Nature Stories
By Jack Ewing I once saw a menu from a fictitious restaurant called the Road Kill Cafe. “You Kill it; we grill it.” It offered selections such as flat cat, smear of deer, awesome opossum, chunk of skunk, and swirl squirrel. The daily special was called “The Mess. If you
Read More“Baarooom” resounded the hollow buttress-root of the Chilamate tree with each blow of the thick branch. Carmelita wasn’t sure which was louder, the “baarooom” of wood against wood or her pounding heart. Again she struck the hollow root. “Baarooom.” “Carmela honey,” her father’s voice penetrated the darkness before his silhouette
Read MoreThe Hardships, Tragedies, and Challenges of Women in Rural Costa Rica by Jack Ewing How many women do you know in their early 60s who have given birth to thirteen children, most of them at home, and without the assistance of a mid-wife? Eleven of this woman’s children are still
Read MoreBy Jack Ewing When the first settlers moved into the area around Dominical in the early 1900s, they found primary forests comprised of hundreds of thousands of species of living organisms. Over time trees were felled and the highly diverse forests replaced with several species of grass intended for the
Read Moreby Jack Ewing Back in the late 1980s we still didn’t have telephones in the coastal communities, and we were just starting to do some bird watching and ecological tours at Hacienda Baru. The lodge didn’t exist yet. For booking the tours we shared an office with a travel agency
Read MoreBy 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 free flowing spring that supplied our water would dry up in mid
Read MoreBy Jack Ewing In the rainforests of Central America the jaguar (Panthera onca) is at the pinnacle of the food chain, and the next largest feline, the puma (Puma concolor,) is one step below. There isn’t much that will confront a jaguar except the larger crocodiles that lurk in some
Read MoreBy Jack Ewing In 1974 President Daniel Oduber began his four-year term as president of Costa Rica. Several months after the inauguration a small article appeared in the daily La Nación mentioning that the president and the minister of transport had stated that the planned coastal highway would be finished
Read MoreBy Jack Ewing Be Careful Bird Watching is Addictive Do you think birds are boring, and don’t see why anyone would want to watch them? Don’t put this article down yet. Let me share with you one interesting tidbit of information about birds, and see if you still think they
Read MoreBy Jack Ewing Forty years ago the interamerican highway was full of holes and had even more curves than it does today. It took Ricardo and me four hours to drive from San José to San Isidro de el General. Pulling into town we filled the Land Rover with diesel
Read MoreTurtle Season 2012 Is Here By Jack Ewing Beliefs are often formed on the basis of a combination of myth and wishful thinking. Since the first pioneers began to settle the southern Pacific region of Costa Rica they have exploited the marine turtles, patrolling the beaches during turtle season, and
Read MoreBy Jack Ewing The sleek, spotted cat rested with her chest and thick front paws on the log, her eyes peering over the top, waiting patiently for a spiny rat or some other small rodent to scurry along the other side. She had been there since moon rise, but so
Read MoreBy Jack Ewing About a year ago in an article entitled “A Ball of Fluff Called Equinox” I told the story of an owl called Equinox who, on March 20, 2009 was nothing more than a little ball of fluff that came walking into my office at 6:30 in the
Read MoreBy Jack Ewing Nothing penetrates the consciousness like a woman’s scream. I’m not talking about an ordinary, everyday, run-of-the-mill scream, like when her husband spills coffee on the new table cloth, or even like when she sees her two-year-old standing on a chair, reaching for a pot of boiling water.
Read MoreBy Jack Ewing Those of us who live within the bounds of the Path of the Tapir Biological Corridor are among a privileged few. With most of the world suffering the impacts of over development we live in one of the few places in the world where biodiversity is increasing
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