Full Moon, Yigüirros and an Iguana

Recently we have been serenaded in the mornings while it is still dark by yigüirros, the national bird of Costa Rica. They are also known by the names of clay-coloured thrush and clay coloured robins.

It was chosen as the national bird in January, 1977. Its melodious song can be heard at this time of year as breeding season approaches. But a more romantic version is that it is singing for the rains to start. We are at the end of the dry season and eagerly awaiting the first rains.

It’s an unassuming bird compared to the many colourful, exotic birds in Costa Rica - but its song is lovely.

Iguanas: three species are found in Costa Rica - the green iguana (Iguana iguana) and two species of spiny-tailed iguanas, the black spiny-tailed (Ctenosaura similis) and the five-keeled spiny-tailed iguana (Ctenosaura quinquecarinata). The first two are very large; the latter smaller. My source for this information is the book “A Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles of Costa Rica”, by Twan Leenders.

It seems like everyone has iguanas living around their homes. Ours favour using a drainpipe that  runs under our laneway and out to the road. They also roam around the planted areas. We have three of them - one large male, a medium sized female and a small female. At least, I think they are females.

Well, I started feeding them small pieces of bananas. The male didn’t think much of this. The medium sized female did. When I see her around, I sit in the rocking chair under the carport and whistle. She comes a’running and skids to a halt at my feet. Recently she mistook my two fingers holding a piece of banana as an entire treat for her. I got bitten in two fingers. Who knew they had teeth?

It was just a mild bite but I’m proud to say I must be the only Miskell with a scar from an iguana bite. Last week she was shedding her skin. They do this as they grow and continue to do it all their lives. 

I made a video of our lovely songsters singing their hearts out recently in the early morning with a full moon and before the sun had risen. The second part of the video is of Lance feeding the tame iguana. You can see her skin shedding off. The background sounds you hear are cicadas.

Click on the video to enlarge.

Around Our House Today

Like everyone else, because of Covid-19, we are still mostly staying home, not physically socializing and wearing our masks when we do go out. We’ve been to restaurants twice for breakfast so that was a nice break. The grocery stores we patronize follow strict protocols so we have no hesitation shopping in them. Twice I ordered groceries on line and they were delivered to our house. Many restaurants are also offering this service - here it is called “express”. We also feel comfortable in our dentist and medical clinic offices.

So it seems like we have become really boring but today we had a bit of excitement! A turkey buzzard landed on our internet cable connection pole and I managed to make a small video. It’s a bit jerky because I was trying to walk down our sloping laneway, holding my iPad and trying to zoom in at the same time. If this is not a turkey buzzard, please let me know.

Still on the theme of birds, we have parrots visiting our backyard coco tree and I made a video of them also.

I walked around our house today and took plant photos.

This is a peperomia, aka watermelon plant. The leaves do resemble watermelons. Our housekeeper Flor Maria gave me one small leaf cutting several months ago and look at it now - it’s flowering!

This one is called Dutchman’s pipe - it’s growing on the tall retaining wall between our house and the vacant lot next door. If this is not Dutchman’s pipe, please let me know.

Ginger flower.

We have lots of cocos this year.

Our mandarina trees are fruiting for the second time this year. These ones are unripe.

I have too many easels!

And one final foto - this is the rainy or green season. And when it rains in the late afternoon, our Cat likes to climb up onto the top of our vehicle and watch the world go by under shelter of our carport. Here he is early this evening - we are fogged in.

The End of the Green (or Rainy) Season, Costa Rica

Mid-November and we will soon be moving into the dry season for the next six months. But all bets are off for October and November as far as rain goes. I really needed to do a laundry wash today but this morning was overcast so I put it off until we got back from a shopping trip to Atenas.

By then, a bit of sun was peeking out and there was some breeze. So I took a chance and washed bed linen and some other small items. I told Lance, “If you hear, smell or suspect rain - let me know.” Just before 3:00 pm, the rains came down without much warning and they were quite heavy for a short time. We ran outside and brought the laundry inside in record time. I have the small items hanging from our shower curtain rod and this is how I am trying to dry out the sheets:

That big floor fan is really useful for drying out wet floors and bed linen. Why don’t we have a dryer, you say? It didn’t come with our rental house. Most Costa Ricans don’t have one either - they are expensive to use because of electricity costs here. If we did have a dryer, I would only use it a few times a year - such as today. Moving to a foreign country teaches you a lot of new things!

It's That Time of the Year

Closing in on the end of October, we are in the deepest part of our green, or rainy season. And it will continue into November, or part of November.

Costa Rica has essentially two seasons ... dry and wet .. roughly six months each. Wet (and beautifully green) from about May to November, and dry from November to May ... with some variations. The dry season is the high season for tourists from the frozen northern climes.

Coming from the Pacific Northwest (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), we don't mind rain at all and, in fact, embrace our rainy days here ...

This does not mean it rains for days on end for six months. For four or five months of the green season, mornings and early afternoons are sunny and maybe, perhaps, rain might fall later in the afternoon. I am only referring to where we live in the Central Valley and at our elevation.

These recent days, for us at our elevation, we are experiencing rain earlier in the day. I hung our wash out this morning before 8:00am but the sun and winds were not in alignment and so some of my laundry did not totally dry. We hung the still damp things inside the house and will put them out on the line again tomorrow.

Some people have clothes dryers here that they use carefully because electricity is expensive.

Tropical Evening

Here we are having dinner outside at the tail end of the green (or rainy) season. The rain is pouring down. Most of the day was sunny. But at just before 5:30 pm, it is pitch dark.

Dinner is a bowl of red bean soup with vegetables. I cooked the dried beans in the slow cooker a few days ago. Bags of dried beans are a great value. You can add all kinds of spices to make them taste how you want.

I added fresh cauliflower to our bean soup, along with toast and cheese on the side. The rain is easing off now, but the temperature is still cool.

 

Canadian Thanksgiving in Costa Rica

October 13, 2014, is Thanksgiving in Canada. Here in Costa Rica, it is just Monday.

Some expats will get together to try to recreate the holidays from their home land. It can be a challenge. Turkeys are not very common here, although once I saw a beautiful tom turkey, turkey hen and chicks running free just outside Atenas. This was the lovely old style tom, with the beautiful feathers and big fan tail. So different from today's sad commercial turkeys that can't stand up because their breasts are too big, because everyone wants to eat turkey breast meat.

You can buy frozen Butterball turkeys in places like PriceSmart but they are quite pricey because they are imported. Imported canned pumpkin puree can also be bought, for a price. I once made a pseudo-pumpkin pie here using canned pejibayes, the fruit of a palm tree species. It tasted pretty good.

So, for our Costa Rican Thanksgiving, we are having sea bass tacos - one of my favorites.

We are at the height of the rainy season now. I've been doing small laundry loads for the last three days, first thing in the morning. I try to get everything out on the line when there is still sun and hopefully wind. All went well until today, when the rain started falling before I expected it. We pulled everything off the line, getting wet in the meantime, and have hung a lot of clothes in the house - over chairs, from hangers, door frames. It is all part of the experience of living in a tropical country.

Although it does not feel very tropical right now. I've been wearing jeans and a long sleeved shirt most of the day. Lance just now put on a t-shirt under a long sleeved shirt to try to keep warm. It will be nice to fall asleep tonight with the sound of tropical rain falling.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian friends and family!

Posted with Blogsy

A Tropical Storm

This is a video I made during late afternoon yesterday, when we experienced a thunder storm for about 50 minutes. Afternoon rains, which may or may not be accompanied by thunder and lightning, are a common occurrence during our green season. The green season runs from about April to October/November.

Mornings will be sunny, with the clouds moving in sometime in the afternoon. The rain, if we get it, may not last very long, an hour or so. October/November will be the rainiest months. We get periods of a couple of weeks during July and August that are called veranilla or little summer, when we experience no rain.

Costa Rica has many, many microcosms of weather. This is what we experience at our home in Vista Atenas.

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Singin' In The Rain

Not singing exactly - more like "wow! amazing!" We are finally getting our first taste of the true green season in Costa Rica. Up to now, we've been wondering where all the rain was that everyone talks about.

From June to last week, it was nothing but sunshine, high temperatures and afternoon thunderstorms with  periods of rain.

Now, it has been raining almost non-stop for about four days. If it's not a fine mist, it's torrential downpours. Maximum temperatures in the last 24 hours have been 75.7F and minimum 67.5F.  We needed the quilt on our bed last night - I've been wondering why a quilt was stored in our closet (rental house, fully furnished).

Power outages are occurring more often too - we cancelled a restaurant pizza meal the other night because the power went out and we could not call for a taxi on the house phone. Why don't we have cell phones? It's something we have to look into - but I think you cannot get one unless you have residency.

We've been curious as to why this big cement hole was right outside the back door:

With all this rain, we now know it is a drain to syphon off rain water that comes down from the back of the property, which is at a higher elevation than the house. The street gutters are huge - deep and very wide and it sounds like we have a river running beside our house. Torrents of rain are flowing down the street.

The higher elevation of the back of the property, where the banana trees are, has also been designed to control water flow with berms, thereby directing water flow out into the street gutters. It's really impressive how everything has been carefully thought out.

Soggy Acres

Just Slogging Along and Downsizing

The more stuff I take to the various charity shops, the more stuff I seem to find in the house. All our Christmas items are on Craigs List and I've had a few calls but no buyers. It's a real deal: $100 will get you a 6 foot tree with stand and carrying bag, tree and outdoor LED lights, ornaments for the tree that are really nice, a bag of wrapping paper and gift bags, and assorted decorations for table tops. One of my favorites is a fabric white swan with a wreath around his neck.

Genny the cat has been spending inordinate amounts of time at her vet. Routine blood tests before her dental cleaning showed a UT infection and blood in her urine. Antibiotics have cleared up the infection but the blood remains. This coming Friday she is booked for ultrasound and x-rays on bladder and kidneys to find out what might be going on. Could be a stone and that can be removed, but kidney problems are more difficult to treat. She is ten years old now and hardly sick a day in her life.

I spend a lot of time reading Costa Rican blogs and have started reading A.M. Costa Rica, an English language on-line newspaper. Their rainy season this year has been so bad. It should be ending soon, everyone hopes.