Sloths Poop Once a Month

Most of our hikes have been guided by a local. English is their second language so sometimes things come out differently. The best one so far was the explanation of how many of the plants produce hard shelled seeds that are eaten by birds but because they are encased in a shell the seed passes through he bird via their droppings. In the words of our guide "the beerds pips the seed". He repeated himself several times. It was probably the bewildered look on our faces. There are a lot of fanatic birders here so now we refer to birders as beerders. There are also a lot of Germans here. Consequently, a lot of German beerders. You can pick them out as they all dress the same; matching two tone medium green colored, quick dry pants, shirt, and funny hats. They come to see "the nature".

The protection of the cloud forest in CR is thanks to the Quakers (and the German beerders) who left the USA years ago. Quakers are pacifists so they really don't belong in the US. When this area started to be developed for logging and farming they purchased large tracks of cloud forest in order to protect the forest. Five stars for the Quakers. They have no connection to the oats, at least I don't think so.

We also went on a guided night walk in the forest. We saw fire flies, armadillos, another pit viper, tarantula, serval very large and strange insects, a humming bird sleeping in it's nest, several forest mammals, and a sloth. Sloths are the hardest animals to see because the are high in the trees, sleep 18hrs a day, and appear as a big ball of fur. They become slightly more active at night. This one appeared to roll over onto it's other side and went back to sleep. Our guide told us they have an average of 900 parasite insects living on their fur. The insects probably think it's a dead animal. I guess it's because the sloth is a solidarity animal and therefore doesn't get groomed like monkeys. Anyways they don't look like the picture you see in the advertisement brochure. Heres a piece of Trivia. Sloths poop once an month.

We went on a self guided walk the next day and tried out some of the tricks our guides had taught us on how to survive in the forest, such as how to entice a tarantula out of it's burrow. The first hole we saw in the cut bank we shone our flashlights in and to our amazement there was a big female tarantula. You take a long thin stick and flicked it around in front of the monster spider to imitate an insect. It worked. We retreated quickly. Apparently they can jump up to two feet. We were pretty proud of our new found skill, but I'm pretty sure we won't be using it that often.

Feb12. We are now in Plays Coco on the west coast of Costa Rica. We are here for 6 days but it's the kind of place I could spend 6 months. Catherine found this amazing place to stay. It's a condo that they rent out by the week or month. It's just like home, except it's got a swimming pool! It's for sale for $150,000. So far this is by far the best place we have stayed in for the whole trip. It's got a full kitchen so we will be cooking most of our meals.