Travels with Gunther and Kara

Yep…that’s the way the Disney tune goes and it’s clearly true…as evidenced by a happening last Saturday night.

Throughout their time together…Connie and Neil have experienced a smattering of serendipitous events that individually pretty much defy whatever odds you might think…presented here in no particular order.

• When we lived in the RV…we were up in Minnesota and went to the commissary (grocery store) on an Air Force Base there to pick up some groceries. Neil as he was want to do had an Alabama baseball cap on and this African American fellow about his age came up and said “Roll Tide”…and they got to talking about where they were from. Neil said Alabama and the guy said “where from?”…and after a series of increasingly more specific answers to that question it turned out that he lived in what used to be called the colored neighborhood that essentially came up to the back of the yard where Neil grew up…and he lived 3 doors down that street. They went to different schools so never met and just happened to run into each other 40ish years later in Minnesota.
• When the human kid Bryan was just a little tyke in grammar school…Connie went on a field trip for his class someplace as one of the chaperones. There was another parent there and he introduced himself as something or other Memoli as his last name. Now that’s a pretty obscure last name of course and Connie had been telling Neil for years about this girl in her class named Emilie Memoli and wondered how the parents could possibly have named her that. So she asked the guy if he had a sister named Emilie and he reported he did. He was her older brother and was a year ahead of her at her high school.
• When he was in Nuclear Power School in Orlando back in 1977…there was a meet and greet for the wives that she attended. She saw this woman there with New Jersey plates on her car so they got to talking about where in NJ they were from. The woman (Pat) told her she was from nearby where Connie grew up and after a series of “where froms” similar to Neil above they both went to Immaculata High School and the woman was a year ahead of her in school. They exchanged original names and this woman stood in front of her in gym class.
• When they were in the RV life…they made a lot of friends that towed the same New Horizons 5th wheel that we had. Mostly we saw those folks every 18 months or so at the New Horizons Owners Group (NHOG) rally and occasionally had some email chats. At the time there were less than 1,000 New Horizons ever made and only 30 or so at each rally so it was strange to even see one in a campground at all or driving down the road. Nonetheless…at least half a dozen times through the 8 years we did that we would see one going the other way on the highway and recognize the truck and wave at each other via email and about as many times we pulled into a campground and found not only another New Horizons but one owned by people we had met at multiple rallies.
• And that leads up to last Saturday night. One of the long time members at our Elks Lodge was having a 70something birthday so there was BBQ and cake in her owner. We attended (well, the humans did since the lodge isn’t zoned for bears) and they started at their usual seats at the bar. As I might have mentioned before…in the going on 48 years of marriage they’ve probably eaten 95% of their eating out meals at the bar for a simple reason…you meet a much better class of bum that was as Neil so elegantly puts it (and he’s only pissed off 1 person sitting at the bar in all the decades he’s been saying that). Eating dinner at the bar is hard since there’s a raised lip on the front and no good place to put your plate…so when friends Joe and Suzanne came in they headed over and sat with and another couple from a different lodge who also knows Diane. They were chatting with Joe and Suzanne about the serendipity of small world meetings and then Connie got to talking to the other woman (Jeanne) about what they did and they were swapping tales and showing off I phone pictures. Connie mentioned that she had been in London last summer singing with the choral group and Jeanne said she was there too. Connie pulled out her photo of John Rutter to show Jeanne and said “Hey, that’s you in the background”…and airdropped her the shot. Another serendipitous moment to be sure.

Otherwise…things around are still pretty much copacetic…it’s Florida in the summer so it’s hot and humid. We’ve been having rain…a lot…more than most summers past but hopefully in another month or so it will start cooling down. We’ve got a couple short trips planned for the fall to a Ladies of Elks thing and then a couple of Saint Sáens Organ Symphony concerts…we’ll piggy back those with a visit to the human kids and out to Arizona for some sightseeing and photography.

And I see that NASA has finally made up their mind how to get the stranded astronauts back from the ISS instead of putting them on the fundamentally broke Boeing capsule…they’re gonna hang around up there until February and the next crew rotation headed up in late September will only have 2 crew instead of the normal 4. Butch and Suni will become the replacement crew members for expedition whatever it is and do ISS things until February. The SpaceX capsule will carry up some spacesuits for them to wear during reentry as the Boeing suits aren’t compatible with the SpaceX capsule…you woulda figured that NASA woulda been smart enough to require that the suits be cross compatible. The only drawback to this recovery plan is there’s currently no parking space available at the ISS for a US craft. There are 2 docking ports, one taken up by the current crew’s ride home and the other by the broke Boeing capsule. The latter will have to be reprogrammed with autonomous software to get home. Again…the thing has already launched twice and docked/undocked/returned twice with that software but the geniuses at Boeing and NASA removed the autonomous software from it before sending it up with people. You woulda thought they were smart enough to leave that capability installed…but the cynic in me says that Boeing knew there were issues with the thing and deliberately removed it to try and ensure that in the event of an issue it would come home with people rather than the embarrassment of being ditched…but nah…that wouldn’t happen would it?

Ok…enough of that so let’s get into Costa Rica Day 6…although it is going to be a 3 post day for the blog as he processed a metric buttload of images for me to post…it was one of the two largest number of images taken that day with over 4,700 on the card by the time he got back to the resort.

So…monkeys. You’ll see some monkeys on this and the next 2 posts but it occurred to me that I haven’t really talked much about the various species available in the country so let me digress a bit and do that.

There are a total of 4 species discussed here in size order…and they’re all sub classified as New World Monkeys by the biologists.

• Howler monkeys…or more properly Mantled Howler as there are multiple species of howlers. They’re the largest at about 15 pounds and 30ish inches long plus the tail. The name comes from their extremely loud calls. All brown…they eat almost exclusively leaves so spend a lot of time napping to digest their nutrient poor food very similar to what a koala does. They spend almost no time on the ground.
• Next largest are the Spider Monkeys or more properly Geoffroy’s Spider due to multiple species. They have prehensile tails and essentially long fingered hands on all 4 limbs Dark brown with a tan chest and a black face with white around the eyes very similar in appearance to a raccoon. 
• Capuchin or more properly White Faced Capuchin again due to multiple species. This is the most common species and got its name based on appearance. Dark brown mostly but with tan chest, head and shoulders and they were said to resemble the hooded cowl worn by Capuchin monks from the Middle Ages.
• Finally…the Central American Squirrel Monkey…it is the rarest species in the country and has a very small range much smaller than the other 4 which are found through the country. Squirrel monkeys are found only in the lowland forests on the Pacific side of the country. Usually no more than a couple of pounds…they’ve been used as pets for a long time and are the typical species that used to be owned by organ grinders at carnivals and such.

So…day 6 the photographers headed off to the far southeast tip of the Osa Peninsula…it was about a 2.5 hour drive without stopping and naturally they stopped…frequently…so it turned out to be a really long day. I’ll let you know in the shots when they actually got to the Bosque del CaBo lodge that was the destination for the day and I gotta tell you plush doesn’t really do the place justice. The average price per night was up in the $700 a night minimum range and although that does include food but not booze it’s still pretty expensive and there weren’t all that many rooms in the place. And it was the day that Connie went out fishing so there’s some shots of that included as well.

Amazonian Black Throated Trogon (although I have to tell you black throated wouldn’t have been the name I came up with)

Fishing trip shots as Connie and her captain left port.

Plain Brown Woodcreeper

Common Poo-too or Stickbird as the locals named it. It perches on the end of a branch and angles itself so that it looks like an extension of the branch or trunk…very similar to what the Australian Tawny Frogmouth does. There was a very narrow window to see this one so the shooters had to take turns…there’s about 20 minutes between the first and second image and the little sucker never moved. This bird was sitting about 5 yards off of the road and about 10-15 yards up in the tree and our intrepid driver Eduardo spotted it looking pretty much straight up. Even after they stopped it still took the rest of the shooters 5 minutes to find it in the foliage as it is the same color and texture as the tree it’s sitting on…and even after finding it it took Eduardo and Dennis a few minutes to find a window where one could actually get a shot, and while this is still a fairly obstructed shot it is the best they could do.

And since we talked about monkeys…here’s a Capuchin, you can see the cowl like appearance that influenced the name selection.

Interesting things found on the net.

Fun fact…the northernmost point of Brazil is closer to every other country in North, Central, and South America than it is to the southernmost point of Brazil.

And finally…remember this critter from the Serengeti? It’s a Caracal which is a 16-20 inch high cat to the shoulder and weighs 15-40 pounds.

Notice those extremely large ears and if I recall correctly I talked before about how the ears move to help it locate and isolate prey including birds which it snatches out of the air. Well…turns out that there are 20something muscles that allow it to do so and Neil happened across this video showing the ears moving. Sorry…it’s from the application formerly known as Twitter. Yeah…we don’t think much of it after it basically turned into a dumpster fire under it’s new owner…but hey, it is what it is..It wouldn’t be ethical to repost the video so you’ll have to go look at it there but it’s free to go see.

Cyas.

I gotta tellya…Ima glad the darned Olympics are over and really can’t understand some of the decisions that various people made…

There was the Australian field hockey player that decided to buy cocaine from an undercover cop.  

There was the whole kerfuffle over the two female boxers who have female external parts (apparently) but have XY (male) chromosomes rather than the normal YY that females have (again, apparently). Both were identified at birth as female, have always identified as female, and one comes from a country where claiming to be a trans sexual person is illegal and would get you jailed or executed. We’ll never know for sure…but both of these women are (again, apparently) some sort of intersex genetic variation rather than being purely female. In reality…it’s probably not fair for them to compete in either men’s or women’s sports as they would have potentially an advantage in one by having more testosterone than pure females are supposed to have…but would have a disadvantage in having less than pure males in the other competitions. I have no idea how that issue could be solved.

However…the most glaringly obvious stupidity appears to be from today’s decision by the CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sport) in regards the bronze medal in the women’s floor routine finals. When the US woman finished her routine and her score was announced her coaches filed an appeal that one of her moves was not scored correctly. The on site judges for the competition agreed and added 0.1 to her score which raised her from 5th to 3rd and she was awarded the bronze medal. Subsequent to this…the Romanian woman who was originally ranked as 3rd and her coaches appealed to the CAS to have the on site judges ruling overturned and the 0.1 addition removed. Their justification was that the appeal was submitted 64 seconds after her score was posted which is over the 1 minute maximum. The first issue here is the rules for appeal. A gymnast and their coach has until the end of the following gymnast’s routine to appeal a scoring decision…which is normally 4 minutes as that’s how long a routine is required to be. The last gymnast only gets one minute to appeal…so the last one is deliberately treated differently under the rules and that just doesn’t seem fair.

Nonetheless…the Romanian folks appealed the decision of the on site judges but not to the people running the Olympics but rather to the CAS. The CAS appointed a 3 member arbiter panel which examined whatever evidence the Romanians provided, ruled that the appeal was submitted late, and directed the Olympics people to remove the 0.1 addition to the US gymnast’s score…but one of the 3 members of the panel was…you guessed it…a lawyer who is the long term counsel of the Romanian Olympic Committee who brought the case to arbitration. Talk about conflict of interest…geesh. Then the International Olympic Committee revoked the US bronze medal, directed her to return it, and decided to award it to the Romanian.

After that CAS and IOC decision…the US coaches found video that conclusively revealed that the appeal was submitted at 47 seconds and 55 seconds after the score was posted…and while I haven’t seen the video the decision of the CAS today indicates it was conclusive.

With the new video in hand…the US coaches appealed the CAS decision to the CAS…who denied it saying

“USA Gymnastics was notified by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) on Monday that their rules do not allow for an arbitral award to be reconsidered even when conclusive new evidence is presented,” the organization said in a statement. “We are deeply disappointed by the notification and will continue to pursue every possible avenue and appeal process, including to the Swiss Federal Tribunal, to ensure the just scoring, placement, and medal award for Jordan Chiles.”

In other words…the CAS said that their arbitration was under the rules of the CAS (which they established I guess) an arbitral decision could not be reversed even with conclusive evidence submitted.

Nuts I say…while I have zero interest in whether this young lady gets a bronze medal or the Romanian woman gets it…the function of the rules and judges is to get the decision right. That’s why there’s instant replay and things get overturned. No matter who wins or loses…it should be fairly decided and if the judges made a mistake then the mistake should be reversed.

In this case…the original scoring judges made a mistake and an appeal was submitted. They apparently decided the appeal was in time, reviewed the scoring, and changed the scoring to correct their error. Then the people who were originally wrongly judged to be 3rd place appealed with some evidence…but not to the Olympics people, no, they appealed to an outside organization (CAS) who directed the Olympics to reverse an apparently correctly made scoring change. Then the CAS refused to overturn their wrong decision when presented with conclusive evidence that the arbiter panel decision was wrong.

Connie has little respect for the CAS…they rule frequently in bicycle related matters and at least according to her they frequently do stupid things. Seems to me they’re basically corrupt.

Anyways…on to the remainder of snake and reptile day.

Central American Gulf Coast Toad

Boyd’s Forest Dragon

And another example of needing assistants with this sort of shooting. You can see one of the workshop participants (they rotated this duty) staying out ofd frame while moving his hand on the back side of the dragon to get it to pick up it’s head while others compose their shot.

Blunt Headed Tree Snake. This is the skinniest snake Neil has ever seen…it was about 3 to 4 feet long and the body less than a quarter inch around…the head is the largest part of it. Non venomous, it eats bugs.

More very strange looking eyes.

Flicking its tongue.

Eyelash viper. This is a juvenile about 12 inches long but it was the only one snake guy captured the night before. And again…different eyes.

Overhead flash to give it the nighttime look.

Coral Snake. This is the same as the one in the US but this one is thinner relative to length than the US ones Neil has seen in the past.

With that…Snake and Reptile Day was done…or so they thought so it was off to lunch. Meanwhile…Connie was having lunch and some neon blue cocktail by the pool. Her drink is almost the same color as Cherenkov radiation…here’s a slight aside on that.

You’ve all seen in movies and TV the pulsating glow of nuclear reactors and like most of us you probably realized it was…fake and think that nuclear reactors don’t glow. Turns out…they actually do glow but you never see it because the glow is from something discovered by a Soviet scientist named Pavel Cherenkov, hence the name. The radiation is caused by

is electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through a dielectric medium (such as distilled water) at a speed greater than the phase velocity (speed of propagation of a wavefront in a medium) of light in that medium.[3] A classic example of Cherenkov radiation is the characteristic blue glow of an underwater nuclear reactor. Its cause is similar to the cause of a sonic boom, the sharp sound heard when faster-than-sound movement occurs. 

You can’t normally see it because it’s inside the pressure vessel for power generating area tors…but most research reactors operate at atmospheric pressure and are of a design referred to as a swimming pool reactor. The fuel is at the bottom of a pool of water which makes an excellent shield for the released radiation and in those reactors you can actually see the glow from the radiation. Here’s a picture of what it actually looks like.

Ok…end of aside so back to her lunch and cocktail.

Neil and the workshop folks went to this eco-lodge owned and operated…again…by some relatives of Dennis and after lunch decided to walk around the ‘nature walk’ at the lodge. On the way through the accommodations which were single person/couple rooms they spotted Snake Day Part 2.

Fer de Lance…most venomous snake in the country and among the worst in the world depending on which internet page one chooses to believe.

Close up. This is a juvenile one about 18 or 20 inches long.

Backing up just a bit…the brown door to the left side of the shot is the entrance to one of the guest accommodation cabanas. There’s a window about 18 inches above the snake covered only by a screen with the bed immediately on the inside of the window. Doesn’t seem a good place to hang out to me.

Out on the nature walk…they found an adult version of the Fer de Lance…this one was about 5 feet long and was easily identified by the sign posted near where it was lying. The second one gives you an indication for the name…fer de lance is Spanish for “head of the lance”…the head is shaped like the lance head used by the conquistadors back in the colonization days.

With that…Snake and Reptile day was done and they headed back to the resort for dinner.

Cyas.

And now…snake, reptile, and amphibian day. But first a little geography.

Ya know…I been talking about the Osa Peninsula the past few posts and it dawned on me (hey, Ima bear and kinda slow sometimes on the uptake) that perhaps ya’ll jus’ might be wunderin’ just where the heck I’m talking about. So…lemme digress for a few and catch you up.

As you know…Central America starts at the Texas/Mexico border and includes Mexico as well as countries heading southward through Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama before ending at the South American border with Columbia. Now everybody pretty much knows where Panama is…it’s the skinny land with the canal through it. Side note…did you know that the Atlantic Ocean end of the canal is actually west of the Pacific Ocean end? Sho’nuf…go check out the googles and a map if ya don’t believe me. 

Anyways…Costa Rica is just to the west of Panama and borders both oceans. The Osa Peninsula is on the south side of the country Pacific Ocean side and is about 25 miles from the border with Panama. Here’s a screen capture of part of the map.

The portion north of the peninsula is part of the Pacific Ocean and has a local name as something or other Sound. The locals claim that the sound is a saltwater fjord…but when I googled exactly what a fjord is it’s defined as a semi-isolated area of saltwater with steep rocky sides and was formed by a glacier. Well…check and check and maybe not check or the glacier part. It’s located at about 10 degrees north latitude and I wondered if there were ever glaciers there. According to the googles…there were glaciers in the highest peaks during the last glacial period in the Late Pleistocene. However…although the Osa is sort of rocky and steep sided at least on the north side toward the sound/fjord…it’s just hundreds of feet at most so I’m not sure that there were glaciers right down to the ocean’s edge…but mebbe so.

The peninsula is about 30ish miles east to west and north to south.

I’ve put some numbers up on the map…#1 is Puerto Jiminez which was our base of operations for the Botanika Resort. #2 is about where Dennis’s almost in-laws have their property and his family sloth preserve is just to the west of #1. #3 is about where snake/reptile guy’s property was…it’s out in the mountains and jungle but isn’t but 1,000 or 1,500 feet elevation at most. #4 is the far southeast corner where we went on the next to last day and #5 is about up where the river cruise on the last went. The road heading west out of Puerto Jiminez at #1 is almost the only paved road we were on, heading east out of #1 it’s all dirt and lousy dirt roads at that. In town about half the roads were paved and the remainder were not. Following the paved road up and around the western end of the sound on the last day we eventually ran into the Pan American Highway…you can see a little bit of it at the far upper right side of the screenshot. Once there, we turned west on the Pan Am for about 30 miles then south on…you guessed it…dirt roads again to get to the location of the boat tour that I’ll get to later on as we continue with images through the trip. I didn’t put Connie’s fishing trip location on this map, but she left Puerto Jiminez and headed out around the end of the peninsula then west along the south coast of it…they stayed inshore fishing so were only a mile or three from the beach down there. 

We flew into the capital San Jose which isn’t on this map but it’s about 75 miles northwest of Puerto Jiminez…and that’s ab out enough geography for today.

Round the home front…Neil came home from Costa Rica with diverticulitis and it’s finally gotten better. It’s been really hot and humid since our return. He was supposed to go out to Glacier National Park on another photo workshop in late July but he ended up cancelling that one due to the diverticulitis. He got a credit for the airfare with Travelocity but the cost of the trip we just have to absorb as it was too late for any cancellation refund.

OK…on to snakes, reptiles, and amphibians…and macro photography. You’re probably wondering just exactly what macro photography is, and the short answer is that it is close up photography of little things. Just how little and how close will become clear in a bit. Neil doesn’t have a macro lens (a macro lens is designed to focus closer than a normal lens and is optimized for optical performance for close things…he doesn’t do much macro photography so never bought one. Fortunately…Dennis their workshop guide does a lot of it and he brought along several extra macro lenses and assorted flash gear that was used during the day. Part of the difficulty with macro is that when you get close the critters tend to want to move so they’re basically kept in a cooler environment before being brought out so they move less. All of the ones that they photographed were gathered at night shortly before the photo day and were released afterwards. The good news being that no critters are harmed…but the bad news is that he can only catch what he catches so they missed out on the really cool green and yellow viper that Dennis hoped to have.

So…snakes. As you probably know…Neil doesn’t like snakes, in fact his opinion is that the only good snake is a dead one. That’s the result of a summer cruising timber up in LA (lower Alabama) and Mississippi back in college. When you cruise timber you’re basically counting the trees so that the paper company can bid enough to win the contract to cut the timber but low enough to still make a profit…for instance a tree you can make into paper is worth just a quarter or so, lumber a couple of bucks and a telephone pole 20ish bucks (those were the numbers back in the 1970s and probably aren’t relevant any longer but the spread is likely pretty similar to today’s prices. So if you’re a landowner and want to sell say 50,000 acres of trees the only way to get a proper estimate of value is to count the trees. Obviously counting the trees on 50,000 acres ain’t happening so what you do is count say 1 percent of the acres and statistics gives you a good number…but statistics only works if the areas you count are equally spread out through the entire average. That means you walk a compass like through the woods regardless of what’s in the way (and trails never follow a compass line) and every so many feet (long tape measure) you stop and count all the trees in a certain size circle recording diameter and pole/lumber/paper usage. This continues until you’ve counted your 1 percent of the land. The trouble with walking the compass line is that it is never the easy way and you walk through rather than around obstacles, thickets and dare I mention it snake territory. So lots of venomous snakes bite at your legs (thank goodness for snake proof pants) and the end result is you conclude that there is no such thing as a good snake.

Despite this decades long belief…he actually had a good time photographing the snakes…even though as will become clear he was a lot closer to venomous ones than he really cared to be…but that’s one of the things that you go to Costa Rica to see so he was all in on doing it.

They drove well into the jungle and mountains to get to the location…and naturally stopped for some wildlife they spotted along the way because that’s what you do on a photo workshop.

Yellow Throated Toucan

Squirrel Monkey…you’ll notice that it doesn’t have feet as much as a second pair of hands on their legs with long fingers as they spend almost all of their time in the trees.

Underleaf butterfly perched on an Expanded Lobster Claw plant…and yes, that’s their real names. The butterfly is about 3 inches across.

After arrival at the jungle camp…which included a couple of small huts where people come to spend time on the weekend or something but it seemed like a long way to go to a basically deserted place…and we got into the macro photography.

Most of the critters in these shots are posed. The snake guy brought out some stands with clips on them, put leaves into the clips and then he (or some helpers) positioned the critter and rotated the stand if necessary to get a front view.

Red Eyed Tree Frog and you’ll never guess how it got its name. It’s about an inch and a half long.

Masked Tree Frog…completely different looking eyes but he’s about the same size.

Our intrepid guide Dennis Valverde…and it seemed that just about everyone we met on the trip was a cousin or in-law or some other extended family member.

Here’s a shot showing how close you get although some of the shots above were actually about 1/3 of this distance. You do a lot of flash use in this sort of photography but don’t mount the flash on the camera as the lens would block the light. Instead…somebody holds the flash over the top of the critter and you put a remote flash trigger device on top of the camera then frame the shot and/or move the flash up a bit so it isn’t in the frame.

As you can see…you get so close that it’s just about impossible to get the whole critter in focus. There is a technique known as focus stacking that gets around this problem but you need a tripod and a really cooperative subject for it to work…you focus on the closest part and the camera shoots a series of images slowly racking the focus farther for each shot. Then back at home you use software to stack the images which picks the in focus parts of each one and combines them into a composite image…but again you need a tripod and cooperative non moving subject so mostly you just try and get the eyes in focus.

Periphoba Caterpillar…eventually grows up to some sort of moth or butterfly…about 2 inches or so long. I know this (and others) look like they were taken at night but nope, all during the day. Putting the flash over the top of the critter results in really short flash duration and the background is far enough away that none of the flash light gets there so it just looks like it’s nighttime.

They then moved onto something even smaller…poison dart frogs. These are less than an inch long and secrete a poison on their skin which pygmies and native people use to poison their arrows to kill food with. They concentrate it somehow so handling one slightly doesn’t really affect a human as long as you don’t lick your fingers or rub your eyes. One of our auxiliary guides was a young lady who was in college to become a teacher but interned during the summer with Dennis…and she was thinking about being a wildlife guide for awhile instead of teaching when she graduates next year. She was quite happy to pick up and move the frogs around for us.

Red Backed Poison Frog…the front of the lens was about 3 inches or so from this one.

Moving on to the even smaller Golfe Dulce Poison frog…it was so dark that getting a good shot was really hard.

Back to the Masked Tree Frog…really cool gold and black eyes.

Central American Gulf Coast Toad…a veritable giant at about 2-3 inches long.

At this point snake guy brought out the snakes so I’ll break for now and put them in next time.

Interesting things found on the net.

This is a shot of part of the Amazon River in South America…it is over4,300 miles long and there are exactly zero bridges across it. This is because there are no roads through the jungle due to extremely sparse population over of its course.

Cyas.