Corcovado National Park

Hiking in Corcovado was a great experience. This state park is the second most biodiverse place on the planet, only behind the Amazon basin. I decided to hike wearing my shoes the way the Germans do - sandals with socks. I did this so I would not get eaten by ants or mosquitos - not for fashion. :D We saw so much wildlife and loved being out in the middle of nowhere hiking in a beautiful rainforest next to a beautiful beach. Here is a list of all of the wildlife that I can remember seeing:
-White-faced capuchin monkeys
-Spider monkeys
We saw SO many of these here - they were in the trees all over the park. Almost every time we looked up, we would see these guys.
-Howler monkeys
We did not see these, but we heard them a lot. We have actually heard them all over Costa Rica, but I finally caught a video of the sounds. I hope they come through okay. The video is at the bottom of this blog.
-Tamandua - or honey bear anteater
We had not seen these before. They were a whitish yellow color with a black stripe down the back. We saw one on the ground and another in the tree. The one in the tree was being bothered, or molested as they saw here, by a spider monkey. The monkey pulled the tail of the anteater to try and get him to play. He was not amused.

-White-nosed coatis
We had seen these before, but not as many as we saw in this park. There was a large group of them that came right up on the trail that we were standing still on. I do not think they realized we were there. Another large group of them freaked out and started making barking noises as soon as they heard us coming. They all climbed up into the trees and just stared at us. They were really cute, especially the baby ones.

-Scarlet Macaws
These are the beautiful red colorful parrots that you see pictures of all the time. We saw a bunch of them in a tree - I was only able to get this really bad picture. We also heard them later on lying on the hammocks. Their loud calls are part of what makes them who they are. Apparently, if they do not have loud calls, they are pushed from the trees when they are babies. They always fly in pairs, since they are monogamous for life - beautiful birds.
-Lizards
There were so many of these and they kept scaring us when they would run away quickly on the trails under our feet. We kept thinking there were snakes.
-Iguanas
-All sorts of crabs

-Basilisks








-Lots of spiders, but mainly golden orbweavers
These guys make the strongest webs you can imagine. They are really big, but amazing to watch. We saw one catch a bug in his web and crawl down the web to go and capture it.
-We did not see any snakes, but the other guy, Geoff saw 4, including what looked a lot like the fer de lance, the most vicious and poisonous one in Costa Rica.

It was quite a day of hiking! There were banana trees all over the park, but we stayed well fed with our packed lunches, so we did not need to take from the trees.
There were also some beautiful beach views, of course. We wanted to hike further, but the tide had come up too high for us to hike around the rocks on the beach. You have to really time your hike to get to certain parts of the park. In this area, the tide causes of change in water depth of up to 10 feet!