A week in paradise

Now I have already been here for a week and don't want to leave anymore! I sleep all alone up here in the station and am woken up in the mornings by the macaws and howler monkeys. Then I feed the macaws with legumes and sunflower seeds and count how many come to feed. Sometimes there are over 30 macaws that, as soon as they are startled by a large eagle, fly over my head. Duaro showed me the best way to photograph them in flight. Yesterday I took the cover photo for this blog.

On the weekend, after feeding, I went to the beach with Felix. Felix worked on a sea turtle project here at the beginning and has been in Costa Rica for three years now. If I ever get bored or lonely up here at the station, I can always come down to Felix and help him plant trees or collect beach plastic. His current project is to search the sea for the coral species least affected by climate change and propagate them in a coral nursery. Pretty exciting!

On Sunday, I even went surfing. A nice guy with a Rasta hat lent me his longboard for a few dollars at the beach. Surfing is a popular sport here in Costa Rica. You see bike riders with boards under their arms everywhere on the street.

In the afternoons, the macaws need to be fed again. Then tourists often come to watch the spectacle. But right now, there are hardly any tourists here, and the beaches are deserted. It looks like a movie, no wonder Jurassic Park is set on an imaginary island off the coast of Costa Rica!

During the week, there is no time for the beach. The past few days, Duaro and I have been driving the quad to different trees that the locals told him had a natural nesting hole for the macaws. Today, we will go tree climbing. Sara is also joining us. She is from California and has been researching the behavior of the great green macaws for a year. It is very exciting to hear what she has to say because she knows the macaws so well by now. For example, she discovered that both the partnership between macaws and the raising of the young birds is different for each individual. Sometimes much more loving and sometimes much rougher.

Yesterday, we also collected beach almonds, the main food of the macaws, at the beach. In general, there are so many fruits here that I had never heard of before but taste delicious. You can then plant the seeds somewhere, and for sure, after a few days, a little plant will grow there. Everything just grows here.

I always get up at five in the morning and sit up on the platform. From there, you can see not only the macaws but also toucans, capuchin monkeys, coatis, and many other animal species. It's an incredible nature experience all alone on a hill in the rainforest!