the white dots on the upper edges of the the forward wing make this one different from the Rounded Metalmark in the book. I do not know who is the final authority on butterfly names, but hope this one is at least made a subspecies of the Rounded Metalmark! And identification of the myriad of butterflies in Costa Rica will always have its challenges like this! 🙂 Here’s two shots of the latest I have seen of the above butterfly in my garden . . .
Bright Scintillant or Rounded Metalmark, Atenas, Costa Rica
