Art Fair One Week from Today!

The annual weekend art fair that I have been participating in for 3 years now is next weekend, December 8-10 at a new location, Calle 2 Plaza, in the same plaza as the new Galería Artenas which is now the sponsor of the art fair. That means you can find Charlie Doggett “Nature as Art Photography” next weekend in both places! Side by side! 🙂

I will continue to have 6 wall art photos, all of my greeting cards and floral accent pillows plus 5 photo books in the Galería Artenas through 13 January, my last day as a member of that cooperative, which I will explain later. But I WILL HAVE 7 DIFFERENT ITEMS IN THE ART FAIR! (1) A new CR Butterflies 2024 Calendar, (2) Atenas Tote Bags, (3) T-shirts, (4) Coffee Mugs, (5) Mouse Pads, (6)several different Wall Art Photos, and (7) a few different Photo Books including my brand new Pura Vida Butterflies, Second Edition with more than 240 species! (Linked to a free preview of it!)

Don’t Miss the “Just in Time for the Holidays” Art Fair next weekend, December 8-10 at Calle 2 Plaza next door to Linea Vital Medical Plaza! 3-7 Friday, 10-7 Saturday and 10-2 Sunday.

¡Pura Vida!

Second Edition of Pura Vida Butterflies

And today just before publishing it, I added another new butterfly! 🙂 I’ll share that butterfly tomorrow, but here is the link to my new Costa Rica Butterflies book:

348 photos of more than 240 species of butterflies in Costa Rica makes this the largest current photo book of just Costa Rica Butterflies. Use as a coffee table book or for identification and research with a complete index of both common English names and the Latin scientific names. And this is right on the heels of the release of my second edition of the smaller Hotel Banana Azul Butterfly book! 🙂

Follow this link or click the image of the book’s front cover below for a free electronic preview of every page! https://www.blurb.com/b/11802842-pura-vida-butterflies

CLICK this cover image for a FREE PREVIEW!

¡Pura Vida!

New Book for a Special Place

Hotel Banana Azul is my #1 source of butterfly photos and thus they get another book just for butterflies found on their property and nearby reserves. If you are going to the Costa Rica Caribbean and love butterflies, then you will want to take a copy of this book with you, featuring 61 species of butterflies photographed there! One of a kind book! 🙂 And why I’m introducing this week? Because Blurb is offering a “Black Friday Sale” of 50% off photo books! And I’m about to do another book also, for the same reason! 🙂

See all the pages in the free preview at: https://www.blurb.com/b/11780529-hotel-banana-azul-butterflies

Or click this image of the book cover:

CLICK this cover image to see the free preview.

¡Pura Vida!

Flowing from my heart . . .

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! 🙂

Continue reading “Flowing from my heart . . .”

Los Colinas del Sol Wildlife

On September 30 after my house was fumigated for ants, I spent the night at our little neighborhood Hotel Colinas del Sol and though cloudy and getting dark, I got some shadowy shots of 3 birds and two butterflies seen below. Nothing spectacular, but nature is almost everywhere waiting to be seen and photographed! And I love it, even in bad light! 🙂

Simple Big-eyed Satyr
Juvenile Baltimore Oriole
Great Kiskadee
Hoffmann’s Woodpecker

¡Pura Vida!

And this Banded Peacock Butterfly I posted on that night. 🙂

Cloudy Morning Hills & Gallery Opening

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 a few shots from the Gallery Opening . . .

¡Pura Vida!

Caribbean Trip Gallery Finished!

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

CLICK this 1st page image to OPEN GALLERY

BUTTERFLIES are the real stars this year! 🙂

¡Pura Vida!

34 Butterfly Species + Busy Schedule

I finally got through all my butterfly photos made on the property at Hotel Banana Azul in Costa Rica’s Caribe South and they total 34 species! Unfortunately I have 11 different Skippers labeled “Unidentified” and I really need some better sources to help with identification. I am including two photos here and one is an unidentified Yellow or Sulphur. You can see all of the 34 species in my Banana Azul 2023 Butterfly GALLERY. And this is in addition to all those already reported on from Gandoca-Manzanillo and Cahuita reserves making a total of 54 species! 🙂

Definitely one of the Spreadwing Skippers, but not specifically identified.
One of the Yellows or Sulphurs but again not specifically identified.

And oh yeah, the feature photo at the top of post has been identified as a Pompeius Skipper, Pompeius pompeius.

¡Pura Vida!

¡Muy ocupado! — Very Busy!

Read on for why I am behind on my blog posts now and what is happening in my personal life, from my new “free” doctors to helping open a new art gallery in Atenas . . .

Continue reading “34 Butterfly Species + Busy Schedule”