Charles Dunlop sent some photos with a short intro. His brief IDs (without species names) are below, and click to enlarge the photos. (I’ve linked to species when I can identify them, but readers can help in the comments.)
Attached are some photos that I took in Costa Rica in 2019.
Blue Morpho butterfly:
Big Cats, La Paz:
Jaguar, La Paz:
Frog, La Paz:
Crab:
Iguana sp.:
If I were very rich – and had a larger apartment – I’d have a butterfly house. Very fancy, lots of art deco and art nouveau.
Not a crab house though.
Lovely pics, thank you.
D.A.
NYC
Lovely pics, quite the variety.
The big cats are pumas, aka cougars, mountain lions, catamounts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puma_(genus)
Because of the look we are getting from the (presumably) lioness, I will not say anything about the name Bananaquit
Once again : no funny remarks about Bananaquit!
Right!
😁
Nice pics, thank you. I’m jealous you saw a Quetzal, I’ve always wanted to see one! Interesting also to see the Bananaquit on the hummingbird feeder, I would’ve thought its beak would be too big to reach the nectar.
Thanks so much! These photos are terrific. I love the big cats. I don’t think the cougar wanted his picture taken.
Nice variety of wonderful creatures. That millipede is a stunner! (Kinda kidding about the stunning part, but I really do like it.)
Very interesting! I think the crab is a Sally Lightfoot Crab. I cannot but help remember a funny passage about them from The Log from the Sea of Cortez by Steinbeck. I can’t find it, but the crew tried a clever trick to trap the crabs on the beach in order to collect some. But the crabs neatly escaped by some quick outside-of-the-box-thinking.
“These little crabs, with brilliant cloisonné carapaces, walk on their tiptoes. They have remarkable eyes and an extremely fast reaction time. In spite of the fact that they swarm on the rocks at the Cape, and to a less degree inside the Gulf, they are exceedingly hard to catch. They seem to be able to run in any one of four directions; but more than this, perhaps because of their rapid reaction time, they appear to read the mind of their hunter. They escape the long-handled net, anticipating from what direction it is coming. If you walk slowly, they move slowly ahead of you in droves. If you hurry, they hurry. When you plunge at them, they seem to disappear in little puffs of blue smoke—at any rate, they disappear. It is impossible to creep up on them. They are very beautiful, with clear brilliant colors, reds and blues and warm browns. We tried for a long time to catch them. Finally, seeing fifty or sixty in a big canyon of rock, we thought to outwit them. Surely we were more intelligent, if slower, than they. Accordingly, we pitted our obviously superior intelligence against the equally obvious physical superiority of Sally Lightfoot. Near the top of the crevice a boulder protruded. One of our party, taking a secret and circuitous route, hid himself behind this boulder, net in hand. He was completely concealed even from the stalk eyes of the crabs. Certainly they had not seen him go there. The herd of Sallys drowsed on the rocks in the lower end of the crevice. Two more of us strolled in from the seaward side, nonchalance in our postures and ingenuousness on our faces. One might have thought that we merely strolled along in a contemplation which severely excluded Sally Lightfoots. In time the herd moved ahead of us, matching our nonchalance. We did not hurry, they did not hurry. When they passed the boulder, helpless and unsuspecting, a large net was to fall over them and imprison them. But they did not know that. They moved along until they were four feet from the boulder, and then as one crab they turned to the right, climbed up over the edge of the crevice and down to the sea again.”
I believe that the frog is an Agalychnis, although I can’t tell the species.
The iguana is a ctenosaur, or spiny-tailed iguana – could be a female Ctenosaura similis.
Nice photos! Looking forward to visiting Costa Rica some day …