2021 in Photos

This year was unlike any other in my life, not only because of the Covid 19 Virus Pandemic, vaccines, mask-wearing, hand-washing, and social distancing everywhere, but even more so as my year of major cancer surgery and radiation treatments. Yet through it all I managed to keep nature central to my life most of the time and even make a few photo trips.

I will not try to do a photo-a-month but rather 12 favorite photos depicting major life events, trips, and different types of nature starting with the 2 wonderful trips before the cancer surgery in March. The links in the photo captions are to my photo trip galleries for those events. I even have a gallery for radiation therapy (not one for surgery) and include surgery in my cancer journal and the combined photo book on my cancer adventure. 🙂 And the featured image at top is a Tiger Heliconian Butterfly on a “Hot Lips” Flower on my just completed Christmas trip to Uvita. 🙂

Resplendent Quetzal from January trip to San Gerardo de Dota & Hotel Savegre (gallery link).
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Brown Booby – A Unique Bird

On the Whale-Watching Boat Tour we spent some time at “Whale Rock Island” watching two kinds of very unique birds, the Brown Booby and the Magnificent Frigatebird which I will post about next year, next week. 🙂 Read about the Brown Booby on eBird or see my Brown Booby Photo Gallery. I’ve seen them only one other time. Here’s three favorite photos from this trip . . .

Brown Booby nesting on a rock wall, Whale Rock Island, Uvita, Costa Rica.
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Giant Grasshoppers

The last wildlife I saw and photographed as I left the hotel early morning with low light and clouds were a flock or family of these “Giant Grasshoppers,” which is what everyone calls them here, but I found no good website about them. I photographed one on one of my pre-move trips here, the Carvan.com tour, at the J.W. Marriott Resort in Guanacaste. See it. or for something really interesting, see my CR Grasshoppers Gallery for 13+ different species of Grasshoppers here! 🙂 Here’s three shots of the ones I saw this morning . . .

Giant Grasshopper, Costa Rica
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My Last Uvita Sunset

There have been 3 nice sunsets in a row now with the rain subsiding. This is the Dec.25 Sunset and early tomorrow I head back home in Atenas with an interesting flight from Palmar Sur to Drake Bay and then on to San Jose with lots of photo-ops! 🙂

Sunset 25 December 2021, Uvita, Puntarenas, Costa Rica.

I will be sharing more photos from this Uvita visit over the next few days. There is so much photography inspiration in the rainforest! 🙂

¡Pura Vida!

Dolphins & A Whale

Today I took the “Whale-watching Tour,” 4 hours on a boat in the Pacific Ocean with 4 other tourists, all from Germany, and we saw much more than a whale which we only saw during our last hour. Later I will post about the natural arches, birds on Whale Rock Island, snorkeling, and other things we did or saw – just the dolphins and the whale today with 3 photos of each. Note that whales come up for air only every 10 to 15 minutes and stay up for only 3 or 4 seconds and one doesn’t know where they will come up! 🙂 Almost impossible to photograph! 🙂 Below whale shots are me barely catching the tail as it goes back under water – same whale, 3 different times. Fortunately, Dolphins stay on the surface longer! 🙂

Tropical or Spotted Dolphin, Uvita, Costa Rica.
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Tonight’s Sunset

Well – it seemed spectacular when watching but I was not able to catch that in the camera! Nine shots will give an idea of what it was like but all light cannot be captured in the camera. The wide ones were shot on my cellphone and the others on my Canon SLR. After two nights of rain during sunset, it was nice to have a little bit of a light show! 🙂 I’ll show one image here for the emailed blog version, then online a gallery of all nine.

Sunset 23 Dec 2021, Uvita, CR
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A Bird, A Bug & A Bouquet

Well, we had a real sunset tonight, so that will be a separate post a little later. Here’s the representatives of daytime today . . .

Yellow-throated Toucan eating breakfast one morning.
Butterfly on a “Hot Lips” Flower
One of my many “favorite” Costa Rica flowers.

Later tonight I will have some sunset photos to share.

¡Pura Vida!