Manuel Antonio National Park & Osa Peninsula
Today was the first day of our adventure! Manuel Antonio National Park was the first stepping-stone of our expedition through the coasts of Costa Rica and Panama.
We arrived early in the morning at Manuel Antonio, the smallest of the national parks in Costa Rica, but a very popular one because of its gorgeous beaches, and abundant wildlife.
We disembarked at a long pristine empty whitish sandy beach, framed in between the lush green vegetation and the blue ocean. Just a minute after we landed we indeed started seeing wildlife activity, yellow headed caracaras being harassed by king birds on top of a very tall tree, that happen to be the National Tree of Panama, “oddly” enough called the Panama tree.
As we landed, we separated into much smaller groups and split in different directions. We soon ran into well camouflaged prehistoric looking spiny tailed iguanas and basilisks lizards, also known as the Jesus Christ lizard for their notorious ability to run above the water when escaping from danger. It really doesn’t take much effort to see things in Manuel Antonio! In fact, there was so much to see, we hardly advanced on the trail bordering the ocean.
We were particularly in search of sloths today, and pretty soon we found our first three-toed sloth. Sloths really are odd animals, one could assume they are about to become extinct because they move so slowly, have very little muscular strength and are not very smart. But according to research, they are very successful and abundant in the tropical forests of Central and South America (the only places where they are found) so sloths are actually interesting, well their behavior is! They are related to armadillos and anteaters, mammals they don’t look like at all. Three toed sloths feed exclusively on leaves, a very challenging diet for an arboreal creature. Leaves are mostly hard to digest cellulose and often loaded with several complex toxic compounds, but sloths are specially suited to deal with this. They live on the edge, on the verge of starvation and being poisoned by their food.
Several other interesting creatures were spotted today, toucans, mantled howler monkeys, white faced capuchin monkeys, agoutis, long nosed coatis and the list goes on. I would say that even though we saw many sloths, the highlight today was the opportunity to see nature in action. We watched a neotropical bird snake rob a nest of a couple of helpless black hooded antshrikes. It was sad but at the same time interesting to see the useless efforts of the birds trying to repel the snake from eating their eggs. That is how it is in nature. Not fair or unfair, it just is!
Later on during the day we were able to take a nice dip in the ocean to cool down, and off we went to our next destination: Corcovado National Park for the next stage of our explorations!
