Mike in the Wild

I wanted to think I had arrived in an Eden, an unspoiled wilderness, untouched by the hand of man or by any other unworthy fate.  Wasn't that what Costa Rica promised me in the firsthand accounts of all my friends' trips there?  Of course they rattled on about the ziplining, the whitewater rafting, the surfing, and the biking, all things not interesting to me.  But I was hearing something else in these stories: the forests, the waterfalls, the nature trails, and the extraordinary wildlife.  Indeed I soon discovered my bucket list awaiting me in Arenal National Park.  But my experience there also taught me that the reality of Costa Rica's natural history owed a lot to acts of God, and often to human drama. The first hotel I booked on my Costa Rica trip was the Arenal Observatory Lodge.  Unlike on my trip's four other legs, the demand was so high that I needed a reservation six months in advance.  The hotel billed itself as the only one within Arenal Vol...

After witnessing six new hummingbirds in the course of just a few minutes, I would have normally been happy to call it a good birding day and gone home.  But I wasn't just anywhere; I was near the entrance to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Preserve in Costa Rica, at a shop that hung several sugar water feeders on its patio.  Violet sabrewings, green-crowned brilliants, and lesser violetears were among the scintillating birds competing for dominance at the hanging stations.  The misty rain didn't deter any of us awed tourists from snapping photos and risking ruining our cameras.  However I was actually visiting this park in search of a completely different bird, the resplendent quetzal.  It wasn't surprising that the variety and sheer numbers of wildlife I was finding in Costa Rica after barely four days in the country was mind-blowing.  Over the two previous days in Arenal National Park, I had counted close to forty species of birds alone.  In ...

Eight nights in Costa Rica didn't sound like a lot.  Neither did the five different hotels and many locations I'd be visiting.  The distances between these places didn't sound like much either: only one hundred kilometers from Arenal Volcano to the Monteverde Cloud Forest, two consecutive highlights.  Sixty miles wouldn't take long, right?  Well that's when the math started defying my North American logic.   The ride took over three hours, not counting a stop for lunch.  First I had to drive around Lake Arenal, the body of water whose hydroelectric dam provides Costa Rica with twelve percent of its electricity. (Passing below towering wind turbines reminded me that ninety-nine percent of the country's total electrical energy is generated by renewable sources.)  But then the pavement started disappearing from the roads along the last thirty-five kilometers or so.   Initially it looked like there was a resurfacing project underway, but the...