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Is another one that seems mis-named with no obvious yellow, though one that I found online did have a golden yellowish hue. 🙂 It seems to be a rare or seldom-seen butterfly with only one other reported on iNaturalist CR and me being the only one on butterfliesandmoths dot org, with three sightings now. 🙂 I’m basing my identification mainly on those two sets of 3 white dots on the wings. I guess most people just see it as another one of the many brown skippers! 🙂
The little Zinnia Patch in my uphill garden is fading just as are the number and type of butterflies with the Banded Peacock being the most numerous butterflies now, along with the less-noticed Skippers and a few Yellows that seldom land. Below is a slide show of my images of the fading Zinnias and Banded Peacocks in front of my “Bird & Butterfly Bench” as I will now be more focused on the birds than butterflies for a while, though we do have some butterflies year around in our “forever Spring!” 🙂 Rainy Season has pretty much ended with only a few straggler showers in December and it’s Dry Season from now until May when things turn back to green and are covered in butterflies! While dry season has us covered in tourists! 🙂
Continue reading “Fading Flowers & Butterflies”
. . . on a busy street in downtown Atenas, Alajuela Province, Costa Rica. I was in a taxi running errands downtown when I realized that the man in the tree was not a tree-trimmer but a National Park employee rescuing a Hoffmann’s Two-toed Sloth, Choloepus hoffmanni (my gallery link) from a tree near Central Park on a busy street full of businesses where he/she would certainly be killed by a car soon. He/she will be taken to a national park or wildlife reserve to live peacefully in the wild as God intended. I jumped out of the taxi and tried to make a few photos with my cell phone, which show what was happening but are not good shots of the sloth. They are all difficult to photograph as mainly big balls of fur that don’t frequently show their faces (both 2 & 3 toed). Just a report of a moment of excitement in busy, pre-Christmas, downtown Atenas! (For which my stopped taxi blocked traffic for about a minute on Calle 1!) 🙂
More photos in the online version of the blog post . . .
Continue reading “Sloth Rescue . . .”
¡Pura Vida!
¡Feliz Navidad! Merry Christmas!
Here’s just two of the shots I made in November of this frequently seen tropical bird, the Blue-gray Tanager, Thraupis episcopus (eBird link) is found only in tropical Central & South America and is one of the more frequently seen birds for me in Costa Rica as my Gallery: Blue-gray Tanager will show.
The feature photo at top is what most of this species looks like and I am guessing that the more rotund one below is a pregnant female, with several eggs to lay. 🙂
¡Pura Vida!
For the White Angled-Sulphur, it depends on which side and angle you are viewing it, with the top of open wings (didn’t get this time) it is bright white with two bright yellow patches and four brown spots, but the folded wings views can be either green, as one of these shots sort of is, or a more yellow look as two of these three photos appear and one shows a sliver of the bright white top. See all of the many looks in my White Angled-Sulphur, Anteos clorinde GALLERY.
Possibly the most seen woodpecker in my garden is this Hoffmann’s Woodpecker, Melanerpes hoffmannii (eBird link), distinctive with it’s gold nape and for the male (this photo) a bright red crown! It is exclusively in Costa Rica and Nicaragua with a few strays into El Salvador and Honduras. See some more of my photos in my Hoffmann’s Woodpecker Gallery made over the years literally all over Costa Rica. Here’s three shots from my garden recently that I’m adding to that gallery collection . . .
I had surgery Tuesday morning to remove another skin cancer, this one from my nose! 🙂 So the Eaton’s hung out at their hotel until about 10 when I took them on a walk through Central Atenas but I was not motivated to make many photos for some reason, so I got only the spreading tree in the courtyard of Mercado Central and the vista from Casita del Café the next morning (where with a clear sky you see the Pacific, but not that morning), with all the other Atenas photos in gallery linked from earlier photos I’ve made. Sorry. We ate out for lunch in Crema y Nata Tuesday and other Atenas restaurants the next two nights.
Wednesday we had breakfast on the mountain top and I took a taxi home while Walter took them to a Punta Leona beach to photograph monkeys and other nature and I rested. Click the above link for an idea of what they saw in Atenas. Just the first two photos I made on those two days here. The feature photo at top of post is of the vista from Casita del Café during breakfast there Wednesday morning and the tree photo is from Mercado Central de Atenas on our Tuesday walk.
¡Pura Vida!
It is tempting to call this a Green Iguana, but those do not live in my garden and these do! 🙂 The babies and juveniles of both species are very much alike, so location determines this ID. I see them in my garden a lot! And their parents & big brothers & sisters walk around on my roof and climb the trees! 🙂
See more of my many photos of this species in my GALLERY: Black Spiny-tailed Iguana. And oh yeah, the scientific name is: Ctenosaura similis.
¡Pura Vida!
I’ve seen this large daytime moth several times in my garden & house and the only other place was at Esquinas Rainforest Lodge near Golfito on the Pacific Coast. The other day I saw two, one on my Cecropia Tree and another injured one hiding among plants in my garden. When not wanting to be seen, they are this plain beigey brown color with off-white spots and bars. But when they fly or lift their forward wings, the hindwings are a bright orange and white. You can see this from earlier sightings in my GALLERY: Giant Butterfly Moth, Castniomera atymnius (linked to the gallery). Just two shots here from this November sighting.
¡Pura Vida!