Corcovado: Tapirs

It took me 7 and a half months to find my very first tapir and I searched every day. That includes a 10km hike in the middle of the night (tapirs are nocturnal)! Once I found one, I cried like a baby. Since then I've seen a handful, but that is still very few given I've spent nearly 14 months in Santa Rosa, Guanacaste. Until...Corcovado. Apparently tapirs are running around like water in Corcovado, we saw three in 24 hours! Tapirs are endangered in each region of the world that they are found, including Indonesia and other parts of Asia. They are like hippos on stilts. They are truly fascinating giants of the forest!

In this picture you will notice a bird picking at the tapir's side -a yellow-headed caracara. This symbiotic relationship is mutual, the caracara supplements its diet with "garrapatas" or ticks, which rids the tapir of the blood-stealing ectoparasites (I am not a fan, the irritation lasts for weeks and I seem to be a magnet for them. I need a pet caracara). If you zoom-in you'll see that the tick is quite large and situated itself in a den of open flesh...yum.

Up next: wild feline and volcano...soon.

Corcovado: Best sighting by far

An eyelash viper (Bothriechis schlegelii). Absolutely gorgeous. Seen within the first 3 hours of being on trail entering Corcovado. Our guide caught site of a toucan off trail in the forest, pointed it out, started to continue on the trail to get a better view of the toucan...almost ran into this. Pretty venomous, but not quite as bad as the fer de lance -a very aggressive snake we saw later that night right next to camp :) I love reptiles. I mean, how can you not? Look how beautiful! All the green, red and bits of yellow. And, yes, this genus is known for modified scales above its eyes that remind humans of eyelashes, hence the anthropomorphic English common name (the spanish common name is Oropelo or gold skin to represent an all-yellow colour morph found in this species). If you look closely, you can see 3 or 4 scales above the eyes in this photo. Not to mention their long evolutionary history, enabling specializations like venom -one small bite and they kill something 50 or 100 times their size...I'm impressed.

Frog capture by raptor, check.

The next picture in the sequence. Sixteen minutes into the adventure...

Corcovado

This is the first picture I took within the first 15 minutes of entering the surrounding forests of Corcovado national park. We had yet to officially set foot in the park before laying eyes on the first of many sitings of the Common Black Hawk foraging in a stream. Hundreds and thousands of song birds and insects singing all around us, trees tower over our heads as we trekked along a dirt "road" in a collectivo (chicken bus) into the seemingly endless jungle. Here, and with a sequence of photos capturing the black hawk catch his prey, we start a journey of 4 days and 3 nights in what ticos refer to as "el paradiso de Costa Rica" -Corcovado.