Sunday bird blogging

A brown jay in Monteverde.

Urban poetry

I love the tropical colors on these buildings on my street in San José.

I'm teaching the first classes in my practicum tomorrow and I'm still cobbling together lesson plans and activities. Last night I dreamed that I tested positive for Covid and couldn't teach. I already knew that I was stressed out; having my brain suggest that coming down with Covid might be a lucky break just confirmed it.

Astronomy Tuesday

I am always fascinated by images of the sun, all the detail that's hidden by the overwhelming brightness.

This image shows a filament—a formation of hot gas held aloft by the sun's magnetic field—that appeared at the beginning of September. This filament was approximately 350,000 kilometers long; filaments usually last for a few days before collapsing back into the sun.

Image Credit and Copyright: Alan Friedman (Averted Imagination)

Garden break

Here's a pastoral interlude: light on the leaves in my garden in San José.

Sunday bird blogging

I took this picture of a great kiskadee in Monteverde, but they were also one of the more common birds in San José and throughout the central valley in Costa Rica.

Saturday reflections

Not the best reflections, but a lovely view all the same: a lake in the Orosi Valley, below the hotel where we had lunch on the last day of the program.

Today I'm administering placement tests to the students who will be taking English classes this semester. I'm really nervous, though I imagine not nearly as nervous as I'm going to be next Saturday when I start teaching them.

Urban poetry

I have no idea what this contraption is—it was on top of a truck driving down the street in my neighborhood in San José. I would have liked to get better pictures of it, but if I hadn't already had my camera in hand, I wouldn't even have gotten this one.

Orosi Valley

I've been back for a month, and Costa Rica already feels like something that happened years ago. But here's photographic evidence that I was actually there, at an overlook above the Orosi Valley.

Astronomy Tuesday

This beautiful new image from the Webb Telescope's near-infrared camera (NIRCam) shows the Tarantula Nebula in stunning detail.

Image credit and copyright: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

Y una bicicleta

It's missing the elaborate decorations but the red on this bicycle (at the language school) reminds me of the carretas.

Carretas

Oxcarts—called carretas in Costa Rica—have been used in rural communities around the world to transport goods, but these distinctive bright orange and red designs are unique to Costa Rica.

The tradition began when a farmer wanted to decorate his carreta so he could use it to take his family on Sunday outings, and he painted it orange because that was the only color paint he had. And then of course everybody wanted one. A highly decorated oxcart became a status symbol because it meant the family was wealthy enough to hire an artist, and different regions developed their own styles of decoration.

This carreta was at the Doka Estate Coffee Plantation in Alajuela.

Sunday bird blogging

I saw flocks of these large birds hanging out in the trees in Monteverde, but it took me a while to identify them. I thought at first they might be a type of guan, another very large bird common in the area, but all of the guans had distinctive red or blue markings. And except for having feet that were so much bigger than their brains, there was nothing distinctive about these birds at all .

Except, as it turns out, for their name. May I present: the gray-headed chachalaca! Much as I love exotic and amusing bird names, I had somehow never heard of chachalacas before. And now, just knowing that there are birds called cachalacas and that I have actually seen them makes me absurdly happy.

Chachalaca! Chachalaca! Chachalaca! Say that three times really fast.