Costa Rica, Part Two of Five? Ujarras/Coffee

Belated Merry Christmas!  While this was a mission trip, we did take about two days' worth of time (two afternoons and one full day) to explore the countryside.  The first afternoon of free time away from the camp was spent seeing the ruins of Ujarras, before driving over to a coffee plantation on the shores of Lago de Cachi.  Some members of the trip recalled a previous visit when a sloth, likely the brown-throated three-toed sloth, Bradypus variegatus. Unfortunately, no sloths were seen on this trip.  While common, sloths have excellent camoflage, partially due to algae that collects in their fur.   We did see an overlook over one of the valleys.

Growing at the overlook was the largest Opuntia cactus I have ever seen.  It was a bit of a surprise to see a cactus growing in a predominately rainy environment.

 We arrived at the Ujarras, a  World Heritage Site notable for the remains of one of the oldest church buildings in the Americas.

The crumbling walls of the old church  are an excellent haven for mosses and, as it turned out, a lizard.

This is the green spiny lizard or emerald swift, scientifically called Sceloporus malachiticus.  This was a fairly bold animal, willing to stay on its rocky ledge just a few feet above eye level as a horde of tourists looked at it.  Although it barely shows in the picture, the tail of this lizard was sky-blue.  These lizards are occasionally found in pet stores, but this was the first time I had ever seen one.  This is easily the most impressive lizard I have seen in the wild.  It is a close relative of the eastern fence lizard, Sceloporus undulatus.  Eastern Fence Lizards barely range into southern central Illinois, but are common further south in glades in the Shawnee Hills in Illinois.  A picture of it is shown below.

The other animal of interest was the leaf-cutter ant,  This ant, which could be one of several species in the genus Atta, are widespread across Costa Rica, and found nearly everywhere.  They cut leaves off of trees and carry the leaves back to the nest. The leaves are used to grow fungus inside the nest, which the ants then eat.  Essentially, leaf cutter ants are farmers.

An ant nest was discovered under this shrub.  A nearby bush, unpictured, had been completely stripped of its leaves by the ants living here.

Next we went to a coffee plantation.  Coffee is the main export of Costa Rica, and along with tourism is one of the main industries.  As it was the afternoon and the rainy season, the rain began to come down.

This particular plantation has permitted tours of its facility.  We saw the plantation, as well as a toucan high over the parking lot, too far out of range for a photograph.  The whole area, despite being a plantation, was quite lovely.  Part of this may have been due to the fact that the plantation rests next to a sizable lake, likely Lago de Cachi.

After drinking coffee provided to us at the end of our tour, we hiked down towards the waters edge.  This was a very wet area, and my group began discussing the possibility of crocodiles. Caimans are native to Costa Rica, and being from Illinois we had no idea where we might find one.  I have a picture of the general area, taken as close to the water's edge as I intended to get.  

Shortly after this, something made a large splash in the water center left of the photo, and we scurried back up the hill in some fright.  The jury's still out on whether it was a caiman or a large fish, but we had no intention of finding out.  After this, we returned back to the camp over the Rio Reventazon gorge. 

It rained all the rest of the day.  I still found one last plant, a maidenhair fern (Adiantum raddianum) This species is extremely popular to grow indoors, and indeed I used to own one.  Maidenhair ferns grew around the lodge at camp on steep slopes where only ferns and mosses seemed to grow.

That's all for now. Happy New Year, as this will likely be the last post until the new year.

Costa Rica, Part One of ?... Not Really Lincoln Land Anymore?

I've been debating this for a long time.  With Christmas, I have a bit of spare time, so I have decided to write about my ten days in Costa Rica that I spent there six months ago.  Many of my friends and family have asked for me to write about the trip.  I have around two thousand pictures on my computer from that time.  As Costa Rica is a very biodiverse area many of these pictures are nature or landscape pictures.  It would be extremely easy to take this material and work it into a blog post.  The flip side of this is that Costa Rica is not exactly Illinois.  I started this blog with a focus on the land of Lincoln, aka Central Illinois. I debated creating a separate blog specifically for vacations, but decided not to.  At this point,  why should I bother?  Within the second blog post,  I visited Southern Illinois, and the third post took us to North Carolina and Georgia.  This blog is focused on Central Illinois, but it does venture to other places.

 The deciding factor was the time of year.  It's December in the Midwest.  There is very little of interest in December in Illinois.  (Yes, there are bird migrations, and it is 50-ish degrees outside on the first official day of winter.  I saw a fly outside earlier, too.  Thanks, El Nino!  No chance of a white Christmas, but we may be wearing shorts this year...  It was colder in the cloud forest in Costa Rica than it will be here on Christmas.  This is insane.)  (UPDATE- This was followed by a similar warm Christmas the following year.  Perhaps it's a common climate thing here, now.)

As a result, here is the first of several posts on Costa Rica.  It was a mission trip from Cherry Hills Baptist Church in Springfield,  Illinois.  We spent most of the week around the capitol of San Jose.  For more information on the trip itself, see CHBC Costa Rica Mission Trip.   The blog is written by a friend of mine and it is excellent.  I will warn you,  I may have about two thousand pictures, but most of the nature that I saw I failed to photograph.  Google Mimosa pudica, Sciurus variegatoides, and Pitangus sulphuratus and you will get some notion of what you are missing and what I failed to get pictures of.  Many of these photos, particularly the next two, are shots taken by Dr. John R------.

Soo...  Let's get into this.  We left from Chicago's O'Hare Airport having spent a wild night at the hotel the night before.  We landed in San Jose, Costa Rica, pictured above.  We then drove to Campamento Bautista in the hills between San Jose and Cartago.  We had landed in the midst of the rainy season and thus clouds are present in nearly every shot.  It rained every afternoon, sometimes heavily.  This is why they call it a rainforest.

The author of this post is pictured above.  Oh no, security risk!

 I should warn you that I had an abysmal, infernal, and blurry camera to work with, as well as a phone camera.

 I also had no interest in getting any closer to the insect pictured above.  A Tarantula Hawk Wasp (Pepsis or Hemipepsis spp.) is rumored to have the second most painful sting of any insect in the world.  I saw an average of about one a day in Costa Rica, on the grassy slopes of the camp.  Fortunately or unfortunately, there were no tarantulas.  The female tarantula hawk wasp, in similar fashion to the cicada killers of the Midwest, catches tarantulas, stings them, and then lays its eggs in the still-living tarantula. The juvenile wasps then eat the tarantula when they hatch.  Isn't nature so wonderful?   All I know is that that wasp is about the same length as my hand, and that this picture was taken from at least twenty-five feet away.

 The insect population in the area seemed about triple that of any late summer meadow in Illinois.  Furthermore, every insect seemed bigger. I literally kicked a beetle that was dark red and  resembled a june beetle out of the lodge on the first night after it had terrorized the people inside.

The camp itself was stunning, and the nearby hills made it even more beautiful, especially early in the morning after the sun had risen and the clouds had not settled in yet.

Even as second-growth  forest, this area was still absolutely gorgeous.  Below the camp at the base of the hill was a  stony creek with a number of epiphytes and orchids nearby.  Thanks to my camera's mishaps, I failed to get many pictures in this area that actually resembled anything that had been photographed.

This was one of the best I took in that valley.  Ferns, orchids, clubmosses, liverworts, Peperomia, saplings and even a cactus or two grew on the branches of the trees, all the way down to the base of the trees.  The small ferns are Polypodium, the plant with the long green flower clusters in the center is a Peperomia and the rest are generally unknown.

I was amazed at the biodiversity of the area, despite its location.  It was also remarkably free of trash when compared to similar sites in Illinois.  Most of the trash dumps I saw in Costa Rica were in town and near roadways that were already polluted. 

Going back uphill, I spotted Mimosa pudica.  The darker green mounds in the lawn are this species.  I leave it up to you to figure out why this plant is so special.  Sensitive plant is the English common name of this plant, by the way.  I also spotted an orchid that was reminiscent of a Malaxis, pictured below, in the laws of the hill.  Orchids growing in a lawn is a new concept for me.  I generally have to outfit an expedition to find any orchids in my area.  If anyone knows what this is, please let me know,

I'll leave you with a tease for next post.   If you know what kind of plant this is, you might see where I'm going.  (Hint: It's an Old World native, and a substance made from this plant was once banned by the Catholic Church as witchcraft.)  Merry Christmas!

Midwestern Canyons

With few exceptions, the Midwest is extremely flat.  Illinois, for instance, is the third flattest state in the country, and central Illinois is the flattest part.  Excluding the Illinois River Valley and Sangamon River Valley, there is virtually no significant elevation change in this region.   This makes areas like Starved Rock State Park or Matthiessen State Park a virtual wonder.  Cool north-facing canyons hold geologic and floral rarities for this part of Illinois.

At first I was extremely happy to have this sort of place in Illinois.  Then I noted a trend.  In Indiana sit Turkey Run and Shades State Parks.  The same ecotype, north-facing canyons and rarities both botanical geological.  And then I start reading about Hocking Hills State Park in Ohio, which is similar, although not exactly the same.

Is there a canyon-filled, popular state park in every Midwestern state?  And what is the equivalent in Michigan and Wisconsin?

Glacial meltwaters carved these canyons, it is said. That must have been a decently-sized flood.  I find it curious that at each of these places I have visited,  hemlocks grow wild, whether naturalized or not. (At present, I am delayed by several causes from determining anything related to the hemlocks that grow in Starved Rock.  I understand that most of my readers are probably people who see my blog linked on Blue Jay Barrens,  Steve Wilson's excellent blog.  Most of those who visit that blog I presume live east of me, and likely see Eastern Hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) on a regular basis.  I, on the other hand, see such marvels as Prairie Trilliums (Trillium recurvatum)  in the woods nearby and find them extremely common.  I understand that this is a rare species anywhere east of Indiana, so to each his own treasure.)

To return to what I was saying, hemlocks are not common in the Midwest, and thus dwell exclusively on such sites as Starved Rock and Shades State Parks.  Other rarities of such sites include Canada yew (Taxus canadensis) and a diversity of fern species.  I am not implying that all these fern species are rare, but Starved Rock State Park, by itself, contains roughly a third of Illinois fern species.  I myself saw roughly eight species on my last trip, which was after a hard frost had killed off the leaves of most deciduous species.  One of the evergreen ferns was Asplenium trichomanes, which according to BONAP does not grow north of the Shawnee Hills in southern Illinois.  (There will be a future post entitled "When BONAP Is Wrong")

There are several reasons why Midwestern canyons are so biodiverse.

One is the fact that, as in my second to last post, the Midwest is the crossroads of the nation's plants and animals.  Starved Rock's summit, pictured below, holds both northern white pines (Pinus strobus) and the eastern red-cedar, (Juniperus virginiana), two plants from different parts of the world.  The cedar is a southern or western immigrant going north, and the pine is a dweller of the north at its southern limit.

 A second reason is that topography lends itself to diversity, obviously due to water-runoff.   Rocky upland areas provide dry habitat, while the bottoms of canyons are permanently wet.

Third comes temperature.  The cold rocks, shaded by trees, lead to a cool micro-climate with distinctly un-Midwestern  temperatures, while the hot rocks on the edges of bluffs provide a differing micro-climate entirely.  Plants such as White Pines, denizens of the north, can be found along these slopes.

All of this contributes to unique and diverse landscapes that are very worthy of exploring.