It started raining overnight, and drops hitting something that banged loudly made me think, in my state of semiconsciousness, that pipes were banging so the heat was coming on. Well, the heat was not coming on, it was still raining at sunrise, and it has rained here all day as far as we know.
I did see some birds from our covered porch this morning, but my pictures are streaked with raindrops, so here’s a nicer picture from yesterday of another familiar face, a Tennessee warbler, whom we just might see again in Wisconsin in a few weeks.
This not-great-picture, from a couple of days ago, is of a little bird with an awesome name, common chlorospingus (Chlorospingus flavopectus), and I’m not kidding. Sources say that it may also be referred to as a common bush tanager.
Since the forecast was for rain all day, Anne suggested we take a road trip to a “nearby” sugar mill museum, Museo Regional del Trapiche, in San Jerónimo, where “the first sugar plantation in Central America was founded … in 1601″. Google maps said it was just about an hour away, but what it didn’t say is that it routed us down a dirt road for the last 10 kilometers.
At one point, after we had already scraped bottom once, Anne said of the “road” ahead, “it looks bumpy, but not bottom-out bumpy,” and she was correct for that stretch. At least there were no log bridges, we eventually made it just fine, it wasn’t raining there, and the museum was quite nice, but I’ll leave the description to someone else’s travelog. Let me show you, instead, some wildlife we also saw there.
Here’s a banded peacock butterfly (Anartia fatima).
Here’s our first lizard of the trip, which even Anne was excited to see. This one turns out to be, as far as we can tell, a Guatemalan emerald spiny lizard (Sceloporus taeniocnemis).
We could hear birds chirping from time to time in the nearby trees, but they kept out of sight, so here’s another of the many butterflies, a yellow-tipped flasher (Telegonus anausis).
Finally, here’s a northern red rim (Biblis aganisa).
Lastly, here’s a black vulture, which I just recently showed you in Connecticut, from my hike yesterday afternoon on the hill behind our hotel. From the cloud forests of Central America to the restaurant dumpsters of New England, this is one far-ranging and adaptable bird, eh?
Signs of Life in Estabrook Park 