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The Heliconia psittacorum x spathocircinata is one of many heliconia in Costa Rica that are easy to confuse in identify! And like some of the others, it has several common names, but I prefer “Golden Torch” for this one in my garden. 🙂
See more of my flower photos in FLORA & FOREST Costa Rica including a whole gallery of just flowers in my garden.
¡Pura Vida!
Or most online sites say “relatively rare” but vary in the reasons from being very healthy or the “right amount of sun” to being stressed or root bound. Not sure why my snake plant in the frog pot on the terrace is blooming, but it is, and I thought a first for me, but after loading this I find my 2017 blog post with another one blooming. I had forgotten! 🙂
Snake Plant (Mother-in-law’s Tongue), Dracaena trifasciata.
¡Pura Vida!
January to March is very windy here and maybe that is one reason for fewer butterflies, but one of the larger and more colorful ones that keeps hang on around my gardens is the Banded Peacock, Anartia fatima (my gallery link). While several Yellows fly around high in the trees and never seem to land for a photo and a few Skippers can be seen close to the ground, it is mainly these Banded Peacocks who frequent my gardens now.
¡Pura Vida!
My Costa Rican gardener has always called this flowering shrub “Once de Abril” as a local name honoring our one war hero who fought off the North American Rebels trying to turn Central America into another slave state in the 1800’s. Thanks to Google Lens & iNaturalist, I’ve discovered that it is “officially” . . .
So there you have it for all the “official” names I could find! 🙂 Which like pretty much everything in nature, the only sure name is the scientific name and sometimes even that changes! 🙂
¡Pura Vida!
See all my flower photos in the Flora & Forest Galleries.
This is not the most common of the Hairstreak Butterflies, but I have seen it 3 other times before these two in my garden the other day. These photos of two different individuals show the variations in shades of green they can have. And yes, there are other species of green hairstreaks that are different in design from this one and their IDs are also not based on the shade of green which seems to vary in all the green ones.
See my Tropical Greenstreak, Cyanophrys herodotus Gallery for more photos and more shades of green! 🙂
¡Pura Vida!
The humble banana plant flower, seen here along the shores of Rio Tarcoles but also found all over Costa Rica in lowlands and rainforests.
¡Pura Vida!
See the Day Trip Gallery: 2025 January 7 — Rio Tarcoles & Punta Leona
See also my gallery: FLORA & FOREST Costa Rica
Our January 7 day trip with 6 Canadian friends from British Columbia to Rio Tarcoles & Punta Leona Beach was a fun trip with lots of nature photo ops! And I now have the “Trip Gallery” finished! Click that link or the image of the first page below or this web address: https://charliedoggett.smugmug.com/TRIPS/2025-January-7-Rio-Tarcoles-Punta-Leona In many ways, these trip galleries are my “base galleries” from which I glean photos for subject galleries like Birds! While photos made in my home garden go directly into the subject galleries if they even make a gallery. 🙂 But I love these trip galleries because I always make more photos on a trip!
¡Pura Vida!
My needle biopsy went well yesterday and now I just wait for their report that I will receive in my February 12 appointment. And my sister Bonnie learned that her “colon cancer” was primarily an ovarian cancer that spread to her colon, and now they are about to begin chemotherapy after one more procedure. Our mother and brother both died of cancer and now it looks like the rest of us may go the same way. Only Dad never had cancer. The doctors said he died when his heart just stopped, not a heart attack. And Bonnie and I will both look for the positive while we fight our different types of cancers. Thanks for your prayers!
A new regular that’s seen about as much as the Rufous-tailed! See more photos in my GALLERY: Blue-vented Hummingbird.
¡Pura Vida!
I’m out birding with friends from British Columbia, Canada today and expect to have a lot of photos to share over the next week or so. Stand by! Starting with blog in two days. 🙂
Our plan is to have breakfast in Orotina, which is not far from Tarcoles where we will check in at 8am for the birding river boat trip on the Tarcoles River. I usually get a lot of birds on that trip with my prefered “Jungle Crocodile Safari” boat. They generally do a lot better job finding birds than their several competitor boats who focus mostly on the crocodiles. 🙂
After two hours on the river we will go to the nearby coast and beaches of Punta Leona which is a private development and hotel, but the government requires all beaches to be public and Walter knows how to get in free. At these beaches he has seen sloths and monkeys in the past plus the usual seabirds. We will then eat lunch somewhere and travel the hour or so back to Atenas. That is the plan.
Hope you have a happy day too! 🙂
The Art of Flowers! There is no limit to the creativity in flowers!
See the flower slideshow below . . .
Continue reading “El Arte de las Flores”
This Banded Peacock, Anartia fatima (my gallery link) is the most obvious butterfly to still be around during these months of fewer butterflies. Here in the Central Valley the best time for the most butterflies is May-October which is the bulk of the Rainy Season, which I cannot explain, because they do not usually come out when raining. But now, the wind is just as big a problem and it is more frequent than the rain is during rainy season. The irony is that this is the peak tourist season until May and thus tourist see very few butterflies except those captive in the butterfly gardens. 🙂
¡Pura Vida!