The Beautiful Tropical Dry Forest in Guanacaste

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Oh, my goodness, there are so many animals in the tropical dry forest! I'd only heard about rain forests, but the dry forest has so many animals! I'm going to post lots of pictures here. :)

We went on a number of day and night hikes, and both kinds were awesome. I didn't take any pictures at night, because it wouldn't do the animals justice, but we saw lots of frogs and toads on the roads into the park, and also a cool bird that might be called a whippoorwill. It flies around at night, landing on the ground, and has big brown eyes. It's a brown bird, and flies up and then back down in short bursts, and has been known to trick people into going into the forest. We also saw the largest toad in the world, the marine toad, and I got to feel a tree frog's feet. :) We also saw two kinds of scorpions, one being a whip scorpion.

Apparently my professor, Tom Langen, is the world's expert on the magpie jay, which we learned has interesting social habits. A group of females will all help raise the young of one lead female. They're gorgeous birds, and we first saw one flying back and forth across the road as we entered the park.

During the day time, we were about to see agoutis, which are the small brown mammals you can see in the picture. They look about the size of a house cat, and run around eating. We saw a bird that reminded us of a turkey, but was black with a red neck. We saw several big iguanas, and a bunch of little lizards. We also caught a gecko! :)

There are so many birds! We also saw two snakes, one venemous that someone had killed, and another that looked black and white and reminded me of checkerboards.

We saw a number of deer in the park, and also, coaties!!! :) (Pronounced co-aa-teee, here they call them pisote. :) ) I saw them in Iguazu, Argentina last year, and they were scavengers there, but not here. :) We also got to see two kinds of monkeys!!!! Above I posted a picture of a white faced monkey, and we also got to see howler monkeys. :) With that white-faced monkey, that's another animal from my ceramic piece! Whoo! :)