Freshwater Shrimp: A Delicious Dish

Yesterday I went on a hike with Javier - the caretaker of our house - down to a jungle creek. Javier has lived in the area around Cuervito all his life. He doesn't speak much English so all our conversations took place in Spanish.  He taught me a number of names and facts about the local wildlife as well as some stories from his life.

Cardulovica (Panama hat palm) flower beginning to open

Javier has 22 brothers and sisters and he took me to a waterfall where they all used to swim on Sundays when he was young. He hadn't been to the spot in 10 years, but we still found it quickly and easily. There was no path down to the creek, really, we navigated down an incredibly steep and slick face, composed of the wet clay soil and a topcoat of slippery leaves. Partway down the face we paused so Javier could cut us long, sharp walking poles with machete. My pole kept me from falling several times but I also kept picturing how gutted I'd be if I slipped onto it.

Approaching the pool at the base of a 30 m waterfall

The waterfall was several times higher than the one we went to previously. Almost immediately on arrival I spotted one of the freshwater shrimp my sister had mentioned before. I pointed it out to Javier and he said

"¡Agárralo! Él no muerde - acaba de quitarse de la cáscara!"

I have seen and handled lots of crayfish in the united states and they have strong claws and hard shells. When they pinch, or snap their tails on your fingers it can really hurt, so I was a little bit timid. This strange shrimp was both large and alien to me. The foremost arms and claws were nearly as long as the rest of the body and it seemed disproportionate and possibly dangerous, even if it had just shed its shell.

Javier kept repeating that it wouldn't bite so I reached into the water and herded it toward him (I still didn't want to grab it myself). The shrimp was quick and slippery, but eventually we cornered him into the shallows and Javier grabbed him.

Javier holding the freshwater shrimp, freshly-pulled from the quebrada

Javier said that sometimes the locals come down to the stream at night with flashlights and collect up to 4 kilograms of the shrimp in a night. Once we'd wrapped the shrimp up in a plastic bag and put it in my backpack we sad down by the water and chatted about the animals, plants, geology and human history of the area.

A close-up of the newly-molted freshwater shrimp we caught near Cuervito

There is still gold in some of the quebradas, like the one we visited. Javier explained how the oreros sift it out of the sand and gravel and how some people seek out the ancient graves of the natives that often contain caches of gold. Javier had personally seen two palm-sized gold figurines - one of a vulture and one of a frog - collected in such a way. He'd also once served as a guide for an American who recovered 11 troy ounces of gold from the area's streams!

On the way back up the hill he told me about how the perezosos (sloths) favored the guarumo (Cecropia obtusifolia) trees. We searched their scarred, bare trunks but didn't see any sloths.

I tried to get Javier to take the shrimp home and eat it, but he insisted it was mine, and that'd I'd better not forget about it in my backpack. So I took it home and fried it up with my mom and sister!

It was actually super tasty. Unlike the strange or muddy taste crayfish can sometimes have, the tail of our shrimp tasted like lobster and the claws like crab. It was an awesome midafternoon treat. Especially when paired with some incredibly juicy oranges from one of Javier's trees.

12/23/2012: A Day in the Neighborhood

The house I've been staying in near Cuervito, Puntarenas Costa Rica has mostly typical, but lovely tropical landscaping. It's surrounded by variegated and flowering ginger plants, heliconias, hibiscus and croton plants and bushes, shaded by palms, citrus trees, local forest trees and even a ylang ylang (Canaga odorata) tree.

variegated ginger leaves

Hedychium coronarium  (White ginger lily) flowers. 

The sweet-smelling flowers of Canaga odorata (Ylang ylang tree)

On December 23rd we had a relaxed morning, then we went on a short loop hike near the house. We climbed through a fence and took a muddy path down into a forested ravine, where we followed a creek up to a beautiful waterfall. The water was not as clear as Rio Claro near Pavones, but we did see a Granular Posion Dart Frog (Oophaga granulifera) on the trail and a beautiful green and blue hummingbird that I couldn't identify to species level darting in and out of the waterfall mist.

We found what looked like the tail of a shrimp on a rock at the base of the waterfall and my sister mentioned she'd heard there were freshwater shrimp in the creeks in the area.

Me, my mom and sister swimming in the pool below the waterfall

We hiked up the other side of the gorge and saw a small bat roosting underneath a heliconia leaf and a troupe of White-Faced Capuchins (Cebus capucinus) in the trees. Then the path entered pasture and cleared land where we saw a host of butterflies flitting and resting on the grass stems.

Can you even see the capuchin in this photo? So far away :(

Pasture land near Cuervito, Costa Rica

It was super hard to get good pictures of the many of the things we saw. The poison dart frog, hummingbird and bat were much to quick to hop and fly away out of sight in the low light environment of the rainforest floor. The monkeys were to quick and a bit too shy to capture well, especially since I don't yet have a wildlife oriented zoom lens. Butterflies and flowers are a bit more my speed at this point.

Swallowtail butterflies, resting by the side of the road

After our hike I came home and mom and Marin went to a nearby soda called Linda Vista for a beer. I watched the sunset and made drinks in young coconuts and watched the fireflies. 

I would guess that there is little pesticide application in the fields in the area, so each night, hosts of fireflies come out and phosphoresce above lawns, pastures and fields. Prior to coming to Costa Rica I had seen one single firefly my entire life. Each night here there are thousands. Unfortunately they're very hard to capture on video, or stil image, so unfortunately that's just one more thing I don't have saved anywhere but my memory. 

Costa Rica - Arrival and Exploration

I'm in Costa Rica now. I flew with my mom from SFO to San Salvador to San Jose, to Golfito, where we met my sister.

Our SANSA regional flight from San Jose to Golfito, Costa Rica

                                                                                                                                                           Mom and I were very tired from our long series of connections (she had seven flights that day) but the views were so spectacular that for once, I couldn't fall asleep.

Clouds over San José, right after takeoff

Golfito is south and east of San José, but our flight path went slightly west at first, in order to follow the Costa Rican coastline down to our destination.

Our view of the Pacific Ocean during our flight from San José to Golfito

Golfito used to be a banana port but I think it has diminished in importance now and mostly serves as a gateway to the Osa peninsula and Corcovado National Park.

The approach to Golfito Airstrip

Golfito sits on the Gulfo Dulce and is surrounded by steep forested ridges and low, verdant islands. The runway itself sits at the vertex of a deep jungle V. Heliconias bloom along its edges and palms, gingers and massive hardwoods crowd space, making our pilot's smooth landing more impressive.

On the two-hour ride to our house the sun set and thousands of green fireflies phosphoresced in the clearings and pastures next to the road.

The next day, our first full one in the Conte-Pilon-Pavones area, we woke up bright and early to surf at Pilon. A friend of the house's owner loaded our surfboards onto his Yamaha Rhino and I initially took our sole four wheeler while my mother and sister took the fiat. In foreshadowing of things to come, the front wheels of my quad locked not far from the house and I couldn't unlock them or restart the engine for 5 minutes so I ended up taking the quad back to the house and riding in the bed of the rhino.

Me surfing the long, low break at Pilon

At the beach we unloaded our boards and did about two hours of good surfing. The breaks at Pilon are extremely long left handers and I had some great rides - probably the best of my life so far! The waves weren't huge and the sets were a bit far apart, but we were almost the only people there.

The beach at Pilon, 

When we'd finished at Pilon and were loading our surfboards back up for transport to the house my sister's friend noticed four Scarlet Macaws in a Terminalia catappa tree. They were bright, loud and extremely beautiful and best of all, they were only 15 feet away. Unfortunately my camera was in a separate vehicle that had already departed so I just have the memory to enjoy, and no photos.

After surfing and lunch, my sister and I decided to go for a hike. First we had to ride our quads out past Punta Banco, which was a trip of about 1.5 hours.

On the way we past through Pavones and drove by many seaside trees supporting populations of Brassavola nodosa. Some of the plants bore spidery white flowers, tinged pink or yellowish, but none were close enough to the ground from me to smell, or properly photograph.

Rocky shore near Punta Banco. The Osa peninsula is visible in the background

We parked our quads at the end of the road and set out along the beach on foot. Steep rocky slopes covered in jungle meet the black sand in this area allowing a better view of the canopy than you'd be able to get from within the forest.

The beach south of Punta Banco

Again we saw a flock of Scarlet Macaws, but this time they were many meters up in another Terminalia and they are barely visible in the best photograph I could manage:

Scarlet Macaw in a Terminalia tree south of Punta Banco

We followed a little creek up into the forest. 

Jungle creek, south of Punta Banco

Not far from the beach, a downed treetrunk crossed the creek. On it, I spotted the second group of wild orchids on the trip: some kind of Pleurothallis I think - I don't know enough about these little plants to be confident of the species.

Pleurothallis (?) species growing on a downed tree in the creek beed

We found some other things as well. The broken tip of a Cecropia branch had fallen to the forest floor. When I picked it up to show my sister, the Azteca ants that protected and feed off the shoot when it was still attached to the tree rushed out and started crawling over my hands.

The broken tip of a Cecropia branch on the forest floor

As we proceeded up the stream bed things got increasingly steep and increasingly jungly. We started to get worried about the time and how dark it would be when we got home, but before turning back we decided to scout around one more bend.

Jungle creek south of Punta Banco

It was a good thing we did, because just upstream we found a cool cascade of water shooting over a mossy cliff.

Waterfall in a jungle creek, south of Punta Banco

Near the pool at the base of the waterfall we found a dried mature Cecropia leaf, big enough to hide our heads.

Fallen  and withered Cecropia leaf

My sister, hiding behind the foliage

And a nest of thumbnail-sized, coral-colored reptile eggs, hidden beneath a rock in the scree at the base of the waterfall.

Lizard (?) eggs near the jungle waterfall

Despite being overcast, and shady in the forest, it was still quite hot. So the cool mist form the waterfall was refreshing for us, but problematic for our cameras. The mist collected on our lenses and started to make our photos blurry.

Marin and me, next to the jungle waterfall

Eventually we had to climb back down and head home. On the way I noticed a batwing passion vine - no flowers to identify it by, but it was still exciting to see the plant in the wild. As a bonus it had some kind of interesting beetle on it.

Passiflora growing near a jungle creek

Rising tide on the black sand beach south of Punta Banco

As the sun sank lower in the sky we headed back toward our quads

Rocky shore south of Punta Banco

And caught a lovely Costa Rican sunset on our way home.

Sunset behind the Osa peninsula

After the sunset we still rode for about an hour in the dark to get home. We arrived muddy and tired but a friend of Marin's had cooked us a hearty and satisfying veggie stew.