Author: Seth Inman

On the Road to 100 Species at Xandari

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Silhouette of the Blue-crowned Motmot, one of Xandari’s most colorful and exciting resident species due to its racquet-tipped tail and partly iridescent plumage.

Over the last four months or so that I’ve been birding around Xandari, in the beginning with the help and company of James, Xandari’s species list on its eBird hotspot has been growing, if not daily, then at least weekly. James and I had charged ourselves with documenting every resident species before the migrants came down starting in September and October. When James left to go back to school in early August, we had seen or heard 80 species on or from property.

A pair of Gray-headed Chachalacas enjoying the view of Alajuela. Seen from Xandari’s balcony restaurant.

Since then, I’ve seen Continue reading →

Earth Hour 2014 at Xandari

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This past March, on the 29th, Xandari supported the 60+ Earth Hour movement by hosting a candle-lit dinner and inviting guests to turn off their lights between 8:30-9:30PM to join hundreds of millions of people around the world in saving energy. In 162 countries and around 7,000 cities, people joined Earth Hour and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature to symbolically pledge to do more for the environment and engage in energy-saving efforts throughout the year. Watch the video below for some footage of national monuments around the world flipping the switch for an hour, and learn more about the 60+ movement.  Continue reading →

First Sale of Xandari Pysanky

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Last week, we had the good fortune of having some guests at Xandari who were interested in buying a few of the eggs on display in the gift shop. One guest purchased a Xandari coffee-stained egg like the ones featured in my previous post on the subject, as well as an egg that bore the insignia of San José’s soccer team, Saprissa, which is generally unpopular among fans of the Alajuelan team, La Liga Deportiva Alajuelense (La Liga for short).

As Xandari is located in the hills above Alajuela, most of the employees here are Liga fans, and it’s fun to joke with them about which team’s eggs will sell more in the future (so far the Liga egg is still hanging on the display tree, but that’s most likely because it doesn’t feature a fire-breathing dragon like Saprissa). The third egg that we sold this weekend was one featuring a new design of the Xandari ‘X’ with some extra lines to turn it into a flying bird. Continue reading →

Celebrate Urban Rock Birds

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With over a week of working with other grades at the elementary school in Tacacorí, I’ve seen lots of really great paintings of birds on locally-found stones, and even one or two chunks of cement. After finding around seventy-odd rocks around Xandari that were mostly usable for this art project and scrubbing them all of mud and moss, I Continue reading →

Bird Behavior at Xandari II

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I recently accrued enough videos of birds doing interesting things at Xandari to make a new video to share here. By chance, all the footage I’ve gotten over the last few months has followed a common theme: pecking and pulling. In the video above, you’ll notice that all five species of bird — Rufous-naped Wren, Hoffmann’s and Lineated Woodpeckers, Lesser Greenlet, and Rufous-capped Warbler — were either pecking or pulling at something in an effort to get some food.  Continue reading →

A Conversation with Bill Gates

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Screen Shot 2014-10-06 at 3.43.23 PMLast week, Bill Gates visited Cornell University for a question and answer session after attending the dedication of Bill & Melinda Gates Hall, the new Computing and Information Science building that was supported by a $25 million gift from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. You can read a summary of Mr. Gates’s discussion here.

Tacacorí Rocks Birds

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A sixth-grade creation

Starting last week, I began the next art project at the elementary school in Tacacorí. After learning that over time the papier-mâché creations succumbed to the Central Valley’s relative humidity and became difficult to preserve, I decided to find a more solid medium. I liked the idea of recycled plastic bottles from the hotel but I worried about the extensive use of scissors they’d require and all the sharp plastic edges that would be created in the process. Instead, I went with the option that, although not exactly recycled, at least doesn’t require industrially-created materials and is fairly abundant: rocks. And the best part is that stone is impervious to humidity (on the scale of time that we’re thinking about).

Fifth-grade creations — some kids pasted paper versions of their bird on the rock.

In the slideshow below, you can see some of the fifth- and sixth-graders’ works of art Continue reading →

Xandari Pysanky

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Sample eggs in the Xandari gift shop

Over the last four days, I made six sample eggs with parts of the designs I had drafted and shared in my last post on the subject. With a slightly limited palette of dye colors (black and purple so far) and an attempt at a home-made coffee-based dye (i.e. coffee), I followed three very simple color schemes and tried a couple different design themes.

I also tried my hand at some vinegar etching, which I had read about recently and seemed like a cool way to  Continue reading →

World Tourism Day

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September 27th is World Tourism Day! As the UNWTO Secretary-General Taleb Rifai said in his address this year,

Tourism is a people-based economic activity built on social interaction, and as such can only prosper if it engages the local population by contributing to social values such as participation, education and enhanced local governance. At the same time, there can be no real tourism development if such development damages in any way the values and the culture of host communities or if the socio-economic benefits generated by the tourism sector do not trickle down to the community level.

Continue reading →

Pysanky (Part Three)

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Egg blueprints

Egg blueprints for a previous project

Access Part One and Part Two if you haven’t checked them out yet!

As we reach the end of September, it may seem strange to be posting about a traditional art form that generally revolves around the festivities of Easter. Even though none of my egg creations have had religious foundations behind them, I’ve still always worked on them in the springtime around holy week because that’s the accepted time to be fashioning and gifting “Easter eggs.” Being at Xandari for the past several months, however, where the gift shop could always use another little shelf of locally-crafted artwork souvenirs, I’ve been thinking about making a round of trial eggs to put up for sale and see how it goes. After all, we could dedicate any profits to more artwork supplies for the Tacacorí school or another good local cause.  Continue reading →

Pysanky (Part Two)

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A finished egg with most of its wax still present to give texture and a stained glass effect
my favorite traditional pysanky accomplishment so far
For my high school government teacher
a fun design
Darwinian
for a statistician
for a Northwestern University student
an unusual blue
an intense but rewarding design

To continue learning about the process of creating pysanky,  Continue reading →

National Clean-up Day in Costa Rica

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This Sunday, while thousands of people were marching in NYC and other major cities around the world, Costa Rica had its national clean-up day in communities, rivers, lakes, beaches, and oceans. Designed to collect recyclable material as well as trash, the program was organized in part by the Ocean Conservancy and Terra Nostra, and sponsored by relevant government agencies. Xandari invited community members to join in to work around the roads in Tacacorí and the neighboring town of Tambor, and including four hotel employees and myself we had forty-five people come out from 7am-11am to pick up and sort trash. Many of these individuals were young children and teenagers, which was an encouraging sight!

Part of the street before trash pick-up

On Saturday, a team of thirteen hotel employees had also gone out along the Tacacorí river, and they collected a total of twenty-two pounds of plastic, forty-four pounds of glass, ninety pounds of scrap metal (tins, car parts, etc.), two-hundred pounds worth of car tires, and four-hundred and sixty-two pounds of just trash (clothing and other non-recyclable waste). The next day, the group of forty-five combing the streets found a hundred and twenty-seven pounds of plastic, a hundred and nineteen pounds of glass, sixty-six pounds of paper and cardboard, and six-hundred and six pounds Continue reading →

Pysanky (Part One)

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Several years ago, my aunt gave my mom and me a starter kit to make Ukrainian Easter eggs, knowing that the two of us enjoyed art and working on detail-oriented things. Included in the package was this book, which contains a great history of the tradition as it evolved in communities around the US through the work of Ukrainian immigrants. The book also, of course, explains how to make the eggs and includes many fantastic photos of eggs that the authors or their friends have created over the years, in countless patterns and color schemes. These exemplary eggs have served as perfect inspirational diving-boards for my mom and me as we create our own pysanky every year (when we have the time).

Croatian Easter eggs made for neighbors, friends, and family

The process always starts with creating the dyes. In Croatia, on the island of Koločep where my family lived for a year, we learned that villagers use a boiling water bath of red onion skins, walnuts, roots, and herbs. This creates a reddish dye that stains the egg a reddish color. The problem is that the boiling water also removes the wax that covered the egg before it was placed in the dye, so you only get two shades on the egg, but that’s Continue reading →