charliedoggett.net
Both my gardens and ones I visit
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!
This older and much larger Rufous-tailed Hummingbird, Amazilia tzacatl (my gallery link) was visiting a couple of days ago and has not been back. I think that the smaller and younger one is chasing all other hummingbirds away as if he owns the place. The Blue-vented I had here earlier last month has not returned either. I filled the feeders again, hoping if would attract others, but maybe not with a little boss bird around. 🙂
¡Pura Vida!
Yesterday was a new species of birds for me and today a new species of butterflies for me, the Arita Skipper or Green-browed Skipper, Arita arita. No link to my gallery because this is the only photo in it now. 🙂 And no good article online, though there are 2 other photos on butterfliesandmoths.org and 5 more sightings from Costa Rica on the iNaturalistCR site. Not a spectacular butterfly, but one more species which brings my CR Butterflies Galleries up to 320 identified species now! 🙂
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” ~Henry David Thoreau
¡Pura Vida!
2,000 Blog/Website Visits in January! THANK YOU!
One of the services provided by my WordPress blog/website host is a monthly report of page visits on my site and it has been typical for the last few years to have around 2,000 page views of my blog/website at charliedoggett.net each month!
And though my photo gallery is a menu item on the website, it is actually separate and hosted by a different business, SmugMug.com, and they started in February 2022 counting my gallery visitors with several galleries now having had over 1,000 visitors in 2 years! And the shocker for me, as I typed this (yesterday) is that I’ve had 1,957 views of the gallery “My Home Gardens.” 🙂 Flowers are more popular than birds?! So I express my THANKS to all of you who read the blog (with more pictures than words)! 🙂 And then go on to look at my photos in the gallery! 🙂 Maybe “A picture is worth a thousand words” is a true statement after all! 🙂
Moving to Costa Rica 10 years ago and immersing myself in the incredible nature here was definitely one of the best decisions I every made! And I’m thankful for the many people who have joined me in my adventures vicariously by reading the blog posts and looking at the photos! ¡Pura Vida!
The only “regular” (almost daily) large (Turkey-sized) bird in my garden is the Gray-headed Chachalaca, Ortalis cinereiceps (eBird link) which is found only in the southern parts of Central America or from Honduras to Columbia. When a whole flock of them swoop into one of my trees they are sort of “pests” because of their constant chatter. But lately it has only been 2 to 4 at a time which is less noise and more interesting to watch. See my many photos of this unique bird in my Chachalaca Gallery. Just one shot here.
¡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 colorful, purpleish, dove-like bird is not as common in my garden as the White-winged Dove, but I like him just as much! He is the Red-billed Pigeon, Patagioenas flavirostris (linked to eBird) and found only from Costa Rica to Mexico. Just one more of the many birds unique to this part of the world! The best place to go birding! 🙂
¡Pura Vida!
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 Black Spiny-tailed Iguana, Ctenosaura similis (my gallery link) is called “Garrobo” in Spanish and lives only on the Pacific Slope, which is also where I live. Here’s just two shots from one recently in my garden (living there or nearby) and the only neighbor I have who walks on my roof! 🙂 See more of this interesting fellow in the above-linked gallery.
And what about the Green Iguana? Well, he lives on both slopes, but I’ve not seen one in Atenas, I see many in the Caribe.
¡Pura Vida!
“Hitching the evangelical wagon to Donald Trump has meant unhitching it from the life and teachings of Jesus. It’s a bad trade.” –Peter Wehner, Writer, The Atlantic
Thanks to Ellie for sharing that article in The Atlantic! It is at:
From last night’s devotional . . .
See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy. Colossians 2:8