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 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 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 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 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 Stories on September 20th, 2009
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