Tacacori, Costa Rica
Bird of the Day: Black Vulture
Tacacori, Costa Rica
Author: Seth Inman
Speed Pysanky
In the video above, about four hours of working on two different eggs are condensed into six minutes of edited footage that has been sped up by 2000%. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: White-eared Ground-Sparrow
Tacacori, Costa Rica
Orchid Expo: Alajuela
One of José Luis’s orchids at Xandari.
From Friday the 24rd of October to Sunday the 26th, Alajuela had their annual orchid exposition, which includes displays and awards as well as a few lectures on growing orchids and a section for sale or auction. As James and I have written before, Xandari has a wonderful collection of this family of flowers in addition to the general gardens thanks to the industrious efforts of our head gardener, José Luis Ballestero. He has a little greenhouse near Xandari’s restaurant with about a hundred plants that are often in varying stages of development, depending on how much time he has to prune them.
The three photos above are examples of some of the orchids on display in Xandari’s common area, like the reception, lobby, and restaurant room. At the expo this weekend, there were dozens of species and hundreds of individual plants, including hybrids, miniature flowers, and some fantastically strange Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Squirrel Cuckoo
Tacacori, Costa Rica
Bird of the Day: Great Kiskadee
Tacacori, Costa Rica
Bird of the Day: White-winged Dove
Tacacori, Costa Rica
On the Road to 100 Species at Xandari
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
Bird of the Day: Barred Antshrike
female – Tacacori, Costa Rica
Earth Hour 2014 at Xandari
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
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
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 of the Day: Scarlet Macaws
Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica
Bird of the Day: Ferruginous Pygmy Owl
juvenile – Tacacori, Costa Rica
Bird Behavior at Xandari II
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
Last 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.
Bird of the Day: Long-billed Starthroat
Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica
Tacacorí Rocks Birds
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
Bird of the Day: Rufous-collared Sparrow
Tacacori, Costa Rica
Xandari Pysanky
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
