Bird of the Day: Hoffmann’s Woodpecker – Female (Xandari Resort, Costa Rica)
Author: Seth Inman
Bird of the Day: Rufous-tailed Jacamar
Carara National Park, Costa Rica
Bird of the Day: Black-throated Gray Warbler – Male (Yosemite National Park, California)
Bird of the Day: Dusky Flycatcher (Yosemite National Park, California)
Celebrating Birds with Tacacori Students
About fifteen minutes downhill from Xandari by foot, the primary school at Tacacori serves first through sixth graders from the local community. Xandari has collaborated with the school on multiple occasions in the past, and also regularly cares for their grounds (mowing the lawn, etc.). This semester, third and fourth graders don’t have an art class in their normal schedule, so it seemed a perfect opportunity for James and me to go over and do a week-long art project with the kids.
Of course, I stuck with what I know best for art projects with young children, and decided upon papier-mâché and painting on little cardboard canvases, just like I had done in the Galápagos a couple years ago. James and I went to the third and fourth grade classes during their Spanish classes and for about an hour and twenty minutes each a day we showed them how to use newspaper, glue, and a balloon to create the body of a bird. Then, with recycled cardboard from Xandari, we gave them canvases to paint on as well as the materials to make beaks, wings, tails, and feet for the birds. Continue reading
Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl at Xandari
A few weeks ago, as James and I were leading a bird tour, we had quite a lucky and enjoyable sighting. From the title and the picture on the left, you already know that we saw a small species of owl, but that actually wasn’t what we had been looking for at the time.
There was a hummingbird buzzing around in front of us on the trail, and eventually it landed on a branch on our left. We all turned to look at it more closely, but, as birds are apt to do, the hummer (a Rufous-tailed) swiftly flew out of sight. On a branch in the background of where the hummingbird had perched, stoically still, was
Bird Behavior at Xandari
Over the past several weeks, I’ve had the fortune of being able to find birds sitting relatively still and have filmed them doing their stuff. All of the species in the video below are quite common here at Xandari, but I hope to eventually be able to share footage of even more rare and exciting birds that James and I sometimes see!
For more bird videos that I’ve taken in the past, you can Continue reading
Xandari’s Mandala Herb Garden
If you’ve been following some of the recent posts about Xandari’s trails, flowers, and gardens in general, then you are probably aware that the resort’s property abounds with plant life that is beneficial to visitors — both human and otherwise — in some way. One element of the gardens that James and I have not emphasized as much, though James mentioned it in his post on Aloe vera and I did in an earlier post, is the mandala, a circular garden near the spa and the entrance to Xandari that holds dozens of herbs.
“Water” or “rose” apple, an insipid fruit that grows in the tropics
Xandari’s Trails
With our daily walks around Xandari to build the resort’s checklist of resident birds and take photos of as many species as possible, James and I are taking full advantage of the remarkable trail system. It allows us to travel several miles around the thirty-odd acres of private reserve in Xandari’s property without tracing back over our steps at all, which would have negative implications on the eBird data that we submit for every outing (we don’t want to increase the chances of counting a bird twice!). Descending from about ~1,150m (~3,800ft) to ~1,080m (~3,550ft), on woody switchbacks that give us vantage points over the surrounding forest and allow views into the canopies of the trees below, James and I walk through many types of bird habitat, which both in theory and in practice yields us a higher species count than if we were to simply walk around the gardens right outside any of Xandari’s villas – though I don’t mean to imply that the gardens aren’t home to quite a few species here!
Bird of the Day: Common Raven (Yosemite National Park, California)
The Footprints of Footballing Countries
© Global Footprint Network
Have the countries with the highest ecological footprints done the best in this year’s FIFA World Cup? Analysts at the Global Footprint Network asked themselves this question in this month’s newsletter addendum and the results of their calculations are interesting — and sometimes surprising!
The eight nations who made it to the quarter-finals represent vastly different lifestyles. If all people on Earth lived like residents of those countries, Continue reading
Throwback Thursday: Galápagos Coffee
Before my recent experience with growing coffee, the last time I had been exposed to the agricultural side of the brew had been almost exactly two years ago, on the island of Santa Cruz in the Galápagos Islands of Ecuador. The plants that I had a hand in starting up there should be reaching the beginning of their prime production this year.
The scale of the farm at Santa Cruz was much greater than that at Xandari so far, and hopefully Roberto and Reyna will get a bumper crop this year and we’ll be hearing about it!
You can read a little about their coffee farm and some of the work I did there Continue reading
Coffee Seedlings
Last week, using Borbón coffee seeds graciously given to us by the Doka estate, we started growing new seedlings to eventually plant in the ground at Xandari. José Luis showed James and me how to prepare a substrate of earth mixed with decomposing leaf litter he had put through a sort of wood-chipper to make a soil that closely mimics the forest floor where coffee often grows wild here.
In a wooden box with a corrugated tin floor (so water can drain easily), we made a bed of about an inch of soil. Then we put the two varieties of Borbón on either side of the box. Once the box was full, and we had removed all the rounded seeds that wouldn’t be as healthy as the seeds with a flat face, we added another layer of soil on top and watered the box.
After we had gone, José Luis remembered to add a layer of dead leaves on top of the soil to help keep in the moisture and recreate natural conditions of the forest floor. Later, we went to visit his friend who had sold us the Borbón we planted earlier last month, so that James and I could see what our seedlings would eventually look like as they were transplanted into the black plastic bags we knew so well.
Bird of the Day: Yellow-rumped Warbler (Yosemite National Park, California)
Throwback Thursday: Coffee at La Cumplida, Nicaragua
Finca workers heading home at the end of the day
It’s that day of the week again, and I’ve found yet another post from roughly this time several years ago (in this case ~3) that relates to the work I’m doing now. Although I was not performing the physical labor that James and I have helped with at Xandari when I was in Nicaragua during the summer of 2011, I was learning all about the steps that go from the seed to the cup, as they say in the business.
Soon, I hope to experience the Costa Rican side of things, and next week (next Thursday, in fact) I’ll hark back to the Galápagos style of Continue reading
¿Por Qué Pajarear en Xandari?
Cada dÃa, miles de personas alrededor del mundo están visitando un sitio de web, usando un app en su celular, o escribiendo en su cuaderno para documentar las aves que han visto en algún lugar. Algunos son cientÃficos. Algunos simplemente están interesados en anotar la diversidad de sus patios. Varios tienen equipamiento sofisticado para ayudarles ver de lejos o tomar imágenes de las maravillas aladas que buscan.
En paÃses como los Estados Unidos e Inglaterra, el pasatiempo de observar aves es Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Pileated Woodpecker (Yosemite National Park, California)
Happy Anniversary, Yosemite!
One hundred and fifty years ago, on June 30th, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant Act, which passed through Congress and created the first protected wild land in the United States. The Yosemite Grant Act was the first step toward creating what is now the famous and highly popular national park, which eventually happened in 1906 under President Theodore Roosevelt. In the video below, you can see some nature and landscape photography and a couple videos I took during a recent visit to YNP.
Throwback Thursday: IPM
A ladybug relative nymph in the foreground and a mature individual in the background. The tiny thing next to the nymph might be a larvae.
Yesterday, as James and I were on one of our birding walks around Xandari, we ran into José Luis, who had a couple new things to show us about the gardens and orchard that he runs. At first, it looked like a ragged young tree, its leaves half-devoured and its trunk stained black. But we quickly learned Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Sooty Grouse (Yosemite National Park, California)
Organikos 