Category: Trees

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Park Renovation Continues

Soon after the Covid Pandemic started in March of 2020 the regular work on renovating the Central Park of Atenas slowed and then stopped in October 2020. I don’t know, but guessing they ran out of money or the pandemic caused a reduction of tax income or something like that for the city. There has been no work on the park renovation for more than a year. Well, this week it started up again!

First I noticed the tin fence around a small triangle of the park between two sidewalks at the corner opposite Olivera Pizza and between the City Hall and Banco Nacional.

View across old park while standing in street in front of Banco Nacional or the North side of park.

As I walked around the fence to see what was going on inside the fence, I stopped at the very Northwest corner of park opposite Olivera Pizza:

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Variable Cracker Butterfly

A first for my garden, seen on the trunk of a small palm tree. This “strange” butterfly is very much like the Guatemalan Cracker, with the latter having 2 blue rings instead of one. I have photographed 3 species of the Crackers, seen in my CR Butterflies Galleries: The Gray Cracker in Nicaragua, the Guatemalan Cracker at Corcovado NP Costa Rica, and now my third, the Variable Cracker in my Garden, Atenas, Alajuela Province yesterday. 🙂 More photos are in the gallery linked above.

Variable Cracker, Hamadryas feronia

“If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day.”

~John Archibald Wheeler

🙂

¡Pura Vida!

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TRIP GALLERY is Ready

Because I wasn’t running around on my usual side-trips this past week (in my over-80 slow mode now) 🙂 I got started on and have now finished the “CR TRIP GALLERY” for this 2021 Banana Azul Caribe South week (link is to the gallery).

There’s a lot more to photograph when not leaving a hotel than I thought. Now granted, there are fewer photos of birds and other wildlife and none from national parks, wildlife refuges, waterfalls, indigenous reserves, or wildlife rescue centers (all of which I’ve “toured” from this very hotel in the past). This week became my “quiet mode” focus. I just stayed put and photographed the little things in nature all around me on the hotel grounds, plus some fun shots from the small plane flight there! There are 9 sub-galleries! 🙂 Just click the first page of the gallery below and ENJOY! 🙂

CLICK above image to go to the gallery.

“Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.”

– Ansel Adams

¡Pura Vida!

And if you are interested in some of those great “side-trips” I’ve made from this same hotel, check out the galleries from other trips to South Caribe:

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Beachside Rainforest?

Well – It has been and I hope that at least part of it will last! I’ve been coming here for 5 years and it is definitely deteriorating with development and now evidently a landfill somewhere on the peninsula north of the hotel due to truck loads of dirt and rocks and trash headed that way.

The main (only) highway runs parallel to the coast and thus most beaches but Banana Azul is on a peninsula of sorts with a narrow dirt road leading to it and a few other smaller hotels or B&Bs. Then alongside the beach are “tracks” in the dirt that I hike down into the forest with some old growth trees, marshes, and some small animals and birds. Locals come down these tracks to find a private spot on the beach and like all good things in nature it may be getting “loved to death” with too much use. My Gallery below includes a few of my shots from this trip along this beachside rainforest trail. Though the Caribbean is slower developing than other parts of Costa Rica, I’m afraid it too will go for “the progress of the area.”

Here’s a shot from the beach with forest on left going all the way to the end of that “point” or peninsula.

Looking North from Hotel Beach, Forest on the Left.
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Seen on The Beach

This trip was much more of a “Beach Holiday” for me than most of my trips to or near the beaches of Costa Rica. I’m usually on side trips to national parks or wildlife refuges to photograph nature almost every day. But needing to rest this time, I haven’t left the hotel and thus I spent a lot of time on the beach or overlooking it from my balcony. And of course photographing much! 🙂

With a telephoto lens I did photograph a few interesting people from a distance but decided to give them their privacy and not include in this collection of just nature things I saw on the beach near Hotel Banana Azul, Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, Costa Rica. Below is my straight-ahead view from the hotel chase-lounge chair on the beach and below that a slide show of 16 other interesting things I saw on the beach including “A Dragon’s Head” (if you have an imagination!) 🙂 And this doesn’t include the sunrises from the beach every morning which are in separate daily posts.

My view from under the beach umbrella!
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East Coast Sunset?

Welllll . . . sort of. The sun seemed to be setting in the northwest last night and by shooting north along the beach I got some reflected light in sky and lots of shadows from the rainforest trees on the beach. 🙂 Late afternoon is nice light anywhere and the sky is nice, even in the second shot where I shot due east over the Atlantic! But I probably won’t try that again here. It was not like Tambor Bay beach that curves and you can get both sunset and sunrise there if in the right places. 🙂 And here – I’m just a retired old man playing with my camera! 🙂

Shooting North
Shooting East

¡Pura Vida!

My Sunrises/Sunsets GALLERY.

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Learning How Small I Am . . .

“Sometimes you have to go up really high to understand how small you are.”

— Felix Baumgartner

One of my many joys of traveling across Costa Rica is occasionally getting to fly in the small planes for 20 to 40 minute flights and seeing this beautiful country from above and yes, learning how small I am as I look down! 🙂 I have so many photos from the plane this morning that it was hard to pare them down to just these 5 shots. I will use some of the other shots in the eventual photo gallery of this trip. We stopped in Tortuguero on our way to Limon. Enjoy the thrill of flying with me . . .

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Great-tailed Grackle

Yesterday morning I heard some bird making a racket or singing a not-too-melodious song. I walked out on the terrace and found this young Grackle male moving from limb to limb in my Guarumo (Cecropia) tree chattering away. These two shots show that he is probably a younger male since he is not as large as most male Great-tailed Grackles nor was his tail that “great” like the bigger males. His tail will grow! 🙂

With his smaller size I almost thought he was a Melodious Blackbird, but his song was not “melodious” (which theirs really is) and the yellow eye (instead of black) cinched him as a Great-tailed Grackle, teen or young adult male (perhaps looking for a female which is brown in color). 🙂

Great-tailed Grackle Young Male, Atenas
Great-tailed Grackle Young Male, Atenas

 “Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.”

—George Santanaya

🙂

¡Pura Vida!

See my Great-tailed Grackle Gallery.

And the eBird description of him.

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Orange-chinned Parakeets

I hear these guys flying over my house most afternoons when it’s not raining hard but they seldom stop on their way up the hill to their roosting tree at my friend Dan’s house. Yesterday afternoon, before the rain started, they flew over and stopped for a little rest and grooming in a neighbor’s tree. I got a few shots, though not good with the overcast sky. But as bad as the photos are, they’re my nature shots for today! 🙂

This first shot is of the tree showing several scattered throughout and then I follow with a gallery of 6 individual birds or couples, with one couple cutely snuggling! 🙂

Orange-chinned Parakeets stop over on their way to their roosting tree up the hill.
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Whispering from Every Leaf . . .

“There is another alphabet, whispering from every leaf, singing from every river, shimmering from every sky.”

― Dejan Stojanovic

And I have always considered every leaf an individual work of art – O so many beautiful canvases!

Anthurium Leaf

Yesterday I was motivated by another blog to go photograph leaves. Below is that collection of 14 “Art Masterpieces” by God Himself! Fourteen totally different leaves in my garden . . .

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