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long skinny snake
Wednesday, February 22 2023
the northwesternmost casita at Toucan Hill, Montezuma, Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica
I saw a cat on the lawn near the casita this morning. It had patches of tabby on its back but was mostly white otherwise. One of the agoutis saw the cat and went running into the jungle making a loud squawking sound. Interesting, the agoutis don't seem the least bit concerned about coatimundis, which are also potential predators and of a catlike size. But evidently agoutis and coatimundis have some sort of understanding.
Later I saw very long, very thin snake climbing up into the palm tree nearest the steps to our porch. The snake looked like a garter snake, with a body of about the same diameter and somewhat bigger, greener head. But a garter snake is maybe thirty inches long at the longest, and this snake was at least twice that length or longer. Having such a long body made it easier for the snake to find niches in the palm's trunk to help him or her hoist him or herself up into the fronds. I don't know what the snake did once he or she was up there, and I never saw the snake again.
Meanwhile over at the pool, I saw a lizard coming out of the end of the hollow support beam late this morning, but it wasn't Boris, it was Amelia. Evidently more than one iguana use that pipe as a den. Later this afternoon I saw Boris and Amelia hanging out in the grass (Amelia was eating something, though I couldn't tell what). Clearly the two iguanas know and like each other, as they came into physical contact and it was no big deal. Then I noticed a third iguana over at the other end of the deck near the entrance to the hollow deck beam. This one was more of an Amelia than a Boris. It made me wonder how many iguanas crowd into that beam every night.
Meanwhile in the remote workplace, I was working some more on that legacy website, the one I built a deployment pipeline for last week. Today I had to modify its form to add free-entry text boxes to the interface as a way to bypass the annoyance of paging through graphical calendars. In so doing, I had to teach myself about ASP.NET web forms and how to intercept their events, all things I haven't really done before. It's a somewhat dated technology, but it was fairly intuitive to work with.
Gretchen's language session with Andy began at 2:30pm, and when she came walking back from that (having hitched a ride with some nice people from Switzerland), I was down at the bottom of the hill at the entrance to Toucan Hill looking for the source of some animal sounds. Gretchen said she had some stuff that needed to go directly into the freezer, so she continued back to the casita while I headed southwestward on Calle Linda Vista. I soon saw a bird I knew to be a trogon, and as I was taking pictures of that, I became aware of a group of slow-moving howler monkeys. After taking pictures of them (and of a bird I couldn't identify against the brightness of the sky that turned out to be another trogon), I hurried back to the casita to tell Gretchen about the howlers, her favorite kind of monkey. She just begun making a dinner of spaghetti, red-bean tempeh, and green beans, and she turned it all over to me and hurried down the hill. The monkeys hadn't moved much when she got to them and she was able to have a full-on howler monkey experience for the first time in days.
A group of capuchin monkeys had come through this morning, but no monkeys came to the casita at all this evening. Eventually we went to the pool, where a waxing crescent moon hung in the sky right next to Jupiter. I took a picture of this unusual phenomenon and later when I looked at the photograph, I was delighted to find that my camera had also managed to capture at least one of the Jovian moons, and that was without a tripod or anything but an automatic exposure.
A white-winged dove. Sings a song that sounds like "who cooks for you?"
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The long skinny snake going up into a palm.
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An unknown species of hummingbird near the casita.
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I thought these were grackles when I photographed them, but now I see they're groove-billed anis. Sorry about the bad focus!
The first trogon I saw on Calle Linda Vista.
Click to enlarge.
Then I saw this mystery bird, which turned out to also be a trogon when I changed the brightness levels in Photoshop.
A young howler monkey above Calle Linda Vista.
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You can really see the enlarged voice box on this howler male.
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Agoutis don't actually have a particularly cute face.
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Marvin the variagated squirrel on the roof of the adjacent casita.
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The crescent moon with Jupiter. Note a Galilean/Jovian moon at one o'clock with respect to Jupiter. Some of those other bright dots are probably also Galilean moons.
Click to enlarge.
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