Sample of wildlife at Finca el Tigre:

White faced monkeys
They are thieving little rascals.
You can hear them coming from inside the house - trees rustling with little feet scurrying about. You look out the window and see the head monkey, the most daring of the bunch, glancing furtively around to make sure the coast is clear of any humans. It's a go! He lopes over to the nearest banana tree and up to the top in a flash. Grabs a banana. You rush out the door, arms waving and yelling - "Hey! Get out of there!" The monkey faces you and hisses, and dashes off, with a bunch of bananas under his armpit. This scene repeats itself regularly. We intend to plant new banana and papaya trees so there will be enough for us all.

Howler monkeys
We haven’t seen them yet but we sure have heard them.

Fiery-billed Aracari
The Aracaris look like smallish toucans. We saw one perched on a small tree just outside the house. So we all ran out to take a look. We hear another bird raising a racket nearby and realize that the Aracari is raiding the eggs from a clay-colored robin's nest! "Hey! Get away from there!" The Aracari doesn't budge - he just looks down at us with those beady bird eyes as if to say - "Oh just piss off, you interfering humans!"

Sloths
We love the sloths and it’s a thrill to see one. They seem to have such sweet little smiles as they hug the cecropia tree. If I so much as tap a cecropia, the ants swarm out and attack. Why they don’t attack the sloth is anybody’s mystery. They all just exist together harmoniously. Then a few days later when we go back again to see the sloth, he has gone…moved on to another tree.

Terciopelo Snakes
It’s very important not to disturb a sleeping Terciopelo, even if he’s curled up in the middle of the trail and blocking your path. It’s best to silently walk around and give him a wide berth. I found that out the hard way.

We see the tracks of many other animals, especially near the streams, but rarely see them.

Then there are the stable farm animals:

Horses
The usual routine is that the horses leave the stable at 6AM and return punctually at 4PM. They do not like their schedule interrupted by, say, a pesky human wanting to go for a ride mid-morning. They are happy to let us ride them first thing in the morning or late afternoon, before settling down in their stalls but woe to the human who intrudes on their schedule between those hours. First of all, you have to search the pastures just to find them. When you eventually spot them - grazing some 500 meters away, they will immediately perk up and look you over. If you are a recognizable human, they might trot over to say 'neigh', especially if you're holding a carrot. But if they also spot a harness, they will keep their distance - even if you coax them with a whole bag of carrots and bananas! They've got better pickings out in the pasture so - NO WAY JOSE. We'll see you at 4PM!

Barnyard cats
Last week, we had two cats in the hay barn. This week, we have ELEVEN - two mothers and nine kittens. Anybody want a cute little kitten? We will keep them long enough to sterilize the whole lot of them and allow mother cats to train the little ones how to hunt. Assuming the kittens take after mother cats, they will all make excellent mousers. We've never spotted the father - he is a marauding, philandering mountain cat who is known to promptly eliminate all other male cats. These are not your typical lap-cats.

Dogs
We have nine strays at the moment. It's rare to be anywhere at the Finca without a couple of the dogs along for company. Usually two or three of them accompany us out into the forest when we go hiking and they have a ball crashing in and out of the charrales. They never stray too far from us though and follow us out of the forest and they've never killed any of the wildlife - probably because the wildlife is smarter out there. We did lose a couple of dogs to the forest (and also two cats) but that's because these animals went in there at night when the snakes are active. One of my favorite dogs, Maggie, had a bad habit of going out hunting in the forest for days at a time. She always returned with some injury or another. One time a snout full of porcupine spines. And always with cuts and a limp of some sort. Then one time she never returned and we could never find her again. The guys were amazed that she lasted as long as she did. After Maggie's demise, we tried keeping the other vagabond on a leash for his own safety but he howled with such misery that we finally relented and out to the forest he went. We lost him a few months later. At this point, the rest of the pack is smarter and stays close to the stables at night and only goes into the forest when we go. Perhaps they saw something... It's a rough life for the dogs in the tropics. We treat them for parasites and ticks but there's nothing we can do about the torcelos. I was quite disgusted the first time I had to squeeze a big nematode out of a dog but we squeeze them out on a weekly basis at this point and the dogs always appreciate the service. Ivermectin does not work in preventing Torcelos! The first week the drug kills them but you still have the squeeze the dead worms out - which actually causes the dog more infection in our experience than just squeezing them out while still alive.

Hens
We built a nice hen house complete with perches, yards and egg-laying beds for our 20 plus chickens and one rooster. They wander outside during the day but head inside at night to keep safe from the hawks and snakes. The rooster enjoys herding them hither and thither. You learn rudimentary politics watching the chickens – I can definitely understand where the term ‘pecking order’ comes from. It’s quite fun watching them cluck about, chasing and herding. Sometimes I get in there and play Chief Justice.

We are so easily entertained out here!

Greetings to you and all your critters, Victoria

Lost in the Forest

January, 2005:
Yesterday I got lost in the forest. Jay and I decided to hike the borders all around Finca El Tigre. The workers and topographer had just finally finished clearing and putting in orange stakes, so we figured the trail was clear and we wouldn’t get lost. The 2 kilometer hike down the road was no problem. Then we followed the fence-line into the western border of the forest and began hiking down the mountain. Eventually, the mountain ended at a stream and we hiked along it, awestruck at the massive old trees. That part of the old growth forest is one of the most magical places I’ve ever experienced. Too bad it’s such an ordeal getting there!

After scrambling along the stream for a while, we lost sight of the surveyor’s stakes and began backtracking and searching both sides of the canyon for any sign of the trail. Finally, when we realized that the trail had definitely gone cold (we missed the spot where the border stretched back up into the forest), we headed northeast back to the stable, straight through the forest and back up the mountain. We found out later that we should have scaled the left side of the canyon instead of heading up the right side.

Hiking through open forest was high adventure and, I thank God I was hiking with an experienced hiker and navigator. We didn’t even need to use a compass. Jay could tell direction by knowing the time and looking at the sun. He also gave me a few pointers on moving through the forest, which I shall pass on to those who might be tempted:

Look before you grab onto something! Only grab onto strong, live roots and saplings without thorns. At one point, as we climbed down a precipitous 50 foot drop, Jay advised me to hold firmly onto a particular root before taking the ‘real’ drop. It was good he warned me else the sudden fall might have dislocated my shoulder. Even so, I got an impressive elbow scrape.

2. Use chimney technique climbing up narrow gorges. You get your footing, choose your spot, and then use gravity to fall onto the opposite boulder with both hands and then swing legs up to parallel boulder. Repeat and up you go! It’s not scary so much as hard work.
Follow contour of the mountain rather than climbing up and down in a straight line. It was still rough going, using roots as hand-holds and slashing through bamboo groves, but it was faster and not as exhausting as dealing with the boulders down at the stream.

When you need to climb up a very steep slope, choose your objective at the top and scramble up very fast on all fours – like a monkey - to keep forward momentum.

When going down a steep slope and you lose your footing (like when a sapling snaps away), sit down and keep your feet in front of you and above the ground. The idea is to slide down on your butt. This technique is scary but I never got hurt doing it. The most important thing is not to panic and grab blindly onto something – it could be a snake or a thorny palm.
Don’t step where you can’t see. This is obvious when all is calm and easy but is especially important when the going gets rough. I found that out the hard way.

With all these techniques, Jay only had to lend me assistance one time when I lost my grip and nearly slid off a very big boulder. Otherwise, we hiked quite companionably, under the circumstances, and only hoped to find our way out of the forest before 2PM, at which time the finca employees would come out looking for us. And that would be very embarrassing.

At one point, we saw a clearing up at the top of a canyon and thought we’d reached one of the pastures. We climbed up there only to discover that a massive tree had fallen and left a sunny gap in the canopy. Yep- it was still sunny and very hot outside of the forest. It was almost a relief to go back into it – even though we were lost!

Finally, we could see another open area and climbed up to one of the more distant pastures from the house. We collapsed for a while in the meadow and looked back at the dense forest we’d just walked out of. We got back to the stables- just after 2PM – like apparitions out of a coalmine – totally filthy, scratched up and walking on wobbly legs. What a couple of wussies! The finca employees hike and work all over that forest with perfect ease. The foreman, Armando (who knows the forest like the back of his hand), suggested that we make the building of forest trails a priority. Guess he figured that if he couldn’t stop us from going in there alone, he’d better sort out some easy trails.

Thus, the trail building will begin straightaway and will be carried out concurrently with another high priority project: setting up worm composting. The local ‘worm man’, who works at Univ. of Peace, insisted that we meet a series of requirement in order for the delicate worms to survive. At one point during his litany of requests, I began to wonder if there was anything else I could do for his worms– a telephone…radio??? Armando thinks we can do worm compost simply by piling up manure and putting in the worms. He certainly demonstrated the truth of that by showing me what they do already. The worms seem perfectly happy just living in a pile of manure and being left alone. Jay, however, feels we can speed up the process by building a wooden enclosure for them and keeping them covered. Thus, the great worm debate continues.

So what is a “Charral” anyway?

I’m pondering this word – Charral, which our Costa Rican Forestry Engineer used to describe areas of old pasture land. Soon after we bought the Finca, we decided to stop cutting several tracts of pasture land and allow it to revert to forest. As a result, we now have around 18% of the entire 120 acre Finca designated as charral, leaving about 10% as horse pasture and all the rest as forest. Our plan is to increase the percentage of forest from the current 70% of the entire property to up to about 90%, by regenerating forest from the six charrales.

My primary purpose in starting this blog is to share the journey of natural regeneration of charrales surrounded by forest. Many people here in Costa Rica have an interest in reforesting tracts by planting trees on once agricultural land by succession planting – basically trying to mimic natural regeneration by establishing fast growing R species before introducing hardwood K species into the mix.

My interest is in natural forest regeneration without human intervention over a period of 15 plus years. This is possible at Finca El Tigre because it is part of a government protected area known as Zona Protectora El Rodeo, supposedly the only remnant of primary forest left in the Central Valley of Costa Rica. The forest at Finca El Tigre is a combination of both young and old forest. We have found more biodiversity in the young forest, with birds bringing in seeds from areas on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the country. The old forest has mostly remnant species left uncut when cattle once grazed most of the entire area. About 50-60 years ago, the owners removed cattle from part of the Finca and the old forest regenerated quickly. About 80% of the old forest is made up of HUGE remnant trees left uncut: Cedro amargo, Cedro bateo, Ceiba, Chapernos, Chilamate, Espavel, Gallinazo, Guanacaste, Guacimo Colorado, Hule, Jobo, Lagartillos, Lorito, Higuerones, Jabillo, Madrono, Mangle de Rio, Ojoche, Pochote, Quebracho, Sura, Yos, Yuco. Then about 20 years ago, after the entire area was designated by the Costa Rica Government as a ‘Protected Zone’, the previous owners stopped cattle grazing on a large part of the rest of the Finca and this area quickly reverted to a young secondary forest with huge biodiversity (we are still in the process of completing an inventory of flora & fauna). The secondary forests surround the charrales and pasture areas, which were used for light cattle grazing up until the time we bought the Finca in 2005.

Thus, all of the biodiversity surrounding the charrales will provide a good amount of plant material over the years as the charrales revert to forests. Each charral is surrounded by different forest vegetation. For example, the Tigre Hill Charral is located adjacent to a forest of hardwood trees such as: Cocobolo, Guapinol, Mora (Maclura) and Guayacan (Acosmium). Then there’s the Stable Charral, which is located next to a lot of Cenizaro and Guachipelin trees, among many others and so on for each of six charrales.

Twice a year, I’m taking pictures of each charral and noting the changes and will continue doing this for the next 15 years. My only intervention is to plant some hardwoods no longer extant in this forest along the edge of the charrales as well as in small clearings left from fallen trees in the younger growth forest. I will not have any idea of what’s going on in the center of the charrales for the next few more years until the faster growing trees begin shading out all the herbaceous material and improve ground visibility. For now, the charrales are all impenetrable masses of vegetation teaming with insects and who knows what else.

So how do we call Charral in English? I haven’t found a web dictionary that can define the word in Spanish, much less translate it into English! This seems to be a uniquely Spanish word used here in the tropics. Infojardin.net defines it thusly in Spanish:
Charral
Área regenerada del bosque secundario en tierras en las cuales la vegetación arbórea había sido eliminada en gran parte; incluye también a zonas en proceso de degradación de la masa forestal, partiendo de los bosques densos, a bosques sujetos a extracción de las mejores especies, y eliminación de ejemplares de porte arbórea quedando la vegetación más baja o sotobosque (según Maldonado 1997).
And so… Charral is perhaps best defined as a tract of tropical land in the process of reverting from agricultural to forest or (sadly) vice versa.

I like the word charral because it conjures up the concept of dynamic transformation, of real life plant succession, of an emerging forest. I like wandering the charrales and just witnessing the continuous changes. Everyday I see something new just by peering into the edge – here a new Guachipelin sapling, there a Guazuma popping up through the Mozote. Most visitors prefer the forest trails and gazing at the big trees. The forest is always a spiritual sanctuary but the charral is also very special. It brings the promise of what’s to come.

Searching for jobo

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, then it must be a bloody duck.

That's the same for a Jobo. The leaves look like a Jobo and the fruit looks and tastes like a Jobo. My tropical dendrology friends look at the fruit and say: That's a Jobo!
But the bark on the trunk is not fissured like a Jobo ought to be. Then a visiting dendrologist told me it wasn't a Jobo at all! That the tree was in fact, a Tapirira brenesii or Cirri Amarillo, as they call it in Costa Rica.

Well Tapirira didn't correspond to what I could find in the literature and the Cirri Amarillo refers to a Mauria heterophylla in my dendrology bible "Arboles de Costa Rica". And that didn't describe my Jobo looking tree at Finca El Tigre, located near Rodeo, near Univ. for Peace, in Costa Rica.

So you know what? I'm going to call this Jobo looking tree a Jobo! Even if the bark isn't fissured.