Very long, red legs. I love the picture on the right. 
Monthly Archives: May 2009
A real coral snake
This time, we saw the coral snake and I got an image of it… although somewhat crappy since it’s head was below the litter. I wasn’t exactly willing to force it from hiding. Boa, on the other hand, made a somewhat violent attempt though.
White Ibis
Another white water bird, the White Ibis.
Jabiru
There is a pair of Jabiru at the wetland I’ve been going to do work in. Jabiru are kind of like storks with a red throat. I’ve heard that they are endangered, with less than 100 left in the wild in Costa Rica, although Wikipedia says otherwise. Regardless, they are a gigantic, beautiful bird.
It has rained.
Long-tailed manakin
I was able to observe the lek (dance) of these two manakins for a short time. 
Tiger-heron
The Bare-throated Tiger-heron seems to be pretty common here. It will often fly off just before I reach it with loud vocalizations and wing flaps. 
A still sunrise
To demonstrate what I mean by shifting of the position of the sun on the horizon that I described in the previous post, here are two sunrise pictures from separate times of year at Palo Verde. On the left is a photo I took in January and on the right is a photo I took this morning. I know it’s not a new discovery to science, but I thought it was still cool to see, particularly because my previous experience steered me wrong in predicting the sun’s location; I had neglected to factor in the change in the earth’s tilt relative to the sun from January to May, which results in a sunrise that is further to the north. Science is cool.
For those of you didn’t explicitly appreciate the start of today
… I bring you the sunrise… well, without the sun. In my second attempt to create a time lapse movie, I was unable to predict the location of the sun this morning. When Adam, a graduate student who’s currently staying here for an OTS course, asked where we should point our cameras to get a good shot of the rising sun, I assumed that it would rise in roughly the same position on the horizon that it had in January of 2008 and 2007; over the mountains show in this video. Nevertheless, the sun rises in a vastly different position now, in May. Thus, neither Adam nor I took time lapses that included the sun in the frame. Live and learn.
There was some fantastic fog though.
My shoes smell
At the dried lagoon, there are hundreds of thousands of dead fish, although I’m not sure of the species (or family for that matter). I do have some living ones, so I’ll key them out as soon as I can. The stench is terrible; further, it’s still in my shoes.
