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.
by Carlos | May 27, 2012 | Featured Articles
It is May, one of the hottest months at La Selva. It is also the beginning of the “rainy season” although calling this a “season” is a bit misleading. Perhaps we can call it the intensification of the rains, or the period when rains are more frequent and intense....
by Carlos | May 25, 2012 | Featured Articles
“Knock-knock!” Don’t say “Who’s there?” It is not a knock-knock joke. Someone knocks at my office door with regularity these days. I open and, invariably, it is one of my staff, or a researcher, or a graduate student, saying “Carlos, do you want to see something cool?...
by Carlos | May 10, 2012 | Featured Articles
Some days are a bit more exciting than others. Take today, for example. It’s a regular morning, with the howler monkeys calling on the forest behind the house, their calls reverberating through the trees, echoed by the calls of a separate troop a few hundred meters away. We woke up to the usual mix of bird songs, oropendolas gurgling softy over their recently completed long-hanging basket nests; a band of parakeets chatter while feeding on the top of a tree; three or four large parrots, quietly forage. Crested guans softly calli each other from the trees. Other small birds sing, chitter, warble. It’s 6 a.m. and all’s well…
by Carlos | May 6, 2012 | Featured Articles
I stopped the other day on the side of one of La Selva’s long trails and started to take pictures of what was happening on a section of a fallen tree, glued to one sport because there was so much going on. Three or four groups of people walked by my spot in the hour...
by Carlos | Apr 29, 2012 | Featured Articles
What do you do at the sight of danger? I guess it depends. If you think you can deal with it, you make a stand and prepare to fight. If the odds seem against you, you look around and take off running for safety. If the danger is coming at you from above, you duck. If at your feet, you jump. We have all kinds of responses, made in a split second, some evolutionary and quite automatic. No one really teaches you to duck if something is coming straight at your face. Some of these reactions are also learned and, depending of the degree of danger, very effective or totally ineffectual. In the movies we see so many people freeze and stare at the T-Rex coming towards them while our brains scream Run! Run! We could write a whole essay about why people react the way they do when faced with danger or a threat. But what about simpler creatures, like insects? I always walk around the forest with a camera. I know, for a fact, that I’m going to see something I have not seen before, a species, an event, a behavior, a rare combination of all of the above. So, my camera goes with me everywhere and I have been able to capture some very interesting, beautiful and even inspiring moments. But then, after the pictures, out comes the finger…
Recent Comments