La Reserva Santa Elena

There are rainforests, and then there are rainforests. Last Friday, we went to the real deal.

The conserved rainforest in the Monteverde zone is not owned or controlled by the Government: most of the protected area fall into one of many private reserves that together form one of the largest protected high elevation rainforest ecosystems in the world. Even within the zone, though, there are countless different ecosystems, different microclimates. The Institute, where I take classes, is on the Pacific side of the Continental Divide at an elevation of about 1,400 meters. It's wet, but not rainforest wet. It rains, my clothes get wet, the sun comes out, my clothes dry. That process happens three or for times a day, and it's great.

Last Friday, we went to the Santa Elena Reserve, on the Atlantic side of the divide and hundreds of meters higher. Take a minute, and envision the most stereotypical, picturesque rainforest you can think of. This was it. It was constantly raining and there was green everywhere. Unlike North America, where moss only grows on the north side of trees, the moss here was everywhere and on everything. Maybe it's because the moss couldn't figure out which way was north: the canopy was so thick, I never saw the sun once. We got wet instantly, and we never got a chance to dry.

The Santa Elena Reserve is operated and maintained, in part, by Colegio Santa Elena, the local public high school. Students who are a part of the forestry program get credit for maintaining trails (staircases, and bridges made out of wood disintegrate within a year) and some train to be naturalists. Our guide, “Johnny,” had graduated from the Colegio seventeen years previous, and was an absolute genius. As we tramped through the forest, he cut open wild avocados to show us the larvae of bees that had made the sweet fruit it's first home, located a hummingbird's nest from thirty feet away, and called out the names and traits of what I swear were just red and orange and yellow blurs, but were apparently beautiful birds and butterflies flying by at lightning speed.

We saw a Black Guan, a large predator bird that looks like a turkey, rare now after years of being hunted and labios calientes (hot lips), a plant that produces bright red, mouth-shaped flowers. (It's also known as labios de prostituta – I'll let you figure that translation out yourselves.) We witnessed warblers, Prong-Billed Barbettes, a Purple-throated Mountain Gem, and beautiful little birds called Amigos del Hombre, “friends of man,” because they not only are not scared of humans, but actually like to show themselves whenever humans are present. We also saw two beautiful blue damselflies (think dragonflies, but cooler) mating, a three-toed sloth, (it looked like a mop sitting on a tree) and chased in vain the famed and extremely rare Quetzal. Out of the six mating calls it makes, Johnny could replicate five.

There aren't a lot of big animals in the rainforest – it's a haven for small creatures who fill specific niches in the ecosystem. Hundreds of thousands of insects keep the forest functioning. They vary from carnivores like praying mantises to detrivores that eat rotting things, enabling the rapid decomposition that gives rain forests their amazingly fertile soil (think termites, which actually have symbiotic relationships with microscopic bacteria that live in their intestines and help break down wood). The coolest are the herbivores that have come up with amazingly creative ways to eat plant matter: the tiny larvae of some species of wasps literally tunnel their way through leaves as they grow, creating leaves etched with patterns that look like advanced levels of the snake game they used to package on old-school Nokia phones.

The photos, as usual, don't do the place justice. It's in this kind of light (ie, not a lot) when cameras with larger light sensors that can afford higher ISO settings without getting grainy really come in handy. I took most of mine shading my camera (mounted on it's four-inch tripod) from the rain with my hands. A few of us got to play tarzan, which definitely completed my day.