Animals
 
I’ve now lived in Guanacaste for two months. Here’s a list of animals I’ve seen so far:
  1. 1.dogs [first in the list because they’re everywhere, without leashes, and most of them, without owners; I read somewhere there are 1 million dogs living in the streets of Costa Rica, an incredible number considering the country’s population is only 4.5 million]
  2. 2.cats [nowhere near as many as dogs; in fact, few, but more than I remember seeing growing up here, when there weren’t as many foreigners and cats were generally associated with witches]
  3. 3.iguanas [sometimes called gallinas de palo or “tree chickens,” because they supposedly taste just like chicken. Although they live in trees, they are found everywhere, and like chickens, they tend to cross the road a lot, just because.]
  4. 4.birds [pelicans, egrets, parakeets, toucans, magpie-jays, vultures, hawks, ducks, kiskadees, tanagers, hummingbirds, swallows, and many, many more that I don’t know their names; after all, there are more than 300 species of birds living in this area]
  5. 5.insects [grouped together like the birds because they are too numerous: huge grasshoppers, huge dragonflies, butterflies, spiders, ants, bees, mosquitoes, flies, sand fleas, and a cool flying black insect that digs holes in the sand by flapping its wings super fast]
  6. 6.cattle [they graze in the nearby lots and go to the beach to drink salty water; they too often cross the roads, to get to the other side; my husband calls them “free-range beef”]
  7. 7.horses [on the beach, tourists ride them; inland, tico cowboys ride them to tend cattle and get around the brush]
  8. 8.howler monkeys [called congos, they sound scary when you hear them for first time, without seeing them, because they sound much larger than they actually are]
  9. 9.pizotes [coatis, with pointed snouts and long, striped tails, they like to steal food]
  10. 10.skunks, squirrels, rats [like everywhere else]
  11. 11.bats
  12. 12.crocodiles, turtles, lizards, geckos [one lives in our apartment, taking care of pesky insects]
  13. 13.fish, mollusks, crabs, jellyfish [unfortunately, quite a bit of the last one, so now we carry a bottle of vinegar when we go to the beach]
  14. 14.goats, sheep, rabbits, chickens, pigs [farm animals, excepts these were seen on the side of busy roads; one huge pig, over six feet long, was napping on the beach]
Interesting cultural trivia on the subject of animals:
Costa Ricans use different hand gestures to indicate the height of a person versus that of an animal. Hand straight, palm down, is used only for animals. Hand up, with fingers curved down, is used for people: El güila es así de alto.
 
 
Wednesday, March 4, 2009