A Day as a Tourist

The Monteverde Institute

Monteverde, Costa Rica

1400ft

Strangler Fig (Ficus)

I am living with a Tico family and so I am experiencing Costa Rican culture right in the family center where many traditions in cooking, story telling and daily life are practiced.  Each morning I wake up to the sounds of a neotropical forest--parrots, motmots, robins, cicadas, and wind.  The wind blows almost constantly here, because we are directly in the path of the trade winds, and sometimes at night I wake thinking for sure the roof will blow away.  We wake early to take advantage of the beautiful mornings, and walk to our research sites, which is always a pleasure.  There is plenty of birding and plant spotting to be had, and each of us in our group of seven stops periodically to point something out.  As a result, we never get places quickly, but there is so much to see and hear and experience that it is impossible to simply pass by.

Yesterday we went to Curi Cancha, which is a preserve about a twenty minute walk from the institute.  We decided to take a break from our work (i.e. bushwacking through dense jungle, complete with Tarzan vines, I must add, and setting transects and counting fruiting plants) and be tourists for a day.  We had a guide who could mimmick bird calls very well.  I kept reaching for my binoculars to look for a motmot or a quetzal that I thought was very near, but it was just our guide attempting to attract one of these territorial birds. (Sometimes you can hear a distinct call coming from the forest, and you get excited about the prospects of seeing an awesome bird, but you can't help but wonder if it is just another guide trying to attract one for tourists).

At the end of the hike, I came round a bend to see our guide hugging a huge fig tree.  "Mi abuelo!" he said.  Fig trees were clearly his favorite thing in the reserve.  He pointed out each one we passed, as if it was the most amazing spectacle we had seen all day (some of them pretty much were).  "Es increible!!!" he would say at a tree not a stone's throw from the last one we had experienced.  And by experienced, I mean, standing inside the hemiepiphytes and looking up through the hollow middle and seeing all the life that consider this impressive plant to be "their bed and breakfast" as our guide put it.  The strangler fig is an epiphyte in its early life, which means it does not depend on the ground soil at all to live.  Instead of sending roots into the soil, it has adapted to germinate at the top of the canopy and therefore receives light that below the tree tops is a resource well competed for.  Once established, it becomes a hemiepiphyte, sending large roots down to the soil, and anchoring itself around its host tree.  At this point, the host tree is ancient history, as the strangler fig has cut off both its supply of sunlight and its ability to grow.  The host tree rots, leaving an empty space inside and all the way up the fig tree.  The effect is an entanglement of roots that have grown into each and formed buttresses and windows and criss-crossing patterns that make some of the older figs look like nature cathedrals in the woods.  This phenomenon is truly a wonder to see.

Our guide's "abuelo tree" had a smooth, round section towards the bottom and it did look perfect por abrazando.  "If I hug a tree all the monkeys will climb off my back, because this is my grandfather!"  It was funny to see how genuinely sure of his statement he was.  but i also admired his positivity--that he could find a psychological place to put his daily burdens and be mentally free of them at least for the time being.  I need to find a place to let the monkeys off my back too!  After some of us finished tree hugging, we swung on a long vine and felt like George of the jungle for a few seconds.  It was great!

When the day was nearly over and after walking all through the busque again, on our own, and covering such topics as our plant taxonomy, JFK's assassination from a conspiracy theorist's pint of view and favourite movies, we walked back to an open field with citrus trees and purple stachytarpeta bushes outlining a gorgeous view of the sunset and the valley and water below.  What I enjoyed most about our day of walking through the reserve was that we were in no hurry, had no destination, and Professor Stone would stop periodiclly to teach us about a particular plant or tell an awesome story.  There is no better place to learn than outside while walking.  We completed our fulfilling day by playing hacky-sack in the dazzling sunset.  "What a terrible Jan Plan!" somebody exclaimed.  We all hurriedly agreed and wished we were in our dorms looking out our windows at coldness, and classrooms, and computer screens.