22 June 2020 - A COLLECTION OF WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM COSTA RICA

A COLLECTION OF WILDLIFE  PHOTOGRAPHS 

FROM COSTA RICA

G'day folks,

Supreet Sahoo is an avid birder and photographer who loves Latin America and its birds! If he had his way, he’d love to settle down near a tropical rainforest and just spend time with birds forever.

He finally quit his full-time, well-paying job last year and decided to jump right into feeding his passion, showing others what he finds.

‘I now try to take photographers from all around the world to share and spread these beauties. Not only does this allow me to revisit these beautiful tropical species, but it also helps others like me to explore and experience what this beautiful country has to offer. I believe that the more people are aware of what nature has to offer, the more they'd be appreciative and empathetic to it,’ he said.

Now, check out his magnificent work ...

Clancy's comment: Extraordinary creatures. Well done, Supreet. Love ya work. Thanks for sharing.

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3 August 2019 - AMAZING CLIMBING TREE IN COSTA RICA

AMAZING CLIMBING 

TREE IN COSTA RICA

G'day folks,

Well, here is yet another interesting production by nature. A secret climbing tree hides along the side of a Costa Rican road. 

With no signs or markings on the road to indicate the trailhead, most people discover el arbol hueco through word of mouth. It’s a few meters off the road and easy to find when you know what you’re looking for, mostly because it stands out from the other vegetation in the forest.

This magical “hollow tree” (in reality a series of ficus trees that have zigzagged together over the years) is located right off a small road on the outskirts of Santa Elena, in Monteverde, Costa Rica. With a hollow interior and easy to grip “branches,” you can easily climb to the top and imagine yourself as a character from Fern Gully or Avatar.

Get close to the tree, and you’ll see its hollow interior is perfect for climbing and can fit two to three people at once. The top does get narrow and you don’t want to be maneuvering around a traffic jam so high up, so it’s best to take turns and allow one person to climb at a time.

While it may feel a bit scary to be up so high, the climb itself is almost like going up a ladder, and being encircled by the tree does give a sense of protection and comfort. But don’t be fooled into a false sense of security—there are no harnesses or safety equipment available, so be careful!

Clancy's comment: The wonders of nature, eh?

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29 June 2019 - BALANCING ROCK GARDEN IN COSTA RICA

BALANCING ROCK 

GARDEN IN COSTA RICA

G'day folks,

Here is a great memorial dedicated to a murdered conservationist and his pioneer wife. 

Years ago, a man named Jake made a daily pilgrimage to the Piedra Colorada area of the Southern Nicoya Peninsula to build balanced rock statues along the shore. He would rebuild the sculptures that were knocked over by the tide and create new statues to add to the remaining collection every day. 

 When he moved away, travelers continued the tradition to ensure the beach would be continually marked with the delicate and often perplexing balanced rock statues called cairns. The quietude of the cairns surrounds the final resting place for Nicolas Wessberg. With his wife, Karen Mogensen, Wessberg convinced the Costa Rican government to create its first protected nature reserve. They established the nearby Cabo Blanco in the early 1970s, and today, the two trails that travel through the preserve are called the Swede’s path and Dane’s trail, after their respective home countries. 

Many environmentalists from around the world followed their lead, buying acres of Costa Rican land to ensure that no development would mar the complex ecosystem that is Costa Rica. Today, its the home of two UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Conservation was not a popular idea just a few decades, ago, though.  In 1975, Mogensen found her husband’s bones near Corcovado, where he was focusing his last protective efforts. While never proven, the commonly held belief is that he was assassinated by those that wished to exploit that land. A plaque honoring the duo’s efforts, perseverance, and vision now stands amidst the fitting tribute of the cairns.

 

 Clancy's comment: Well, good for them. I love these balancing rocks.

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26 June 2019 - PRISON GRAFFITI ON SAN LUCAS ISLAND

 PRISON GRAFFITI 

ON 

SAN LUCAS ISLAND 

G'day folks,

Welcome to another infamous prison, but this disused penal colony features prisoner artwork, some sketched in human blood. 

For 120 years, San Lucas Island Prison was home to the most vicious criminals in Costa Rica. Since it was shut down in 1991 the former prison has only housed the remnants of inmate graffiti scrawled across cell walls and even sketched in human blood.

Given that all the artists on the island were prisoners and were provided no proper artistic tools, anything they could find that would leave a mark was used to tag the walls of the prison. Words and pictures expressed their anger and depression, along with their horniness and faith in something outside of the tropical prison.

Although the vast majority of drawings in San Lucas Prison depict naked women, these explicit portraits often share wall space with haloed depictions of Jesus and other symbols of religion. 

Besides the content of the pictures, most visitors are also fascinated by the “ink” used by prisoners, and certain blood-splattered sketches always catch the eye of unprepared tourists and hold the memories of the brutality carried out inside the prison walls.

Clancy's comment: Mm ... Another gruesome hellhole.

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17 November 2017 - ORANGE PEELS REVIVE COSTA RICA FOREST

ORANGE PEELS 

REVIVE 

COSTA RICA FOREST

G'day folks,

Here is a great story about revival.

20 years ago, a couple of ecologists fighting for the conservation of Costa Rica’s tropical ecosystems convinced a large orange juice producer to donate part of their forestland to a national park in exchange for the right to dispose of massive amounts of orange peels on a degraded plot of land within that same park. No one had any idea what an impact that would have.

In 1997, Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, a husband and wife team of ecologists working with the Área de Conservación Guanacaste national park, in Costa Rica, came up with a plan to save a piece of unspoiled, completely forested land from a big fruit juice company, by offering something very attractive in return. If the company, Del Oro, agreed to donate part of its forested land to the Área de Conservación Guanacaste, they would be allowed to deposit massive amounts of waste in the form of orange peels on a 3-hectare piece of degraded land within the national park, at no cost.

Disposing of tons of leftover pulp and peels usually involved burning them or paying to have them dumped at a landfill, so the proposal was very attractive.

 Del Oro dumped around 12,000 metric tons of sticky orange waste in the Área de Conservación Guanacaste, but a year after the contract was signed, TicoFruit, another juice company and rival of Del Oro challenged the deal in court, arguing that their competitor was “defiling a national park”. They ended up winning, and the deal between Del Oro and the national park fell through.

For the next 15 years, no one really monitored that 3-hectare piece of land that had been virtually covered with fruit waste. Then, in 2013, while discussing possible research avenues with Timothy Treuer, a scientist at Princeton University’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Daniel Janzen mentioned the orange peel story, and how the land had been visited by other researchers, but not properly evaluated, over the last one and a half decades. Intrigued by Janzen’s idea, Treuer decided to stop by that piece of degraded land that had been covered with fruit waste 15 years earlier. What he found shocked him and his team.

“It was so completely overgrown with trees and vines that I couldn’t even see the 7-foot-long sign with bright yellow lettering marking the site that was only a few feet from the road,” Timothy Treuer recently told Princeton University. “I knew we needed to come up with some really robust metrics to quantify exactly what was happening and to back up this eye-test, which was showing up at this place and realizing visually how stunning the difference was between fertilized and unfertilized areas.”

“The site was more impressive in person than I could’ve imagined,” added Jonathan Choi, who was a senior studying ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton when he joined Treuer’s research team. “While I would walk over exposed rock and dead grass in the nearby fields, I’d have to climb through undergrowth and cut paths through walls of vines in the orange peel site itself.”

 But this visual difference between the 3-hectare orange peel dump site and the surrounding degraded land was not enough to confirm that the fruit waste was responsible for the revival of plant life. Treuer and his team spent months picking up samples, analyzing and comparing them. They found “dramatic differences between the areas covered in orange peels and those that were not. The area fertilized by orange waste had richer soil, more tree biomass, greater tree-species richness and greater forest canopy closure.”

“This is one of the only instances I’ve ever heard of where you can have cost-negative carbon sequestration,” Treuer said. “It’s not just a win-win between the company and the local park — it’s a win for everyone.”

 The effect that the orange peels had on the land are probably not that surprising to people familiar with composting, but what is downright shocking is that a judge actually called this particular example “defiling” of a national park and stopped it from going forward. Now that Timothy Treuer’s study has received worldwide attention, this type of defiling is being seriously considered as a way of bringing tropical forests back to life.

“Plenty of environmental problems are produced by companies, which, to be fair, are simply producing the things people need or want,” said David Wilcox, co-author of the Princeton study. “But an awful lot of those problems can be alleviated if the private sector and the environmental community work together. I’m confident we’ll find many more opportunities to use the ‘leftovers’ from industrial food production to bring back tropical forests. That’s recycling at its best.”

  

 

Clancy's comment: Great to see. Mind you, over the years I have made heaps of marmalade from orange peels.

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