By Jack Ewing

Portalón

I used to think of geology as the study of rocks and geologists as scientists who sit in laboratories looking at rocks with a magnifying glass.  Sound boring? I used to think so until found out how much geological events have influenced my life. One day I got interested enough to dig a little deeper and found that geology, rather than being boring can be fascinating, especially when we consider how much certain geological features of the region around Dominical have affected the way that the area has developed. I am referring primarily to coastal ridge, that small mountain range that parallels the coast from the Savegre River to the Térraba River. In the not too distant past — less then 100,000 years ago — a collision between two tectonic plates caused the earth’s crust to buckle and jut up 300 to 500 meters in the air. This probably wasn’t a cataclysmic event that took place one afternoon. It was more like a series of relatively small collisions that took place over several thousand years. Nevertheless, in geological terms we can consider that it happened in the blink of an eye.

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Filed under: Jack Ewing, Nature and Local History Stories on May 26th, 2010
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By Jack Ewing

Back in the 1970s Diane and the kids and I lived in the casona, the old Hacienda Baru home. We didn’t get around to digging a well until the early 1980s, and every year, the spring that supplied our water would dry up in mid February. To deal with the situation we carried drinking water in 5 gallon plastic containers from another spring two kilometers away and water for washing dishes and flushing toilets in 55 gallon drums. The girl who worked for us went to the Barú River to do laundry, and every afternoon around 4:00 PM everyone went to the river to bathe in the crystal clear water. The village of Dominical was out of water too, so most of the town – about 8 people at that time — met us there, and the afternoon bath became as much a social event as one of personal hygiene.

River Otter eating fish

Another daily visitor to the bathing ritual was the Neotropical River Otter (Lutra longicaudis.) No sooner did we started splashing around than a couple of otters would appear from down river, swimming toward our location at the “Paso del Guanacaste.” They would swim directly at us at high speed, and about four meters short of our location they would dive. Sometimes they stayed underwater only a few seconds and sometimes longer than a minute. When they resurfaced it could be anywhere, but it would definitely be at least four meters (13 feet) from the nearest person. It was like they were playing a game with us, but only to a certain point.

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Filed under: Jack Ewing, Nature and Local History Stories on May 1st, 2010
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By Jack Ewing

Most people don’t like bugs. The term brings up negative images of all sorts of undesirable things, both living and not. If there’s a bug in your computer program, some obscure little quirk is making your life miserable. “Don’t bug me!” means don’t annoy me. A bug can be a germ, vermin, flaw, wiretap, defect, fault, or problem. It can mean to pester or bother. My thesaurus lists only one synonym with a positive connotation, the word enthusiast. In Spanish, the word for bug, “bicho”, is often used to mean a very undesirable person.

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Filed under: Jack Ewing, Nature and Local History Stories on March 9th, 2010
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Maybe We Should Ask Woody Woodpecker
By Jack Ewing

Guiding visitors on ecological tours can be very rewarding. Showing guests their first monkey, sloth or toucan is as gratifying for the guide as it is for the visitor. Birds and animals aren’t usually obvious to the untrained eye, and it is often difficult to explain or point out to people the exact position of wildlife within the dense vegetation of the rainforest. A typical conversation might go something like this: “See him? He’s right over there.” “Right over where?” “Look, just follow that trunk up to where it forks off to the left…” “Wait a minute, which trunk?” “That big one just to the right of the one with the vine.” “Oh yeah, that one. Okay now, I follow that up to the fork, right? Then where?” And so on, and so on. Once the bird or animal has been spotted with the naked eye, the next step is to find it with binoculars. Some visitors are practiced in the use of optical equipment, but many are not, and it is sometimes difficult for them to locate the wildlife. I have noticed that visitors will sometimes say they see something even if they don’t. However, there is never any doubt when the person encounters their first toucan. When the large yellow, black and red bird with the enormous beak comes into their field of vision, the visitor’s reaction can range from a simple, “Oh, my god,” to something resembling a low-level orgasm. Nowadays all of our guides have telescopes which they can quickly focus on the wildlife, eliminating all that foreplay and getting right down to the nitty-gritty.

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Filed under: Jack Ewing, Nature and Local History Stories on February 24th, 2010
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By Jack Ewing

The troop of 28 monkeys was strung out over about 100 meters, moving through the forest. The lead monkey, a mature female, came to an area where the tree cover was broken by an open swamp with only a narrow corridor two trees wide going around it. About half way across the corridor the leader abruptly leapt back and let out an excited yelp, one of several different alarm barks the two observers had heard them use. This initial bark was followed by a series of short barks in a slightly calmer voice. Flor Vallet scanned the foliage with her binoculars near where the lead monkey had been when when it jumped back. Finally she saw the source of alarm, a non venomous bird-eating snake. It wasn’t large enough to harm a full grown monkey, or even a juvenile, but it was a snake nevertheless, and they instinctively disliked it. The troop kept moving forward, but as they arrived at the point where the snake was coiled each monkey veered over into a neighboring tree, staying well out of its reach. They didn’t need any further signals. Every monkey in the troop knew exactly where the snake was coiled. Was this communicated to them via the alarm call followed by the short series of barks emitted by the lead monkey when it first saw the snake?

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Filed under: Jack Ewing, Nature and Local History Stories on January 18th, 2010
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by Jack Ewing

People often ask me what it was like when I first came to the southern Pacific region of Costa Rica. Surprisingly many have the misconception that there was jungle everywhere, complete with jaguars, tapirs and scarlet macaws. My memories of those times, however, bear no resemblance to that image. In the early 1970s there were many more hectares of pastures and rice fields than of rainforest. I lived here for four years before I saw a monkey or coati and seven years before I saw a toucan.  I had heard about the peccary (wild pigs) which migrated into the region a couple of times of year, but I never actually saw one until 2004, after having lived here for thirty-two years.

Things have changed markedly since that time. Last dry season, I saw three collared peccary in one week, one crossing the road and two on a walking trail. Several Hacienda Barú Lodge guests, who had gathered at the restaurant for a late afternoon beer, were treated to the spectacle of a collared peccary trying to break into the butterfly garden. It  ran back and forth along the netting, occasionally charging it, trying in vain to break through. One of our guides took a photo of a pair of peccaries in the orchid garden. That same day, my wife, Diane, called the office and excitedly informed me that she was standing on our front porch, observing a couple of peccaries rooting around under a tree about 20 meters from  the house. During the month of August 2009, two groups of visitors hiking in the rainforest encountered groups of more than 20 peccaries.

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Filed under: Jack Ewing, Nature and Local History Stories on December 6th, 2009
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by Jack Ewing

The incident took place so long ago that Daniel Valverde doesn’t remember for sure if Alvaro Mesa was the one who actually felled the last manú negro tree on Hacienda Baru or not, but he was definitely the one who sent the workers up into the rainforest to cut it into logs and split the logs into posts. Some people say that what happened that day was Alvaro’s punishment for cutting down the last manú negro on Hacienda Barú. Others say it was the curse of an Indian shaman whose tomb Alvaro had opened. Regardless of why it happened, it was the worst experience of his entire life, and one that all the people who were with him that day will remember for the rest of their lives.

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Filed under: Jack Ewing, Nature and Local History Stories on September 20th, 2009
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