March 1 – Another Cloud Forest and lots of Orchids

Another early morning departure.  Mary had to skip it as she wasn’t feeling well.  The tour was at the Curi Cancha Trail.  This is a private reserve dedicated to preserving some of the local habitat. 

The walk was pretty flat and through some lovely cloud forest areas.

One section had a lot of vines winding around trees.

Some of the areas had what were called “Tree Gardens” where many plants grew on the trees.

There were a lot of things to see on this walk as well.

Plain Brown Wood Creeper

Lesser Violet Ear Hummingbird

Coppery Headed Hummingbird

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Video of Coppery Headed Hummingbird
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White-Eared Hummingbird

Crested Guan

Quetzal...another good sighting 

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Video of Quetzal
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Agouti

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Video of Agouti
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A big Wasp’s Nest

Grenadilla Tiger

Baltimore Oriole

Brown Jay

We are not professional photographers but travelers who love photography.  Consequently, we can't spend hours or days or weeks in an area with tripods and super powerful (and very heavy and expensive) lenses waiting for the perfect photogenic bird to land close enough and at just the right angle and with just the right lighting and give us an unobstructed view and the perfect pose resulting in the perfect shot.  So, we take whatever nature provides us in the short amount of time we have in a particular location and hope for the best.   

Sometimes we get the perfect angle and pose and sometimes not.  I'm trying to decide if this bird's pose is insulting or genius.  🥰  Regardless, it is a memorable shot.  😂

White-Nosed Coati

Emerald Toucanet

Rufous Collared Sparrow

Ruby Crested Flycatcher

Blue Crowned Motmot

A Dancing Lady Orchid

Tarantula in her hole

Paul was back by noon and after lunch we both headed out on the afternoon tour…at the local Orchid Garden.

We had a very informative young guide who explained a lot about the types of orchids.  About 80% of all of the world’s orchids are miniatures, so they gave us magnifying glasses to use on the walk.  There are over 30,000 found around the world.  Orchids are the largest family of flowering plants and can be found almost anywhere in the world except antarctica.

Each seed pod has over a million tiny seeds.  He opened a pod and it looked like dust was coming from it.  The most famous orchid is the vanilla.

The garden was pretty small but it took us almost 2 hours to do the circuit.  Most of the orchids in the garden were the miniatures.

But there were a lot of others as well.

This one is a Lady Slipper.

This one is called the crispy bacon orchid…the petals looked very much like crispy bacon.

There were also a lot of spider orchids.  Those looked very interesting.

The garden also had a number of other pretty flowers. 

We enjoyed this tour as a nice change of pace.

This evening the sunset was beyond brilliant, no editing was done.