Costa Rica
Bird of the Day: Bat Falcon
Hacienda La Amistad’s Neighbor Under New Management
The entrance to La Amistad National Park, which will now be controlled by the Naso under a joint management plan with the government. EDDIE GERALD / ALAMY
We offer coffee from the oldest organic coffee farm in Latin America, which sits on the border of the La Amistad International Park. During our visit to the farm in late 2019 we heard firsthand the family history that led to the creation of what is now a transnational park, while retaining a large private protected area named Hacienda La Amistad (coffee is farmed on a small percentage of that land). Recently Fred Pearce, who frequently writes about forest management best practices, shares news from Panama focusing on the decision to transfer park management to an indigenous community whose ancestral lands in:
Forest Defenders: A Panamanian Tribe Regains Control of Its Lands
With a landmark court ruling, the Naso people of Panama have won the rights to ancestral territory that includes two national reserves the tribe will now help manage. The victory comes as mounting evidence shows that Indigenous groups are often the best protectors of their lands.
Reynaldo Santana, the King of the Naso, on the banks of the Teribe River in northwest Panama. NORLANDO MEZA
Tribal groups in Panama are celebrating a victory for their rights to control some of Central America’s largest forests — a victory that could benefit conservation throughout the region.
The landmark ruling, by the country’s Supreme Court, upholds a claim by the Naso people of northwest Panama — who live in remote villages, grow subsistence crops, maintain their own forests and native language, and elect their own monarch — to create a semi-autonomous territory, known in Panama as a comarca, covering some 400,000 acres of their ancestral lands.
“This is an act of justice that will restore tranquillity to the Naso by securing our land,” says the King of the Naso, Reynaldo Santana. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Godlewski’s Bunting
Walong, Arunachal Pradesh
Post-Harvest Coffee Processing
Processing coffee after harvest refers to getting the beans out of the cherry, with fruity pulp removed. How that happens, and what follows, is partly a function of tradition, which is itself a function of geography.
In Costa Rica, due to the abundance of water, the tradition historically was to wash the beans. Since I am in Costa Rica I will give a simple illustration of this process using a small quantity of beans. These are from a handful of trees as mentioned in yesterday’s post.
In the photo above, where the coffee is in a round sink basin, you can see some beans in the middle that have been removed from the cherries. You can also see a couple green beans, which get sorted out. The goal of the “washed” method of processing coffee post-harvest is to get all the beans out of all the cherries, with as much residual pulp removed as possible. Water makes this process easier. The skins and other residual material does not historically have much, if any, value. In recent years farms are taking greater care to compost this material and use the result to fertilize the soil where the coffee grows.
The wet weight of the washed coffee is irrelevant, but for comparison purposes I will note it here and then weigh the coffee again once dried. Although many coffee processing mills dry coffee on large patios with direct exposure to the sun, there is some belief that drying without direct exposure to the sun conveys some advantages to the final taste of the coffee. So, that is what we will do with this coffee. When it is fully dried, I will post again to explain the differences in the coffees process this way, and those processed the other most common way.
Bird of the Day: Common Snipe
From Farm To Yard And Back Again
When I have shared images of the long-standing poro trees on this land, as well as the seedlings we have grown and now planted, it was to show the shade and nitrogen-fixing cohabitants of this land. Cohabitation between coffee and poro is a Latin American adaptation to adjust for the fact that arabica coffee trees first naturally occurred under the canopy of forests in Ethiopia. You can see those old poro trees in the background of these two photos, where ripe coffee cherries are in the foreground.
It is time to harvest these cherries from the several coffee trees that held their ground for more than two decades since this land was converted from farm to yard. In our conversion of yard to farm, these ripe cherries will provide the seeds for replanting the land after processing them in the simplest manner. Tomorrow I will show that process.
Bird of the Day: Olive-backed Euphonia
Costa Rica
One More Eel Mystery Revealed
A Volta’s electric eel in the Xingu River in northern Brazil. L. Sousa
Our attention to eels is only occasional, but the mysteries keep coming. The article contains an amazing video of this pack-hunting phenomenon. Thanks to Annie Roth for this:
Electric Eels Hunt in Packs, Shocking Prey and Scientists
The behavior, used by wolves and orcas to run down fast prey, is rarely seen in fish.
In August 2012, Douglas Bastos, then a graduate student at Brazil’s Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, was exploring a remote waterway in the Amazon rainforest when he came across a small lake teeming with electric eels. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Horned Guan
San Marcos, Guatemala
The Mural Is The Thing
Kehinde Wiley’s backlit, hand-painted, stained-glass triptych called “Go” depicts sneaker-clad break dancers who appear to float across a blue sky. The woman’s pointing finger nods to the Sistine Chapel’s “Creation of Adam.” Andrew Moore for The New York Times
In the mid-1980s we lived a few blocks south of Penn Station, and avoided it studiously. If I could right now, I would rush to see it, thanks to Ian Volner’s essay below. I recommend reading it in full because it is neither puff piece nor fashion statement, but a comment on important issues of our day. Like the two essays I referenced earlier by Casey Cep, this essay makes me believe in the importance of this project, as if the project itself is a public statement of intent. The description of the stained glass mural was more than sufficient, but still I had to find an image of it (the one above is from a review I missed a few weeks ago in the New York Times).
The Moynihan Train Hall’s Glorious Arrival
The new transit hub redeems the destruction of the original Penn Station. Photograph by Mark Kauzlarich / Bloomberg / Getty
The film noir “Killer’s Kiss,” from 1955, is an almost perfect dud. But because it was filmed on location in New York—and because its director was a twenty-seven-year-old photographer named Stanley Kubrick—it’s worth watching for the first scene and the last, which occur in the same place: the passenger concourse of the original Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, where the protagonist, having escaped from shadowy thugs, waits impatiently for his lover. Kubrick captures the hero from a low angle, and, overhead, the arched trusses holding up the station’s glass-and-iron roof seem impossibly high. The building looks very dirty, but the ambient soot in the air catches the sunshine as it streams down from above, making the light appear more abundant, almost solid. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Black Guan
Costa Rica
Advances In Animal Migration Studies
Illustration by Shyama Golden
Sonia Shah, a science journalist and author of “The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move,” has provided a great summary of recent developments on the study of animal migration:
Animal Planet
An ambitious new system will track scores of species from space — shedding light, scientists hope, on the lingering mysteries of animal movement.
‘‘I’m going to do a set of coos,” Calandra Stanley whispered into the radio. The Georgetown ornithologist and her team had been hunting cuckoos, in an oak-and-hickory forest on the edge of a Southern Illinois cornfield, for weeks. Droplets of yesterday’s rain slid off the leaves above to those below in a steady drip. In the distance, bullfrogs croaked from a shallow lake, where locals go ice fishing in winter. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Black and Orange Flycatcher
Ooty Botanical Gardens, Tamil Nadu
Big City, Green Arteries
The redesigned Champs-Élysées extends (top right) from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, as envisioned by architects at PCA-Stream. PCA-STREAM
Anne Hidalgo has been featured in our pages several times for greening her city, and now this:
Paris mayor pushes ahead with plan to give Champs-Élysées a $305 million green makeover
An artist’s impression of the redesigned Arc de Triomphe, at the end of Paris’ iconic Champs-Élysées avenue, prepared by architects PCA-Stream under commission by the Paris mayor’s office. PCA-STREAM
Paris — Mayor Anne Hidalgo has confirmed that ambitious plans to transform Paris’ Champs-Élysées, the iconic avenue in the heart of the French capital, are still on the table. Her initiative will see the avenue with fewer car lanes, more room for pedestrians and much more greenery.
Often dubbed “the most beautiful avenue in the world,” the Champs-Élysées has gone three decades without a major overhaul, and many Parisians believe it looks tired and a lot less sophisticated than it used to. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: White Ibis and White-faced Ibis
Mad Island Marsh Preserve, Texas
Migration Modeling Magic
Prothonotary Warbler by Jillian Ditner; Coastal black mangrove photo by Nick Bayly.
Thanks to the Lab of Ornithology for this:
Where Do Migrants Go in Winter? New Models Provide Exquisite Detail
By Gustave Axelson; Illustrations by Jillian Ditner
Part of the magic of migratory birds is their annual disappearing act—one autumn day there might be an oriole in a treetop, and the next day it’s gone, not to be seen again until spring.
Back in the 17th century, scientists had lots of ideas about where birds go during winter in the Northern Hemisphere, including one theory that they migrate to the moon. Today we know Neotropical migratory birds are intercontinental travelers, chasing summer as they leave the North for the warmer weather and longer days of the New World tropics. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Roseate Spoonbill
Costa Rica
Awesome Scientific Knowhow
If you can suspend judgement for a moment the awe is overwhelming:
CRISPR and the Splice
to SurviveNew gene-editing technology could be used to save species from extinction—or to eliminate them.
Odin, in Norse mythology, is an extremely powerful god who’s also a trickster. He has only one eye, having sacrificed the other for wisdom. Among his many talents, he can wake the dead, calm storms, cure the sick, and blind his enemies. Not infrequently, he transforms himself into an animal; as a snake, he acquires the gift of poetry, which he transfers to people, inadvertently.
The Odin, in Oakland, California, is a company that sells genetic-engineering kits. The company’s founder, Josiah Zayner, sports a side-swept undercut, multiple piercings, and a tattoo that urges: “Create Something Beautiful.” He holds a Ph.D. in biophysics and is a well-known provocateur. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Common Raven
Baja California Sur, Mexico
Anne Samat At Asia Society
Anne Samat, Follow Your Heart Wholeheartedly, 2020. Rattan sticks, yarn, rakes, washers, plastic swords, toy soldiers, beads, metal and plastic ornaments. Left: H. 98 x W. 48 x D. 7 in. (249 x 122 x 17.8 cm). Center: H. 131 1/2 x W. 141 3/4 x D. 11 3/4 in. (334 x 360 x 30 cm). Right: H. 105 x W. 48 x D. 7 in. (266.7 x 122 x 17.8 cm). Front: H. 84 1/4 x W. 26 3/4 x D. 12 3/16 in. (214 x 67 x 31 cm). Courtesy of Richard Koh Fine Art and the artist. Photograph courtesy of Richard Koh Fine Art and the artist. This work was commissioned by Asia Society Museum, New York, for the inaugural Asia Society Triennial: We Do Not Dream Alone. Location: Asia Society Museum
If you are out and about in New York City, this may be for you:
Anne Samat is a contemporary artist from Malaysia who works with fiber and weaving techniques from archipelagic Southeast Asia. Continue reading
