Results tagged “Cloud Forest”

Hello everyone in cyberspace. We've left Costa Rica and are now in Panama, in another cloud forest. We stayed at the Los Quetzales Lodge. When we got there, we met the owner named Carlos, who told us about the place and took us to see ten Labrador puppies that were only one month old. He let us play with them as much as we wanted, which was great. Later we went up to our cabin, which was out deep into the cloud forest. To get there, we needed a four-wheel drive because the road was so bumpy and full of huge potholes. The cabin was really cool because it had a wrap-around porch you could go out on to watch for animals and birds.  

The next day, our guide Jonathan brought us out on a walk through the woods and we got to see plants, waterfalls, and birds. That night, we put some bananas out on the feeders and we got to see a few mammals we had never seen before--the cacomistles and kinkajous, when they came to feed. A cacomistle looks like a little tree raccoon and a kinkajou is unique. Not only did the kinkajou eat all the bananas off two feeders, as it that wasn't enough, it then drank everything from the hummingbird feeders!

In my last blog we were visiting the Monteverde cloud forest in Costa Rica. From there we went to see the famous Arenal Volcano. This is one of the 10 most active volcanoes in the world! There is always smoke coming out of the top, which we were lucky to see since the top of the volcano is often hidden in clouds.
 

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.