Bird of the Day: Yellow-rumped Warbler (Yosemite National Park, California)
Author: Seth Inman
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 día, 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 científicos. 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 países 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)
El Café Borbón
A great morning view of the Central Valley and opposing mountain range from the coffee field
The current batch of Xandari’s mountainside Bourbon coffee is all planted, and James and I have a slideshow of photos we sporadically took to celebrate it! Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Fox Sparrow (Yosemite, California)
Bourbon Coffee — It’s No Cocktail
The prevailing etymology of the word ‘cocktail’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is of equestrian origin: any horse that was not a thorough-bred, or whose tail was cut short because it was serving as a hunter or stage-horse, could be described as a cocktail or a cocktailed horse. Eventually gaining a negative connotation, it probably was used to describe any sort of adulterated alcohol in the form of a mixed drink. Nowadays, we even use it for harmful or otherwise potent amalgams of substances, such as cocktails of drugs or Molotov cocktails.
Most of us, when we hear the phrase “Bourbon coffee,” likely think of Continue reading
A Birding Blast From the Past
Blue-crowned Motmot at Xandari
Trending on the web nowadays is the tagline “throwback Thursday,” or #tbt, used to recall old photos or experiences with an interesting or humorous sense of nostalgia. As James and I spend most early mornings going out around Xandari to explore the trails and document the avifauna we can find, I am reminded of similar excursions I made with my friend and fellow Tomás de Berlanga English teacher Mari, in Mindo, Ecuador.
About two years ago on the dot, Mari and I saw an amazing group of birds in one of Costa Rica’s great competitors in terms of birding hotspots. As you can see from my first post about manakins, two years ago I did not consider myself a birder — now, as James and I add our observations around Xandari to eBird every day, my opinion may have changed slightly Continue reading
Xandari Insects
We have a history of interest in entomology here, and in the past couple days alone I’ve spotted insects in a couple different families that are worth checking out below!
Beetle most likely in the genus Calligrapha
Unidentified winged insect
Unknown species
Unknown species
Butterfly in Heliconius (Nymphalidae) family
An ochraceous hemipteran (true bug)
Growing Fruit and Vegetables at Xandari
The view from the path right before reception
Much of the fresh, rich compost that Xandari produces from all sorts of organic material is used as the perfect substrate to grow delicious fruits and vegetables on property, both in greenhouses and out in the open. During our tour a few days ago with José Luis, James and I saw dozens of tomatoes (three different varieties), lots of lettuce, citrus and other tropical fruits, green beans, and much more.
Bird of the Day: Hermit Warbler (Yosemite National Park, California)
Xandari’s Omni-garden
Over the past decade and a half, the creation and maintenance of Xandari’s impressive and diverse flora has been largely orchestrated by one man, José Luis Ballestero. Head gardener at the property, this man and his skilled team of gardeners have developed a highly heterogeneous and visually appealing collection of plant life throughout the private nature reserve that was once a coffee plantation.
As James and I will show in the next several weeks, Xandari’s gardens are a true wonder and effectively occupy any space that is not covered by the resort’s buildings. I use the word ‘garden’ here flexibly, because the forest that makes up the lower portions of Xandari’s forty-odd acres is more of a jungle than a garden, and at this point much of the flora Continue reading
Bird of the Day: European Starling (Ithaca, NY)
As Birds Start Nesting, Things Start Getting Funky
Maybe it’s already happened to you in years past: you walk into your garage, ready to take your first bike ride of the year now that it’s finally warm enough, but you lift your old helmet only to find that it is full of moss, leaves, and twigs. What?! You may think it’s a late April Fool’s joke, but actually it is the product of a lot of hard work by a small cavity-nesting bird that has found a safe place to put their home. Depending on where you live, it could be any number of species, but the most common by far are the Carolina Wren and House Wren.
Clockwise from top left, submissions are by Joe Hoelscher, David Hutchinson, Mike Smith, and Sophie Lyon.
Bird of the Day: Mourning Dove (Ithaca, NY)
Nākd Bars Revisited
A while back I was exposed to the wonder of Nākd bars, and I shared some reasons why you should eat them. Now, I’ve had the luck to try several more of their creative and delicious flavors. Before I dive into those, a quick aside: along with seven hundred other students, this semester I’m taking one of the most popular classes at Cornell University, Introduction to Wines. One of the course goals is learning how to parse the different aromas and their combination with the wine’s acidity, alcohol, and other elements, all of which come together to make a complex liquid.
As I tasted more Nākd bar flavors this year, I thought to myself that if I was being taught how to judge and analyze such a complicated thing as wine, then there was no reason I couldn’t apply the same process to something as naturally simple as a Nākd bar, and write some brief thoughts on the new flavors I tried! Continue reading
Humans of Cornell
Humans of Cornell University, Jan. 28th, 2014.
Earlier this month, while scrolling down my Facebook newsfeed, I chanced upon a photo of a friend of mine on the Cornell campus. The caption was a short but interesting conversation between the friend and a Facebook user called “Humans of Cornell University,” who had taken the photo. I was intrigued. Upon clicking the photo I discovered that there were dozens of other photos along the same theme, where apparently these “Humans of Cornell” (HOCU) people would randomly select a person they encountered at Cornell, take a photo of him or her, and ask a thought-provoking question, sometimes following the question up if the response merited more discussion.
