Tag Archives: Valle de La Estrella

One More Dog Photo

 

I’ve now arrived in Las Cruces, which is another field station operated by the Organization for Tropical Studies (Las Selva and Palo Verde are the other two in Costa Rica).

The past couple of days, I spent visiting Boa in Pandora (Valle de La Estrella) on the south end of the Caribbean slope.  Of course, I have more pictures of my dogs that I could post, but hopefully I’ll get into posting some more interesting and diverse subject… for now, here’s a photo of one of Boa’s four dogs.  She’s 6 months old and extremely playful.

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Crop dusting bananas

From the top of an old water tower, Boa and I watched a regionally famous crop duster spray Dole’s banana plantation in Valle de La Estrella.  The agility and accuracy of the pilot was exceptional – with each pass, the pilot cut off flow while flying over a road and simultaneously rose slightly to narrowly miss the power lines running parallel to the road.

The plantation spans much of Valle de La Estrella and has consequently dramatically altered the hydrology of the region.  Various dikes and canals are used to control flow through the plantation into the river, and proposed projects to increase control through construction of additional channels threaten a protected coral reef south of the Rio La Estrella’s mouth (in Cahuita) due to increased sediment load.

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Ride out the Hitoy Cerere

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Boa borrowed his father’s motorcycle to drive to Hitoy Cerere and, while hanging off of the back of the cycle, I photographed some of the journey.  The first picture I was still, and shows a small, unforested plot on the hill in the distance: Boa’s families houses and ranch.  On the left of the photo is a dike used to control Rió La Estrella’s water flow from destroying too much of Dole’s banana plantations.

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