(La Fortuna, Costa Rica)

Now *this* is why I came to Costa Rica!

After a breakfast featuring (you guessed it) rice and beans, I was picked up at my hotel to travel by van to the Caño Negro region in the far north of Costa Rica.   Our destination was only a few kilometres from the Nicaraguan border and, just in case, we were advised to take our passports with us.

It didn’t take long for the wildlife theme to appear.  When we stopped for provisions just outside of La Fortuna, we saw hundreds of green iguanas.  These are harmless creatures but they are also surprisingly large.  Like every picture you’ll see in the next two posts, all of these animals are living wild in their natural environment.

As we neared Los Chiles and the Nicaraguan border, we veered off the main highway and onto the bumpiest (so far) road I have ever travelled.  It was well worth it, though, as we saw a small sampling of Costa Rica’s incredibly diverse wildlife from the van:  a stork with a 10-foot wingspan, a baby caiman (similar to a crocodile) and a type of heron that actually keeps the predator population under control by feeding on baby crocodiles and caimans.

The real show, however, started when we boarded the boat and set sail down the Río Frío.  It took less than one minute to see the albino howler monkey shown at the top of this post.  These monkeys are usually black but a genetic mutation changed this one to orange.  There are only a handful of albino monkeys in Costa Rica but there are two (having the same parents) on this very river.

Making it even rarer was the fact that this was a hermaphrodite albino monkey!  Our guide thought that there might be one other such howler monkey in the world.  This particular creature is probably doomed to a short life, as its vibrant colour makes it susceptible to birds of prey and its hermaphrodite status means that it is perceived as a threat (and thus attacked) by both male and female howler monkeys.  Maybe that’s why it was exiled to a sparsely vegetated tree.

The baby caiman that we saw on the way to the Río Frío was cute:  maybe two feet long and having a playful grin on its face.  Seeing an adult caiman is another matter altogether:  they still have the grin, but it is more like the evil grin of The Joker (from Batman).

The adult caiman grows to “only” 7 or 8 feet in length.  While they are definitely predatory, they are “small” enough that they apparently do not present a serious threat to humans.   None of us in the tour group were willing to put our guide’s claims to the test, however.

Even though I have only been here for a couple of days, I can already say that Costa Rica is a birdwatcher’s paradise: there are more species here than in Canada and the U.S.A. combined.  While I didn’t catch the names of very many of the birds we saw, I was nonetheless impressed by the size and variety of them along the Río Frío.

Not surprisingly, it’s going to take at least one more blog post to properly document my Caño Negro experience.  Stay tuned to find out if anything came close to the fantastic albino howler monkey sighting!