The Other Stuff

David: My parents arrived in Costa Rica on October 6th. Before we hit the road for adventures in the rain and rivers we spent some time here at QERC, in the rain. I believe that at the time it was welcomed rain. My parents seemed to really enjoy be trapped inside with nothing to do but sleep, read, eat, and watch The Office. We didn’t mind it much either except for that I had planned on working, with the help of my parents, on the native orchid and bromeliad portion of the garden outside. The rain kept us from that work outside, so we shifted our attention inside to work on a few projects in the museum, which was great. We mainly worked with some framing for pictures, a terrarium, and a cork board we are going to use for local kids to display their art and pictures of nature.

On my parent’s last full day at QERC we finally did have a break in the weather and we saw some sunshine early in the morning. We decided to take a chance on it and we took off to hike Los Robles, a longer trail through the mature cloud forest. It’s a gorgeous trail. Our goal was to enjoy the trail and collect orchids and bromeliads that had fallen from the trees as a result from the rain and wind. Luckily, we had plenty of specimens to collect. The trail was littered with debris from the trees. It is a long way to fall for these epiphytes because many of these Quercus oak trees are over 100 feet tall. Epiphytes, by the way, literally means “air lovers.” They are plants that like to grow up in the trees. Their roots do not sink into the ground but form root mats that cling onto the tree trunks and branches. They are not parasites. They do not directly get their nutrients from their host tree, but from debris on the outside of the tree or water. Their presence makes the canopies of the cloud forest appear full of life. Anyway, the hike was great and we collected more than we should have been carrying. We should have had our hands free to help us fall more graciously. The trails were really slippery. And at one point the trail completely disappeared. A huge “tree fall” covered the trail at one point and even though I’ve been on this trail many times, it was very disorientating. It took me bush-whacking for a few minutes before I could actually find the direction the trail was going. Nevertheless, we found the trail and made it down the mountain in one piece and completely soaked. Believe it or not, it started raining before the hike was over.

Jumping forward in time to after Sarah wrote about all the rains, we finished up the time with Dad and Mom Hille in the area of Arenal Volcano. We chose to stay at the Arenal Observatory Lodge which is an impressively 1.3 miles from the base of the volcano. Needless to say, we had a good view. Two fairly impressive events happened while we were there. One of them happened in the middle of the night and it was so grand that all four of us woke up immediately. It was an explosion that sounded like a car backfiring in our room. The employees at the lodge said that it was the most significant explosion in four years. And then the next morning we happen to be outside when the volcano emitted a huge plume of smoke. It was putting on a show for us. So we enjoyed a beautiful morning of volcano and bird watching. This is a picture of a Blue-throated Goldentail that Dad was able to snap. It was the favorite hummingbird of the morning.