Cicada warfare

We noticed a few cicadas the first night, coming in the windows, attracted by the lights in the house. Yesterday though, they came out with a vengeance. Hundreds of thousands of them up in the trees, all rubbing their legs together constantly during the daylight hours. The hum was driving Eileen crazy. As we sat down to supper and darkness fell, there was silence. Then a few started appearing in the house. Rather than ignoring them like we did the first night, out came the egg flipper and down started to go the cicadas. After supper we went out to the deck and played cards. It had clouded over and then started to rain quite hard. Turns out cicadas don't like the rain, and when it started they headed to the house in droves. We closed up the shutters, killed off the last of them and carried on with our card games. It rained hard all night and then in the morning it was pretty quiet. We'd thought that maybe the rain had wiped them out, but they've stared up again about mid-morning, although they're a lot less vigorous this afternoon. Down here on the beach, it's pretty peaceful.

What a difference there is here between high tide and low tide. At low tide like it is right now, the shoreline moves out something like 100 metres in places where the water is relatively shallow. Betty went fishing for awhile this morning, she now sees why she was getting snagged so often.

We were saying just this morning that we had not seen any of the white faced monkeys yet. I looked out over the deck while we were having lunch and saw one straight out from the deck, right above the yard in front of the house. We headed out to the deck for a look and saw that there was a whole troop of them coming. Probably 20 or so. Most of them eventually peeled across the yard on the dead run, but there were a few jumpers that leapt a long distance to get across the open area. We probably watched them playing for fifteen or twenty minutes.

 

Some of them are relatively cute

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And some of them are not

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is something alive almost everywhere you look around here. We had about six toucans flying about the yard yesterday and today there seems to be quite a few Scarlet Macaw.

Costa Rican turkeys, not sure what the real name is.

Tonight I think we're going to go up to Martinas bar, have supper, and watch some of the Super Bowl. I'll have to check for game time when I go online to post this. Tomorrow I think we're going to get William to take us out of his waterfall hike. They only charge $25 for a group to go, so that's a bargain for a guided tour in the rainforest.

 

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