Though I haven’t noticed them as much recently, I think they are always around, maybe a family, as one of these looks younger than the other.
Black Spiny-tailed Iguana, Atenas, Costa Rica
The featured photo is of the older one on the roof, so email recipients have to go to the website by clicking the post title. 🙂 For more photos of this species, go to their gallery: Black Spiny-tailed Iguana.
Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.
~Proverbs 4:23
Yes, this blog started as a “reporting” of my experiences of living “Retired in Costa Rica” and the first few years have lots of “how to” or sharing my experiences of the big transition to a legal resident of Costa Rica. Now that I’m a “Residente Permanente,” it is more of the experiences “flowing from my heart,” and the God I love, and his beautiful natural world that he created for us to enjoy and manage. I hope my current nature blogging motivates just a few people to help save the natural world all around this globe, to love it and to be inspired by it while much of the world’s humans are systematically destroying forests and all the nature within! Nature is the theme of my blog now! But I will not change the name because that is still who I am, a retiree in Costa Rica! 🙂
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
~Albert Einstein
I remember as a child in El Dorado, Arkansas (14 miles from the Louisiana state line) walking the three blocks or so to a small city park with a little pond and being amazed at all the life and activity seen in just the shallow edges of the water and wanting to look at drops of that water through a microscope for the protozoa and other life a book had told me about.
WARNING: This is a longer than usual blog post but still with nature photos! 🙂
The amount of rain has finally reached the norm for this portion of our “Rainy Season” after a May to September of dryer than usual. I’ve never done a good job of capturing the raindrops falling but here’s some shots of the clouds and a couple of plants with raindrops hanging on 🙂 . . .
The Hills of Atenas the other day (October 2). I tried to do a panorama that didn’t “catch” or all match, so this is just one section that depicts the clouds or fog in the hills surrounding Atenas many early mornings, as seen from my terrace. There seems to be something “magical” or “mysterious” happening when the morning air is like this. 🙂
Cloudy Morning in the Hills of Atenas, Costa Rica.
¡Pura Vida!
Report on Galería ARTenas Opening
Gallería ARTenas Opening
We had a great opening to our little art gallery yesterday with hundreds of people coming to see (and some buy) hundreds of pieces of art. I think it was a big success and that many people in Atenas will become regular visitors and customers. We have a VIP Opening November 5 (government officials, etc.) and the JIT or “Just in Time for Christmas” arts and crafts fair the second week of December, so lots of things planned to motivate return visits. I plan to work with the gallery until sometime in January and then I am going to phase out this old man who is finding it a little too much now at age 83, but after that I may have an item or two in the gallery on consignment but will go back to photography just for fun and sharing it on the blog. So keep reading this blog for my usual flow of nature photography. 🙂 ~Charlie
And of course there are many more blog posts I intended to write on this almost annual trip to the Atlantic Coast of Costa Rica, but the opening of a new art gallery is demanding all of my time now! Maybe more later. In the meantime if you are interested in Costa Rica’s Caribe South, I hope you will check out this quite extensive “Trip Gallery” with all of my decent photos included in category folders by clicking the Page 1 Gallery Pix below or going to this address: https://charliedoggett.smugmug.com/TRIPS/2023-September-18-24-South-Caribbean-Costa-Rica
Banana Azul is my favorite “Sunrise Place” and at first I chose one favorite from each day, but too many were alike, so I forgot representing each day, went back and came up with these that I really liked for no particular reasons – I just did! 🙂
I leave this morning for a mid-day, 30 minute flight back to the Central Valley and will miss the beautiful sunrises of the east coast. Here’s 5 shots made of this morning’s sunrise . . .
Sunrise, Hotel Banana Azul, Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, Limón, Costa RicaSunrise, Hotel Banana Azul, Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, Limón, Costa RicaSunrise, Hotel Banana Azul, Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, Limón, Costa Rica
The first shot was earliest, about 4:45 am and increasingly later until 3rd at about 5 am. It changes rapidly over the fifteen minutes or so of rising. I also gradually zoomed in on the sky in each progressive shot.
See a free preview of my book: Sunrise Banana Azul with all 2-page spread photos on “lay flat” photo paper.
The wildlife refuge was Wednesday and the best report on that is my Gandoca-Manzanillo GALLERY. And as a sample, here’s one bird, one butterfly and one “other” wildlife pix! 🙂 PLUS one shot of the cloud covered sunrise this morning. At 8 am today I’m going to Cahuita National Park with a report on that later and tomorrow (Saturday) will be my last day for nature around the hotel which will be reported on even later. A good week! Here’s 4 sample shots from Gandoca and one of sunrise today.