Livin’ La Carara Vida Loca,

I have been in Costa Rica now for four days after a surprisingly easy day of travel. I am currently at the Parque Nacional Carara at a service station that I am pretty sure is only used and taken care of by these annual Western Rica trips. So as you can guess when we arrived it was a bit shocking, we had to clear the rooms of the compound of tarantulas, frog, geckos, lizards, and other creatures before we could set up our cots, and beat the bugs and dust out of our overused under cared for mattresses. We have electricity and a few fans to combat the heat which at times can feel overwhelming, but it seems now I am starting to acclimate. We lack hot water, but we can take showers, but the rain preferable because it’s quite a bit warmer. It has rained everyday but it usually last no more than an hour probably less time, but when it does rain it pours. We are surrounded by the jungle where you can hear the bellow of howler monkeys, the buzz of cicadas, the call of frogs, and so many different bird sounds you cannot classify them with anyone noise. The bugs are everywhere they definitely own the forest, but I feel like we are living in harmony as long as we give up a little blood everyday. We have made many treks into the jungles and I have already seen many plants, insects, mammals, and birds of Costa Rica, but I know it is only the tip of the Iceberg. In the jungle you cannot help but be astounded almost every inch is covered by some sort of vegetation and the trees shoot into the sky harboring a whole new world of life. It’s a world full of niches and all of them are filled. The trees are covered with epiphytes (plants that grow on other trees), many of which are orchids, vines also hang everywhere it’s truly a spectacular place. It’s not only the naturaleza that is great about Costa Rica, but also the people everyone has been wonderful and even the Spanish they speak is more polite than the Spanish I learned in school referring to everyone with the reverence of Usted, disregarding the informal tu. We have not only been in Carara though we spent a day in a Hotel at San Jose which is what you would expect, but we spent a day at the University of Georgia campus near Monteverde. Here were excellent facilities compared to our compound, it seemed like high class safari lodging. The area is beautiful I saw some giant toads, a coatimundi, some white faced capuchin, and many birds, as well as the complex behavior of leaf cutter ants. I spend most days with at least one hike through the forest identifying birds, trees, plants, and whatever else we can find. After UGA we went the Monteverde private reserve an excellent park, where our wonderful guide Giovanni led us on a three hour hike introducing us to all of his “bebes” which were insects and birds he studied with a real love for the forest and animals, here you see the difference of a native guide compared to our gringo guide at UGA. We were lucky enough to see two Resplendent Quetzals, an endangered bird that is brilliantly colored (you should google it). There were also many humming birds buzzing around, and saw all kinds of bugs. This is a cloud forest so at times the clouds come down and touch the mountains creating a fog so thick you cannot see 8 feet in front of you according to Giovanni. This allows epiphytes to dominate this forest almost every inch of trees are covered; reminding me of the Hoh rainforest. After this we headed for Carara where I am now. Last night we had Salsa lessons that turned into an informal party on the veranda with pouring rain and thunder and lightning in the background. Today we went to the Tranopy where we rode a tram to the top of hill sighting toucans and sloth, then coming down the hill on series of 10 ziplines one of which reaches 30mph. At the bottom we had a wonderful meal and went to the serpentarium. That leads me to where I am now at the Carara Ranger station using their internet to blog, and resting before going to the Disco and putting my Salsa skills, or lack thereof, to use.

Con Mucho Gusto,
Atticus

(There are more photos on my facebook if you have such privileges)

An Eventful Change of Pace..

Jaime Liljegren Blog




We arrived in San Jose on the 22nd at 530 in the morning and shuttled to the hotel where we got breakfast and waited for our rooms. Basically we sat out by the pool and read while waiting for the other people to come. The next day we woke up and traveled to the University of Peace at Monteverde where we drove up some sketch mountain roads while our bus driver fought to get our bus up the mountain. Once we pulled into the campus we unloaded our stuff into bungalows and went on a hike throughout the surrounding nature. There were so many frogs hanging out and hopping around our campus it was awesome!! After hanging out there for a night and doing some lecture we traveled to the private reserve of Monteverde for a guided tour. Our guide was so cool he could do so many bird calls that I didn’t even know existed. Howler monkeys began ‘howling’ throughout our hike and responding to our guide so much we wondered if the guides were just calling to each other. It was too hot for the forest to be covered in clouds but it was still definitely cool to see the upper clouds moving incredibly fast and all the animals. After our hike we ate lunch and headed over to our station and Parque Nacional Carara. Our facility was definitely different compared to the comfortable bungalows at University of Georgia. Taking out our mattresses and beating them to get some of the dust and stuff I don’t even really want to know what it is off of them we put our mosquito nets up (Leah and I basically are experts now, just saying..) and cleaned up the facility that hadn’t been used in a year. The bugs and creatures that have been found since arriving here has definitely created for an eventful stay. Cockroaches, tarantulas, mosquitos and termites are some visitors that have been less welcome; however we have had encounters with many frogs, iguanas, leaf cutter ants and awesome birds too!
Here we began to understand our research equipment for recording the morning songs of the birds and got to play Frisbee in the middle of a downpour in the rainforest, where we lost it in the jungle and had to retrieve it (using rubber boots of course) Today we went on a ‘tranopy’ and ziplined through the middle of the forest! An ok way to spend an afternoon. Starting research soon. Miss ya fam and Michael!

Zane's Carara Vida

Hola,

5 days ago I arrived in Costa Rica not quite sure what to expect. I expected to see a lot of organisms and ecology that I had never seen before but I never envisioned seeing all of this. I have seen more already than I expected to see all 5 weeks. Today alone I saw 3 toucans, 3 poison dart frogs, an entire gallery of snakes, and a coati. The lowlands of Carara are far different from the mountainous cloud forests of Monteverde. The views alone are enough to fall in love with the country, but throw in the hospitality of the locals, the delicious food, and the immense biodiversity and Costa Rica is the most beautiful place I have ever had the pleasure of visiting. However, with all of the positives do come negatives, its hot, and I don't mean Washington August hot, or even East Coast muggy hot. This is a completely different term, you sweat day and night. It has been a challenging adjustment but its nice to know I have 19 other people going through it as well.

Hasta Luego!

Zane

From the cloud forest to the station

All our students arrived safely two days ago. We've already been to Monteverde and back and now settled into the biological station at Carara. They've seen the resplendent quetzal, a blue-crowned mot-mot, dozens of hummingbirds, the glass-winged butterfly below, and the amazing forest in the clouds. The mosquito nets are up, and we'll be exploring the Carara trails for the first time manana. Zip-line and canopy Saturday. The students will start blogging soon. Buenas noches.

De-wilding?

Back in December and January, my brother and I completed a 10 day photography safari here in Costa Rica. We captured some beautiful images thanks mostly to my brother's experience and skill, and a lot of dumb luck. But in my journal those days, I wrote the following. "A pair of scarlet macaws glided across the sky. A trio followed. Another pair. They were streaks of red, yellow, and blue in the morning glow. We hoped to capture such a moment with a battery of photography equipment. But a crisp photo was elusive. Maybe capturing such a wild thing makes it less wild?"

A blog titled "Too many lenses, too few eyes" in today's New York Times digs into this question.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/essay-18/

In the juxtaposition of the two photos above and below, I think one can see this tension.



I would write more on what unfolded that morning at the Sirena station. "Called the most beautiful bird in the world by some, Lapa Roja symbolizes the exotic beauty and wildness of the tropics. One day, a pair unexpectedly flew directly towards our porch. As one bird flew over the building, the other looped back and perched on the roof above us. Then, like a leaf, the Macaw fluttered onto the railing right in front of us. I was face to face with the bird the Park Rangers called Lapa Poncho.

This was a bird connected on the one hand to the wilderness and his or her mate in the trees. But Lapa Poncho also remained connected to the station and its rangers who had rescued it after falling out of the nest as a young macaw. This bird has one wing in our world and the other in the tropical wilderness surrounding Sirena Station. That bird also could symbolize the challenges we face in conserving biodiversity.

Costa Rica is one of the world’s leaders in the share of land protected from human disturbances. But their reserves are islands surrounded by development and managing species like the Scarlet Macaw no longer occurs just inside the parks. Conservation is managing people as much as it’s about managing wildlife and their habitats. This is one of the many lessons I bring students to Costa Rica to learn."

Back in the Carara

I've returned again to the place of my first tropical rainforest immersion. Luck brought me to Costa Rica for the first time in 2001. I was a second year assistant professor of political science and a faculty member of our small environmental science and policy graduate program. The latter part was enough to warrant an offer from a business instructor I had never met. She asked if I would be interested in joining a study abroad trip to Costa Rica? I doubt I hesitated. I could do policy stuff, another professor the environmental science, and she’ll handle the economics. She knew a Park in Costa Rica we could do volunteer work for. We attracted more than 25 undergraduates and off we went.

We traveled to Carara, a central Pacific National Park encompassing nearly twelve thousand acres of rainforest ranging from sea level to the foothills of Turrialba mountain and the beginning of the Talamanca range. It’s located south of the Rio Tarcoles and a population of endangered crocs and like Costa Rica bridging North and South America, this transitional forest was an intersection of the tropical wet ecosystems of the south with the tropical dry habitats in the northwest. Therefore, it hosts a great concentration of biodiversity, a kind of microcosm of Costa Rica itself, and includes one of the country’s last habitats for scarlet macaws. The Carara name derives from an indigenous language that would translate as “river of crocodiles”, and many guide books describe the Park as a wildlife oasis. But in reality this park is an ecological island.

On Carara’s eastern borders, agriculture dominates the rural highlands with pasture fences marking the Park’s edges. To the south, the real estate bubble went global and luxury housing developments have sprung up like an invasive species. But the most significant border is on Carara’s western edge. Highway 34 cuts this terrestrial ecosystem off from the coastal plain to the west. A new road brings even more traffic from the central valley to the Pacific coast.

Ten years ago, there were an estimated 200 Scarlet Macaws. Today, their numbers have doubled and I'm proud that my students have had a small part in this conservation success. But there are new challenges. While the Scarlet Macaws fly effortlessly through the surrounding human developments, mammals, amphibians and snakes don’t fare so well. The tragic pictures below are from last week as an ocelot mother and her juvenile didn’t make their dash off the island. The linked article is more bad news. The road takes on average 16 animals a month. This may become our next collaborative project with Carara.



http://www.nacion.com/2010-06-16/AldeaGlobal/NotasSecundarias/AldeaGlobal2410065.aspx

Ecotopia for the tenth time

Greetings from Santiago de Puriscal. I’m back in Costa Rica for my tenth time since 2001. This nation’s name originated from Spanish conquistadors. It means rich coast in English. The colonizers thought the land would be filled with gold. Columbus set eyes on a Caribbean coastline in 1502 that stretched for 132 miles (212 km). In letter a year after his travels, Columbus had this recollection. “I arrived in the land of Cariay, where I stopped to mend and provision the ships, and to give some rest to the crew members who were quite ill. . . There I heard tales of the gold mines that I was searching for in the province of Ciamba” (July of 1503). To the west of where Columbus first anchored, nearly 20,000 square miles of land undulates through 23 different ecozones (Holdridge, 1967). Framed on the other three sides by a 192 mile northern border with Nicauragua, a 397 mile border with Panama, and 800 miles of Pacific coast on the western side, many recognize that Costa Rica’s riches are more green than gold.

Countless observers have documented Costa Rica’s natural exceptionalism. In one of the first, an author in 1895 called it the gem of American republics. “A naturalist’s paradise” proclaimed Alexander Skutch. One coffee table book labeled Costa Rica The Last Country the Gods Made. It was one of The Living Edens featured in a PBS television series. An environmental historian labeled it The Green Republic (Evans, 1999). Others would proclaim that Costa Rica was the Switzerland of Central America. In a more infamous reference, conservative radio voice Rush Limbaugh exclaimed that he would move to Costa Rica if the 2010 health care reform legislation passed. Ironically, Costa Rica has universal health care. It also has a longer life expectancy then the U.S. and a larger share of land protected from development. Rush didn’t immigrate nor did he recognize the double serving of contradictions in his statement. But many other journalists and observers have been drawn to this country’s exceptionalism.

One New York Times journalist would celebrate Costa Rica’s recent ban on oil drilling (Friedman, 2009). That was 2004 when the former Present Abel Pachaco overturned the permits a Texas Oil company had acquired. In an ironic twist, George W. Bush was on the board of Harken Energy when they first got permissions to explore oil along Costa Rica’s coast. Imagine President Bush denying BP’s applications for deep well drilling concessions in the Gulf? That never happened and the Gulf of Mexico Oil spill will go down as one of America’s worst environmental disasters. But not in Costa Rica!

You also won’t find an army, something another columnist marveled at because Costa Rica has seven decades without an army (Kristof, 2010). That is impossible to imagine in the US. Costa Rica’s former Minister of Natural Resources, Alvaro Urmana, called his home “a biological superpower.” The accolades could be continued. But surprisingly few have associated Costa Rica with the idea of ecotopia.

Wandering around my college bookstore in 1986, I saw ecotopia for the first time. I was a wide-eyed freshman buying my first college books. I didn’t stumble across a book about Costa Rica. I grabbed calculus, geology, and ecology; texts representing the accumulated knowledge of scientific disciplines. But for English 101, the required book was titled Ecotopia Emerging. This wasn’t going to be your typical text. Ernest Callenbach’s second novel was published in 1981 and served as a prequel for his 1975 book, Ecotopia. Inside each, I would find the fictional stories of a new nation forming when parts of northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the United States. But that was fiction. This blog includes real accounts of my experiences and the reflections of my students.

Since 2003, I’ve taken more than 100 students of environmental studies to explore the landscapes, culture and economy of Costa Rica. Costa Rica’s tourism bureau proudly proclaims “no artificial ingredients” to draw visitors from around the world. Situated at the confluence of two oceans and bridging two continents in the tropical latitudes, this small nation hosts some of the greatest concentration of biodiversity anywhere. Costa Rica is about the size of West Virginia, or, 0.03% of the world’s surface, yet it holds an estimated 5 percent of the world’s biodiversity. Species from North and South America mixed on this continental land bridge for over a millennia leading to new combinations of flora and fauna.

In the south central spine of the nation’s Talamanca mountains, the highest peak of Chirripo reaches over 12,000 feet with a cap of Costa Rica’s rarest life zone—an alpine cloud rain paramo. To the east, an alluvial plain spreads into the Caribbean and north to the Nicaraguan border. On the Pacific side, the geography varies more with clusters of mountains criss-crossing the landscape to create numerous valleys. A second and distinct volcanic range rises up again north of the central valley. This undulating terrain and climate creates the variations of elevation, temperatures, and rainfall that form differentiated cauldrons where the alchemy of speciation led to new life forms. Over 87,000 have been identified and scientists expect they might discover a half million species across Costa Rica (Zamora and Obando, 2001). You can’t really understand biodiversity and how thick nature can get until you are immersed in a tropical rainforest’s flora and fauna.


This blog, and the program I’ve been leading every year (called Rainforest Immersion and Conservation Action), is not only about tropical ecology. We embark on a broad study of the environment. The students will monitor rare Scarlet Macaws, study deforestation from satellite images, and learn about botany. They also take action to conserve the rainforests by building trails and volunteering in the communities outside Costa Rica’s conservation areas. We also learn about globalization and how economic forces can help and harm this nation in studying the tension between profits and people. Students are, for instance, confronted with the inequitable development patterns transforming Costa Rica’s coastlines. Oceanside property is predominately foreign-owned and often very different than typical housing in the interior. As one of my students put it one year, “you can visit Costa Rica, but never be in Costa Rica.” In short distances, you can see opulent clusters of homes and golf courses catering to the super rich near the meager homes of ordinary residents. The former’s wealth can be a hundred or even thousand-fold higher than their neighbors. According to the New Economics Foundation (NEF), nearly ten percent of Costa Ricans live on less than $2.00 per day. Such inequity is an often an underappreciated weakness of any community or country’s aspirations to hit the sustainability sweet spot.

This blog will give you a glimpse of the three-dimensional perspective we use here, and in doing so, illuminate Costa Rica’s lessons in the triple light of the ecological, environmental, and social dimensions of sustainability. These complicated webs will make or break Costa Rica’s environmental achievements.

Pura vida amigos, 14 June 2010.