I’ve got a couple comments regarding the upcoming Presidential election that seem appropriate before I get into the meat of the post. Let me state up front that neither of our two candidates should be elected…one is a narcissistic blowhard and the other was clearly slipping mentally…as a result neither should be elected. And after the withdrawal of the slipping mentally one…it looks like a replacement candidate that has shown absolutely zero ability to get a single vote for Presidential nominee in 2020 and has done nothing as VP.

We’ve been seeing for 3 years now how the former President incited an insurrection from one side while it was a peaceful protest with a few violent people on the other side…and neither side is fully correct. He came close to but IMO didn’t cross the line after I reviewed the actual transcript of his remarks…but he should have been smart enough to know what would happen…just as the Capitol Police and Democrats in charge of Capitol security should have been smart enough to make sure the riot control folks were already in the basement undetected before any of that situation happened. I’m not going to say either side is correct…although it does seem to me that if the crowd on Jan 6 was participating in an insurrection then the rioters that took over cities and federal buildings during the George Floyd protests were also participating in an insurrection.

That said…and I’ve seen even Democrats who agree with this in the past 2 days…what’s happened since the debate in the Democratic Party leadership is deplorable.

All we’ve heard the past 3 years is that if the former President is elected…it will be “the end of democracy” and “the end of the Constitution”…but…and I’m sorry to be crass here…that’s just bullshit political hyperbole. Sure…if he’s elected he is going to likely not have a compliant Congress and a filibuster proof majority in the Senate…so he’s going to issue a whole bunch of Executive Orders just like Presidents have done repeatedly over the past at least 30 years to enact policies they want to enact. And…just like those previous orders…many to most of them will result in lawsuits and will be held in abeyance pending the resolution of the case.

So…let’s talk about the end of democracy…and the fact that the Democratic leadership and White House have been lying about the competency of the President for a long time. Any person with more than 3 working brain cells has seen the decline in his mental faculties since 2020…and it’s been obvious for at least 18 months that he should not run for reelection. Nonetheless…everyone on that side of the aisle simply and flatly lied about his competence and promoted him to run essentially unopposed…until it was made obvious by the debate performance that he isn’t the man he used to be. The real problem…is that he was trailing his challenger and the elites and party leadership couldn’t let that happen.

So…and we’ve seen numerous reports of this from unnamed sources on both sides…the two primary leaders in the party took it upon themselves to force the President out of the running. Former President Obama and Ms. Pelosi…while we aren’t fond of their politics…are extraordinarily competent politicians and it seems they carefully orchestrated forcing him out. My supposition is that either they’re resigned to losing this election and selected Ms. Harris as the sacrificial lamb since they really don’t her to be President and losing will take her out of the running in 2028…or that they really want her to win but she’s already demonstrated both an inability to get a single vote for presidential nominee back in 2020 and has demonstrated an inability to actually get anything done as VP…after all she was placed in charge of the border crisis some 3 years ago and has done absolutely nothing.

Today…as illustrated in a WSJ column by former governor of Illinois Rob Blagojevich…we’ve seen how much the Democratic Party actually cares about democracy. While we were not one of them…some 14 million people voted for the President to be the Democratic nominee…and I’m pretty sure that pretty much none of those votes were for Ms. Harris…they were for the President. After all…a famous man once said that “the vice presidency is not worth a bucket of warm spit”. Nobody…absolutely nobody…ever voted for a presidential nominee because of who they picked for VP. The problem is that all of the lies that everybody from Ms. Harris down told for years about the President’s declining abilities due to age…along with her complete unacceptability to Democratic voters in 2020…led us to a place where smoke filled backroom politics gave the country the Democratic nominee and not the voters. If the party leadership was *actually* interested in democracy…they would have an open convention and let the delegates on the floor make the decision. That…while still ignoring the will of the voters…is a lot closer to democracy than the travesty we’re witnessing this week. Governor Rob succinctly described this as typical Chicago backroom politics giving the voters selection rather than a vote.

Round these parts…we were really hoping that a more centrist Democrat like Manchin or former governor Warner of VA would run…they actually have a record of trying to compromise with the other side and get things done…because at this point we have simply to make a selection of the least bad of two terrible choices. 

OK, on to Costa Rica.

Neil and Connie left home on July 4 and drove over to Miami then caught a plane the next morning to San Jose, spent the evening there in the Hilton Garden Inn…registration was on the 22nd floor and their room was on the 27th. Arising early the next morning they went back to the airport but to the domestic terminal rather than international and took the 35 minute or so bush plane flight down to Puerto Jimenez on the Osa Peninsula. The Osa is on the Pacific coast just about 20 miles or so from the border with Panama and is basically out in the jungle. They headed over to the Botanika Resort which was their home for the week and after lunch and a couple of organizational meetings the +1s headed off to the pool and the workshop participants headed out on their first outing. Although the workshop is under the purview of Steve and Rose Perry the actual onsite host was a local named Dennis Valverde who served as Steve’s second guide on most of the previous workshops Steve’s done down there. Dennis’s family runs a sloth conservatory/nature preserve and that was our first day’s outing since it was relatively close and it was already 1400 or so in the afternoon.

Waking up in the morning in San Jose we had this view out the window of the Hilton Garden Inn.

A couple of shots from the bush plane which turned out to be the same make and model that Neil flew on out to the Serengeti in April.

While Neil was out on the drive…Connie got this picture of a Scarlet Rumped Tanager with her iPhone through the door to our balcony.

Meanwhile…out at the Sloth Preserve…a three toed female Sloth and her offspring. Sloths only nurse a few weeks before putting the infant on solid (leaf) food. Neil can definitely report  that sloths are…ssssslllllloooooowwwww.

After spending some time with the above sloths they headed elsewhere on the preserve and found some Rufous Tailed Hummingbirds…the female is the one sitting on the nest and the male is the other one.

Neil tried to get one of the male when he departed the branch…but as you can see they were in the jungle, it was raining, and there wasn’t much light. That…along with the fact that he was using his 600mm lens with the teleconverter on it that is only f9 wide open…forced him into a ridiculously low shutter speed for a hummingbird of 1/160 second…so the takeoff and bird in flight shots had too much motion blur to be usable…one needs more on the order of 1/3200 or 1/4000 seconds to freeze the wing beats or 1/2000 or so to get some wing blur but sharp head/eyes. That last one was the best he could under the circumstances. If he had only had that $14,000 lens (and a Sherpa to lug it around as it weights 7+ pounds)…he coulda got a better but still not completely frozen shot.

Still on the preserve they spotted this nest and then were able to get some great shots of the Common Bush Tanager mated pair bringing food back for their offspring. Some of these shots were taken of the approaching parent but at least one of them was a departure…only a single parent can fit into the nest at a time and one returned while the other was still inside so made a half entry then backed back out. This was the first…of many…instances when Dennis’s knowledge of both species, habitat, and behavior led to successful pictures. Participants focused on the nest with the camera and lens on a tripod while Dennis watched the parents and told us when one was approaching the next…at which point they all mashed the shutter button and captured 3-4 seconds at 20 frames per second. Neil probably had 400 frames of just this pair that he sorted through to get these…he had plenty of in focus shots but with part of the wing clipped at the edge of the frame.

At the end of their walkabout of the preserve…they met with Dennis’s older sister and parents who still run the preserve for some fresh made empanadas and observed the wild but pretty tame wildlife that hangs around the place.

Crimson Fronted Parakeet. As you can see…this one (along with his friend/mate, couldn’t tell which) is banded but this one let Neil get close enough to take this very slightly cropped photo with his iPhone 15 Pro Max. Dennis called this one a Green Parrot but perhaps that’s just a local name…google also identified it as that as well as a Red Crowned Amazon without specifying parakeet or parrot.

Bare Throated Tiger Heron. It’s about the size of a Snowy Egret and smaller than a Great Blue Heron.

Once they were fully stuffed with the empanadas…it was back to the Botanika for dinner…which turned out to be huge so Neil (a) ate sparingly and (b) determined to eat less at subsequent drive outings unless there was still plenty of time before dinner.

Cyas.