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Published: September 9th 2017
DOMINICAL We left the Osa Peninsula and headed north passing through great stretches of land completely dominated by African Palm plantations. Our driver, Sergio stopped in Palma Norte so that we could stock up on a few supplies (wine) as we were heading to an area with no nearby grocery stores - well no stores at all of course.
Dominical was once a quiet fishing village but was now a popular area for surfers bringing in a younger set to the area. Although we were here out of season and did not see many ‘tourist’, young or old.
HACIENDA BARU
We had booked a week at Hacienda Baru, a large private nature reserve just off the road. Its amazing how close to a road it was yet straight away it was like you were in the middle of a rainforest.
The proprietor, Jack Ewing came here to work from the States in the early 70s. At that time the coastal region had been totally cleared of rainforest for agriculture as had big swathes of Costa Rica. He thought it was an ideal location as it
Iguana
One of many ...had a variety of other habitats, from wetlands to pristine beach where turtles come to nest and in the highlands on the coastal ridge there was still unchanged primary rainforest.
He decided that he would allow the land to return to jungle and within a couple of decades secondary rainforest covered the lowland area. Jack had laid out 7 kilometres of walking trails around these different habitats and also the property had 3 kilometres of beach to stroll along, so we were looking forward to spending a week exploring the area.
We were staying in one of 12 cabins dotted around well maintained gardens with many flowering shrubs including huge Hibiscus bushes in pink, orange, red, yellow and even white. We were disappointed that there were not many Hummingbirds with all the flowers and only saw Rufous-tailed and Purple-crowned Hummingbirds. A few feet outside our front door was a swimming pool which we had to ourselves most days it was a great spot to chill for a while, particularly after a long hike and we would miss this ‘luxury’ really quickly . … … The only thing one had to watch out for was
Hacienda Baru
Our room behind the pool the
Iguanas - they were everywhere, usually sunning themselves on one of the warm rocks. A male dominated the track into the cottages and would start ‘head bobbing’ if you went nearby but usually got scared and dived down a drainpipe if you did get too close!
One morning outside of our room we watched a large
Bare-throated Tiger-Heron stalking along the undergrowth looking for tasty morsels. It came back several days so obviously got his fill. Have never seen them behave like this before usually we see them around lakes and not in the jungle.
We walked the trails everyday but they were extremely wet and we did not get to see much wildlife in them, the forest was so dense and thick. Aerial photographs located on one of the trails showed the area in the 70s, devoid of all vegetation together with a more recent photograph showing how quickly the jungle had re-grown, not surprising really with all the rain and sunshine we were getting. We had constant downpours most afternoons but the mornings were bright, blue, crisp and clear. We had some spectacular thunderstorms which built up
Hacienda Baru
One of the hikes in the afternoon, the noise was deafening and the lighting lit up the sky in our small cabin - one day we literally both jumped out of our beds as this huge bang boomed directly over our cabin shaking the whole building … …
SLOTH - THE WORLD’S SLOWEST ANIMAL The Sloth is the world's slowest mammal, so sedentary that algae grows on its furry coat! The plant gives it a greenish tint that is useful camouflage in the trees of its Central and South American rain forest home. There are two types and are easily identified by the number of long, prominent claws that they have on each front foot. There are both two-toed and three-toed sloths. We were told that young sloth are not slow and drive their mothers to distraction and have to be taught to slow down - reminds me a bit of human youngsters!!Although we did not see too much on the trails we saw plenty of wildlife around the Hacienda.
On our first day we spotted a
Three-toed Sloth fast asleep in the tree right behind our cabin and she stayed there for
5 days and then like magic disappeared. We watched her slowly climb a branch to grab a handful of leaves and then decend into a crevice of the trunk and sleep for most of the rest of the day. She was really hard to photograph as they blend so well in the trees - and my secondhand camera was not being kind to me so no photo this time! We think it was a female as she did not have a patch on her back as do the males. Male Three-toed Sloths develop these patches as they reach sexual maturity at approximately 3 years old. On mature adults they are always yellow or orange in colour and divided by a central black stripe with additional black markings in a pattern unique to each individual. The type of hair within the patch is completely different in texture to the rest of the sloth’s hair and doesn’t grow any algae. Interestingly, the patch appears to be covered in an unknown oily secretion and if you rub it, the yellow/orange pigment rubs off!
Sloths stay in the canopy of trees eating for about a week and
then descend to the jungle floor just to ‘poo’ - before slowly climbing up another tree or back on the same one if there was enough ‘food’ left. They like the young leaves of
Trumpet trees whereas Toucans, Monkeys, Coatis love the flowers of this tree and sure enough we spotted a group of
White-faced Capuchins on the same tree a day after the Sloth departed, it was there turn now. The Trumpet tree is a vast growing pioneer species that is usually one of the first trees to appear in cleared areas such as tree falls, abandoned pasture and roadsides - hence its abundance here.
That night we heard a noise outside our window and went to investigate. A huge banana tree had fallen over and munching merrily on a huge bunch was a
Collared Peccary - he returned several times until the whole bunch was gone.
COLLARED PECCARY Collared Peccaries are also known as Javelinas, thanks to their long, pointed tusks that resemble javelins. Another pseudonym is musk hog, as they frequently rub their oil glands against rocks and tree trunks to mark and defend
territory. Their musky odour is always evident, and people often smell a peccary long before they see it we definitely did. Though pig-like in appearance, smell and behaviour, the peccary is not however classified in the ‘pig family’. In Costa Rica the Collared are more common than the White-lipped Peccary, the only other species here.
HACIENDA BARU It was really quiet at the Hacienda Baru and whilst we were visiting the only other guests were a friendly family of four from Luxembourg, a German couple and a couple from Memphis, Tennessee who had tried to take their hire car across the border to Panama only to be told they couldn’t. So had to change their plans and had driven for hours in a heavy rainstorm and were very relieved to finally find the Hacienda Baru. These were the only people we saw all week apart from a group of Students from across the world who stayed overnight whilst they were undertaking a project as part of their degree. They were studying Eco-Green Architecture and left a small sample of a building on the beach using washed up driftwood and vegetation - it
Collared Peccary
He just spotted me ... did stay standing though! We were glad they only stayed overnight as they decided to make the swimming pool their ‘gathering’ location and with open mesh windows in our cabin you could hear everything going on outside ……
Each day we would watch several
Agoutis chase each other around the borders of the rainforest and hear lots of birds high up in the canopy and were lucky to spot a couple of Chestnut-mandibled Toucans, Black Hawks, Inca Doves and a beautiful White-tipped Dove with amazing blue eyes - never thought Doves could be so beautiful.
We were walking along the beach most days to the River Baru where we spotted an
Amazon Kingfisher perched on a dead log waiting for a fish to float by. It was one of those moments really — as we were just saying we had not managed to capture a photograph of one we had seen in Puerto Jimenez and there it was …… perched there waiting, of course it flew of quickly. The river exit into the sea was partially blocked with massive tree trunks that had recently been washed up. When we returned to the
river a couple of days later, after a heavy downpour the whole area had changed and more of the banks of the river had collapsed uncovering huge fossilised trees beneath the sand - the weather changes the landscape so quickly.
We enjoyed the trails and on one of them there were signs detailing the different species of trees growing in the area. We liked the
Spiny Cedar - large thorns covered the trunk as well as the branches disappearing into the sky. Sloths love to eat the leaves but have difficulty moving along the limbs to reach them - so would you! As we were reading one of the signs I felt a load of stings on my feet looking down they were covered in large
Black Ants -
ouch … … We spent ages getting them off it was most uncomfortable and I thought I would have a terrible reaction but luckily only a couple caused a lot of scratching for most of the night ..… lesson learnt, never stand too long in the rainforest in one spot … …
Thinking of Ants there are
millions here, we thought we had
enough in our garden at home but no way …. we watched these long moving ‘green lines’ on the jungle floor, each ant carrying their individual leaf most of them quadruple their size on its back.
LEAF CUTTING ANTS It has been estimated that these amazing insects harvest 15 percent of all the foliage produced by tropical rainforests. A large colony will cut and carry back to its home as much vegetable matter as a cow eats in a day, about 120 kilograms. They do not eat the foliage they cut, instead they chew it up, mix it with saliva and place it in the chambers within the colony where a specific fungus will grow on the vegetable matter. This fungus forms 100 percent of the ants diet.
These ant trails can be as long as at least half a kilometre in length and we watched them travel all around us disappearing into the jungle with their heavy load. They of course play a key role in the rainforest ecology by recycling vegetable matter and aerating the soil. Their demise would cause a domino effect with other rainforest species,
the consequences of which are unpredictable so they are considered to be a keystone species around the world.
At home in our garden in the summer we have
Leaf-Cutting Bees doing much the same thing but on not such a large scale as the Ants here. We have a dead tree in the garden and they come back to the same chewed out hole and carry their leaf inside - they particularly like the rose leaves and if you wandered around our garden you will see huge circles in the leaves where the bee has visited.
RARE EVENT An extremely rare thing happened at Hacienda Baru just 3 weeks before our arrival. Jack the owner said,
‘that after 45 years here you would have thought that he would have seen or heard everything. Not the case - as in early August this year one of the guides and several employees heard a terrible noise coming from the trees only to see a White-faced Capuchin Monkey actually kill another of its species - an act of infanticide. Next to the restaurant which borders the secondary forest a very large male was chattering furiously at a female who had a baby on her back. The rest of the troop was also yelling and threatening the female who took off moving through the trees as fast as she could go. The big male caught up to her, blocked her advance, and attacked her. The female, with the baby still on her back, fought back, and, in the scuffle, they all fell to the ground about four meters below. It wasn’t a free fall because there were small branches which broke the fall and at which they grasped on the way down. At some point during the fall the male snatched the baby monkey away from it’s mother. When they hit the ground he started biting the baby and banging it on the ground. Finally he threw the baby on the ground and went back up the tree.
The baby laid still at first but after a few moments began moving the upper part of its body. It appeared to be paralysed from the waist down. A couple of the workers examined it and determined that the spine was out of line. The rest of the troop were in the lower branches of the trees making aggressive gestures at the female. The big male, on a lower limb was having what could only be called a fit of rage, screeching, baring his teeth and making threatening gestures at the two men. The workers had seen many capuchin monkey threat displays in the past, but this was much more extreme so fearing an attack from the big male they backed away.
The terrified mother ran to her baby and tried to pull it up onto her back, but it was unable to hang on. The witnesses said she wailed and cried almost like a human. The spectacle brought tears to their eyes. She looked into the trees and called to the troop but none would help her. At one point she left the baby’s side, and the large male again descended and brutally grabbed the baby. The female attacked him in a final effort to save her baby, but he batted her aside and, with one savage bite, severed the small monkey’s spinal column. Still furious he grabbed the now dead infant by the legs threw it in the air, dragged it, and finally left it about five meters from the point where he killed it. Then he ascended the tree and rejoined the troop. The workers took the body into the forest and buried it and the troop wandered away. The mother of the deceased baby stayed near the site for several hours whimpering and obviously in a state of extreme distress. Finally she wandered away to - what a sad story.
It is known that African male lions do kill cubs, usually sons of a recently dethroned patriarch, but Jack said he had never heard of this behaviour in primates. It is, however, the only explanation that makes any sense to him but of course no-one will never know for sure why … … … … perhaps with the opening of the tree corridors she was from another troop and the group were scared for their own survival and were not used to non related monkeys coming into their territory.
TIME TO MOVE ON We enjoyed our time at the Hacienda Baru it was a very comfortable place to stay and in the end we did see lots of
White-tipped Dove
with beautiful blue eyes wildlife and it was great to be able to wander down to the beach as well. On our last night we watched a troop of White-face Capuchin move into the ‘Sloth Tree’ behind our room and eat the ripe fruits before moving on - they do not stay as long as the Sloth but of course they are so much quicker constantly on the move. They were probably the same troop mentioned above and we hope that the sad event did not happen again and that the mother of that poor baby went on to enjoy her life in the rainforest and that she was accepted back into the clan or if she was a new arrival that she finally found a ‘family’.
Early in the morning we were awoken by a loud screeching noise - a group of
Peccaries has come out of the rainforest and were foraging around our cabin. We watched them for a while before they disappeared back into the dark of the rainforest.
We said goodbye to the family from Luxembourg and the Americans who had offered to take us on to Manuel Antonio but
we had already booked Sergio who had brought us here from Puerto Jimenez which was a shame as it would have saved us a little bit of money. We have noticed on this visit that the transfer costs are a lot higher than when we were here in 2012 - inflation has kicked in, but still not as expensive as hiring a car which we would hardly use at each place we stayed.
So we are heading off again this time only a short distance up the Southern Pacific Coast to Manuel Antonio - see you there.
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Good size
This one is pretty big