Fortuitous Encounters

by Carlos | Jun 9, 2012 | Featured Articles, For Animal Lovers

Several times I’ve started these little essays with “I was walking from the house to the Dining Hall to have breakfast when…” And it is true, these short walks, including from the house to the office or lab, or a short hike down a trail usually brings me into contact with something unique, unusual, perhaps even common in the big scale of things, but extraordinary nonetheless. So you can only imagine having a couple of hundred people “walking from here to there” every day encountering the extraordinary and you will understand why this is such a remarkable place to live and work. Consistently, conversations at breakfast revolve around someone showing off a picture of a tamandua (a tropical anteater) carrying a baby on its back, its orange/cream-colored fur broken by a “vest” of darker pelage; or the image of a blue-glowing scorpion under a UV light, eerie and ghostly, encountered during a night hike to a high spot next to a wetland; or the tale of rare birds walking in front of someone on a trial or near a stream, or the amazing viper resting by the side of a trail, or the ocelot hunting frogs in the swamp and on and on.