Results tagged “Bats”

Hello everybody on your computers. We continued our trip in Costa Rica, and visited Monteverde, which is in the cloud forest. A cloud forest is a type of forest similar to a rainforest, but higher in elevation and instead of having a lot of rain, there is a constant mist. There's 100% humidity in a cloud forest all the time. The other distinguishing feature of a cloud forest is that the moss grows all over the trees and branches, not just on one side, and this makes it a great environment for epiphytes to grow on the trees there. An epiphyte is basically a plant that grows on a host plant instead of in the ground and it's amazing how much stuff can grow on just one tree in the cloud forest.
 
There was a lot of cool stuff to see in Monteverde. Our first night there, we went to a place called Ranario, and "Rana" in Spanish means frog. They had a lot of different species of frogs that are found in Costa Rica. My favorite ones are the red-eyed tree frog, the green and black poison arrow frog and the glass frog. You can actually see through the glass frog and check out it's insides.
 

'Olla' everyone. I'm in Costa Rica and having a great time seeing animals and rare birds.

We went to a town in the mountains called Monteverde where we stayed in a tree house. It was really cool because we were in the cloud forest and had a great view. One morning, we went on a guided hike in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve. Having a guide was important because they really know where to look for stuff. The most amazing thing we saw was the rare Quetzal bird.

When we were finishing our hike, there were all these guides with telescopes and binoculars running around because someone had spotted a Quetzal. So we followed them and everyone was chasing the bird around, including us. Every minute the Quetzal would fly to a different tree, so everyone would go running again. It was really funny. Finally the Quetzal stayed in one tree and we got a really good look at it and even got pictures of it through our guide's telescope.We spotted a male, which has two beautiful long feathers that they use to attract a female. Check out Tyler's blog for a great picture of it from the front and here's a good one I got of the cool tail feathers:
 

Hello everybody. We've left Peru and are now in Costa Rica. To start our adventure, we were picked up by a guide named Mario from the Turtle Beach Lodge who showed us around some of the Costa Rican rain forest in Tortuguero National Park. At around 1 p.m., we got to Lodge, which stayed at for the next three nights. The first night, we went out on a night walk through the rain forest to look for red-eyed tree frogs. Not only did we get to see them, but we saw them mating, which Mario had only seen once before in his ten years of guiding.The next morning, we went on another walk through the jungle and saw some hard-to-find white tent bats. These bats chew on the edge of a palm leaf until the ends fall down and forms a tent. There were seven little white bats all huddled together under the leaf and each one was only about the size of a thumb.