From the sea to the mountains

Hello dear readers. This will be my last report before being back in the Netherlands (and I don’t expect to continue writing reports once I’m back) so I hope you will enjoy this last one for the time being.

The previous conservation projects here in Costa Rica were mostly on sealevel or in the lowlands. For my last project though, I went to a location up in the mountains, at nearly 1600m above sealevel. Not very high but high enough to have a different climate here. First of all, it’s much cooler, which is a really welcome change after all the hot and humid months I had so far. Here I can go up the hill and still not sweat. And that’s nice because going uphill is a activity I have to do here every day. The reserve has several trails, both for visitors and for private use, and every time we have to do a bird count, change trap camera’s (they are used to see what kind of wildlife animals are in the area, because especially the mammals are quite invisible when there’s people), or maintain the trails. So while working in the field, I am working on my physical health at the same time.

Because of the elevation, the rainforest here is different from the ones at lower level. Although it’s dry season now, every day in the afternoon clouds start building up and although the chance of rain is low at the moment, the hills do often disappear in the clouds. For that reason this type of rainforest is called cloudforest.

As I just wrote, the chance of seing mammals here is much smaller. We do have some spider monkeys and capuchin monkeys but they are much higher up in the forest and not easy to spot. There are also big cats walking around, but of course those are even more difficult to spot (and most people don’t really want to see one up close either, although it would be very special and unforgettable). The main type of animals you see here are birds. I figured out that there are a lot of birds with a greybrown back and yellow belly and they all look quite similar, so only when you know their calls and songs, or know to little differences between these species, it’s able to tell them apart.

Luckily not all of the birds look similar; there are some really brilliant coloured birds here, like tanagers, manakins, motmots and trogons. The most famous one is the so called respendent quetzal, a type of trogon of which the male has a beautiful long tail and brilliant coloured. Quetzales can only be found in the cloudforest, so most people who come here as visitors to hike the trails, as well as the interns, researchers and volunteers here, hope to see one. So far I haven’t been lucky to see one here, although we heard one 2 weeks ago. One day there was one at the visitor welcome centre here, but by the time we received the notice and went there, it was gone of course. I still have 5 days left here, so please sent some good vibes so I hopefully will see one.

Apart from birds, there are many beautiful waterfalls in the reserve, to been seen from the trails. Costa Rica has an enormous amount of waterfalls, because of the big mountain range and many rainforests. The ones we have here are not the biggest, but because we are far away for real civilication, there are no big groups of tourists and the only place where you can safely swim in the river close to a waterfall is not accessible for visitors so it’s always very quiet there.

Next week, after I’m finished here, I will go for 2 days to another cloudforest 2 hours from here. There the elevation is even higher and the place I’ll be staying is next to the Quetzales national park, so that’s also my last change to spot quetzales, in case I won’t see one here. After that I have only 2 days left and will go to the probably only real interesting city of Costa Rica called Cartago. Similar to the one in Tunesia, it was the old capital here and some nice buildings and ruins are still visible. The city is also rather close to 2 other volcanos so I hope to visit one of them on my last trip in this country.

Thank you for reading my weblogs these months and hope to see you soon in the Netherlands or somewhere else on our beautiful globe. There’s a lot of weird things going on in the world, but don’t forget that we still have many beautiful landscapes, natural reserves and wild forests left that we need to protect. As long as there’s nature, there are places to retreat, forget about the daily challenges and just be at the moment, enjoying life.

Pura Vida!!