Covering Nature and Society in Costa Rica
MU journalism students head to Monteverde and Guanacaste Province
Photos by Stephanie Sidoti
GUANACASTE, Costa Rica —Rincón de la Vieja National Park, located in Guanacaste Province, is home to a variety of geologic features and life forms. The park has an active volcano and a scattered array of boiling mud pits and steam vents. The park encompasses both tropical cloud forest and tropical dry forest ecosystems.
By Courtney McBay
SAN LUIS, Costa Rica — Viewed from the Trocha lookout over San Luis, rolling hills once covered by thick forest now have random patches cleared for pasture. Cows for beef and dairy now graze where monkeys once swung from tall trees while brightly colored birds sang.
Farmland took over the wild landscape before ecotourism became the primary economic activity in the Monteverde area. Agriculture was the key to mountainside Ticos’ success.
Now, as guests flock to hike through Monteverde’s natural attractions, the community’s focus has shifted to preserving forests rather than producing food.
Guillermo Vargas, a farmer in the area, focuses his operation on sustainable agriculture. His farming decisions are based on planning for the long term.
“People enjoying life now, not economy, is the number one goal,” Vargas said. “We need to be preparing for 1,000 years from now.”
The first Ticos came to the forest areas in the early 20th century as Costa Rica’s coffee industry began to suffer, he said.
“They needed a new avenue,” he said.
Vargas said the “Great Grandpa Ticos” were told to go to the forest, cut the trees and farm. The government promised the farmers titles to their land after they had farmed it for 10 years.
The introduction of chemical fertilizers and herbicides along with strains of resilient pasture grass contributed to the widespread deforestation that took place prior to the tourism boom in the late 1980s.
Marcos Mendez, a nature guide, said agricultural technology assists in farm success.
But despite “cows loving it,” these innovations are “the number one enemy of environment and conservation,” Mendez said.
Mendez has guided visitors through the dense Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve for 10 years, pointing out colorful plants and identifying whistling bird calls. He calls on memories of lost endemic species, such as the extinct golden toad. He said he doesn’t know of another cloud forest guide who has seen the fiery throated hummingbird, a creature that formerly fluttered about the forest freely, in eight years.
Mendez is not a scientist, but based on his forest observations, he attributes the loss of species to climate change and deforestation.
Anibal Torres of the Monteverde Institute leads the organization’s Sustainable Futures Program. The ecotourism boom has reversed some of the deforestation caused by agriculture, he said.
Torres said education outreach initiatives equip farmers with the knowledge to “make better use of the land.”
But conversations about reforestation can be difficult in Monteverde’s neighboring towns, where most economic activity still thrives on agriculture.
Even with education emphasizing the importance of forest preservation, many farmers are faced with the choice to feed their families now or to conserve their forest for the future.
“There is no conservation for the hungry,” said Victorino Molina Rojas, founder of the Costa Rican Conservation Foundation.
The foundation joined forces with six other conservation-minded organizations to form the Bellbird Biological Corridor in 2007. The project advocates for reforestation in at least 10 life zones extending from Monteverde to the Gulf of Nicoya.
FCC president Evelyn Casares Cespedes said convincing farmers to plant trees on their land is never easy.
“It is always a fight,” Casares said through a translator.
Although the government gives incentives for planting trees on deforested land —$600 per hectare over five years – it is simply not enough to live for most farmers.
“They can cut down three trees and make as much as that payment,” Casares said.
Casares and her fellow Fighters for the Forest are convinced the conservation conversation must be a compromise with farmers.
Reforestation is a cooperative effort for the communities in the biological corridor.
The Monteverde Institute and the conservation foundation plan to continue collaboration with farmers to ensure sustainable futures for both farms and forests.
By Courtney McBay
MONTEVERDE, Costa Rica – The Banyan Tree’s sprawling trunk is a unique tangle of woody vines and hollow pits. It races against the tallest of the Monteverde Cloud Forest’s inhabitants, climbing upwards of 120 feet.
These trees are globally known as Strangler Fig Trees; to Marcos Mendez, they are nicknamed “Ficus Condominiums.”
Mendez, a trail guide for the Monteverde Biological Reserve, speaks of the cloud forest’s species with the expertise of a seasoned veteran mixed with the casual approachability of a friendly boy scout. His descriptions of each species’ interdependence on one another paint this forest as a self-reliant ecosystem—a world of its own. Each animal, insect, plant and microbe plays its own special role in creating and maintaining the lush landscape.
Its beauty is no secret: 50,000 of the area’s 150,000 annual visitors make Mendez’s trail their top priority. As the oldest and most famous cloud forest in the area, the Monteverde Biological Reserve has become a must-see for nature lovers.
The Banyan is not exclusive to Monteverde. The ficus thrives in rainforest, tropical forest and island climates, including those in Asia. According to the Royal Botanic Gardens, it has significant cultural importance in the Republic of India as its national tree.
But Mendez is more concerned with the Strangler Fig Tree’s ecological importance in the complicated forests of Costa Rica.
The Banyan gets its Strangler Fig Tree nickname because of how it establishes its twisty tracks of trunk. The Banyan begins its life as a sticky seed atop a host tree. It then extends its roots down the trunk of its host until those roots reach the ground. Mendez classified the tree as an epiphyte: a plant that grows on another plant without depriving the host of resources. Unlike a parasite, an epiphyte is able to live on after a host dies. And that is exactly what the Strangler Fig Tree does.
After the Banyan digs its roots into the ground, it begins to compete with its host for sunlight and water. The Banyan then wraps itself around its host from the top down, winning the fight for sunlight. Eventually, its host dies after weeks of inadequate chlorophyll activity.
The Banyan essentially strangles its host, thus its globally recognized slang term. Mendez warned not to take “strangulation” as a negative thing – he said this relationship is extremely important to the critters and crawlers of the forest.
After the Banyan’s host dies, it decays and leaves behind empty space between the Banyans’ root-trunk. This void is the perfect shelter for animals, including birds, monkeys and coatis.
It is in these ficus condominiums that animals hide from predators or build their homes.
They are the cloud forest’s prime real estate.
By Daniela Vidal
MONTEVERDE, Costa Rica-In Monteverde’s cloud forest, frogs lay their eggs in rather unexpected places: tree branches. This feat is only possible because of bromeliads, a species of epiphytes. Epiphytes are microecosystems vital to the cloud forest.
Making up 29 percent of the vegetation in Monteverde’s cloud forest, epiphytes are non-parasitic plants which live on a host species. They use the host for housing purposes, not nutritional purposes. To survive, they create their own “top-soil” in the branches of the tree by absorbing moisture from the air and gathering nutrients from dead leaves and bird feces. This process takes a few years to complete.
“The soil can be a foot thick,” Marcos Mendez, an INBio-certified, freelance tour guide, says.
This topsoil is home to hundreds of insects. “Frogs, snakes and birds are there [in the epiphytes] precisely because they feed on those things,” Mendez, who works at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, says. “There are birds that specialize in catching what lives in the middle of epiphytes.”
Two of the most common epiphytes are orchids and bromeliads. Others include mosses and ferns.
Of the 878 species of epiphytes, 500 of those are orchids, according to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve, giving Monteverde one of the highest orchid diversities in the world.
Bromeliads, which are related to pineapples, have tightly wound leaves that act as water reservoirs. It is in this water that some frogs lay their eggs. When the tadpoles hatch, the bromeliads act as a safe place for them to await their mother’s return, food in tow.
“Epiphytes make the cloud forest special,” Mendez says.
By Aaron Braverman
MONTEVERDE, Costa Rica – Tucked away from the road in a picturesque cloud forest town, the Monteverde Friends School has provided an educational experience focused on nature, community and integrity for more than 60 years.
The vibrant school was founded in January 1951 when Quakers first arrived in Costa Rica as a place to educate their children. While preparing for their move to Monteverde, classes were held in a coffeehouse in nearby Heredia. The school moved to Monteverde in August 1951 and has been on its current grounds since around 1957.
“History tells a lot about the way we do business,” School Director Francisco Burgos said. “The school was created to figure out how to educate and not lose connections to the English-speaking world, but still allow for Costa Rican culture.”
Continue reading “Monteverde Friends School focuses on Integrity, Simplicity”
By Sally French
MONTEVERDE, Costa Rica — It’s the last full day for us University of Missouri students in Monteverde before heading off to our next destination in Costa Rica. We haven’t been here long, but we’ve gathered our list of the top 5 things to do in and around Monteverde.
5. Selvatura Park’s Canopy Tour: We know this is probably number one on every tourist’s list of things to do. But if it’s not, get it on there! The Zip Line canopy tour is an exhilarating trip above the tree tops with 15 lines. It’s about $50 a person, and we think it’s worth the price. We won’t spoil the end — our favorite part of the adventure — but let’s just say it involves embracing your inner Tarzan.
4. Eating at Nachos: I can’t say for sure, but I don’t believe they sell nachos here. No worries, because even better, they have pizza! It’s cheap, local, and tough to find (just around the corner from the iconic Treehouse Restaurant and head down an unmarked staircase). The food is great, and the walls are covered with some rad grafitti art. I’d totally give you a link, but this place is so hip that they don’t even have a website — so people like us can tell our friends, “you’ve probably never heard of it.” Continue reading “Must-sees in Monteverde”
By Kyle Cardine
MONTEVERDE, Costa Rica – During our travels in Costa Rica, we had good karma running into the country’s diverse animal populations. Coatis, golden-groin rainfrogs and millipedes are just some of the animals that we have encountered so far. The following is the first segment in an ongoing photo series showcasing the vast amount of species Costa Rica has to offer. We saw most of these during a night hike with naturalist Mark Wainwright in the Santa Elena Cloud Forest Reserve and a morning hike with nature guide Victorino Molina in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve.
By Benjamin Zack
MONTEVERDE, Costa Rica — There is a section of the hillside above Santa Elena, Costa Rica where the air is so thick with the aroma of cilantro that it becomes difficult to focus on what else is happening around you. For Orlando Trejos, this smell is the future of agriculture.
The rich scent comes from one of the greenhouses on Trejos’s hydroponic farm. In addition to the herb that is so popular in local kitchens, other greenhouses line the hill full of lettuce, tomatoes, basil and 14 other herbs and vegetables.
After a lifetime of working in agriculture and conservation, Trejos began farming with hydroponics in 2005. He now sees it as the next step forward in the delicate balance between preserving the area’s rich biodiversity and feeding the hundreds of thousands of visitors and residents in the Monteverde region.
Covering Nature and Society in Costa Rica 