Costa Rica -- La Selva animals

Things are too busy here and I haven't had too much time to write anything for my blog in the past couple of days. I've been working on some projects with looming deadlines (Smithsonian contract, OTS job) and trying to plan out my busy summer and spring -- hectic! Anyway, maybe that is a topic for another blog post. In this post, I have lots of pictures of some of the animals I encountered while Carlos and I were in La Selva.

As usual, the peccaries were ubiquitous and mischievous around the lab clearing. They were usually pushing over banana plants to eat the fruits, tearing up Heliconias and eating their roots, or snoozing during their afternoon siestas!

Here is a tent (made from a Heliconia leaf) with a few little Ectophylla alba (Honduran white tent bats) inside! These are the cute, little white cotton-ball shaped bats that live in leaf tents that they construct. They are also frugivorous and Carlos and I were lucky to watch them zoom around fig trees at night, snatching small figs to carry back to their tents to eat!

Here is a cute Tinamou taking a bath in a puddle after a day of heavy rain:

A pretty Mot-mot resting in a tree:

I saw lots of Curassows on this trip -- this fella was wandering around the lab clearing.

One night, Carlos and I led a night walk to the Cantarrana swamp and we found a couple of cute tree frogs:

Strawberry poison dart frogs were everywhere throughout the forest (as usual!).

I found this little turtle napping next to the trail one day:

I saw more snakes than usual on this trip (including a huge fer-de-lance and a little hog-nosed pit viper -- no pictures of those venomous guys though...only cute snakes!).

I also saw many, many butterflies in La Selva, but only this one stopped long enought for me to take a picture: