Costa Rica Hotels

[guppiecat]

Costa Rica has fruit. There's lots and lots of fruit. Not only do normal houseplants grow so large there that they eat small children, but they also fruit so much it's knee-deep in places. In Iowa, we have to shovel snow, in Costa Rica, they have to shovel fruit^*. It's everywhere. Of course, birds eat it, and some hotels put out fruit to attract the birds for the tourists. You wouldn't think that they'd care that much for slices of fruit when there are towering mountains of fruit just a few meters from them, but I guess that since birds don't carry knives, they appreciate the effort we go through.

I took a few photos of birds going after fruit, and put them in this set.

^* This post may involve the use of hyperbole.

(By the way, this post is the first to use Flickr's new "larger medium" photo sizes. If this is a problem on your end, please let me know.)








This is another one of those guans. They eat fruit. There are lots of them.


See? yummy yummy fruit


This what fruit looks like before it's cut up for birdies.


There are also squirrels that run up and down the trees to gather fruit.


Some trees don't like this.


Pointy pointy pointy.

Comments

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

Very pretty birds indeed.

[maiac.livejournal.com]

I never thought of squirrels as tropical animals, but I guess wherever there are trees and food, there will be squirrels.

I especially like the perspective of the first photo. Very pretty bird.

"Some trees don't like this" made me snortlaugh.

[guppiecat]

There really weren't many. Not many rabbits either.

I wonder if it's a humidity thing.

[nightshade1972.livejournal.com]

I would beg to differ. I went to school at the University of Houston. You couldn't walk two feet without practically stepping on a squirrel. So many of them were so used to being hand-fed by students, if you were trying to quietly eat your lunch outside they wouldn't leave you alone. As I understood it, when UH began eighty years ago, there weren't many squirrels on campus, but over the years their population has exploded. It's a safe environment (for the squirrels, anyway, it's right in the middle of the Third and Fourth Wards of Houston), and the original few probably reproduced, grew up and told all their friends, so the UH campus is pretty much Squirrel City now.

Did I mention that Houston, since it's about an hour from the Gulf of Mexico, is terribly humid most of the year, but particularly in summer?

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

I guess guans are a sources of guano...

[guppiecat]

I thought guano came from bats.

Maybe guans eat bats.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

I'd never heard that--about the bats. Though it would explain why we have no guans, because we have tons (literally) of bats.

I thought it was seabird excrement, but I see that Wikipedia includes bats and seals.

I like my story better.:) I'm going to promulgate it as a folk etymology.