Wild Life

We have a pet lizard. His name is Snatch. He is pretty harmless, unless you are a fly and he is hunting you. We like Snatch; he is our very own fly swatter.

Living in Costa Rica means dealing with insects. Lots of insects. When we lived in Tulsa we had a problem with ants, and I eventually got pretty good at keeping them away. Boric acid was my friend then, and it certainly is doing the trick on the pesky critters now. There are four different sizes of ants that we see almost every day.  Thankfully the big guys don’t get inside very often. I’m pretty much okay with any insect, spider, scorpion, beetle, etc, as long as it is outside. Inside, I don’t have a lot of mercy. Especially for cockroaches. Die!

 

Aside from the numerous bugs, though, the wild life here is amazing.  We have seen at least six different kinds of humming birds. There are something like 900 species of birds in Costa Rica, and I don’t know the names of hardly any of them. But we see lots of bright red and black birds, ones that are yellow and black striped, and toucans!

The coolest creatures we’ve seen have got to be the howler monkeys. After weeks of hearing their roars outside our bedroom window, we finally got a good look at them.

Now it seems like we see them almost every week.

They like to eat leaves and berries from the trees near our house, and will spend a day or two close enough for us to get a peek at them before they continue on their path through the jungle.  

Howler monkeys travel in families (packs?) and like to stay in their own 2 or 3 square mile territory. They will eat from the trees in such a way that they never deplete the tree’s ability to grow and produce fruit. They have to move to new trees every day to keep everything growing correctly. Cassie thinks they are pretty smart.  And pretty wild.

Not as wild as her hair though. Wild life indeed.