Day 3: La Selva Biological Station & Braulio Currillo NP

Braulio Currillo features an aerial tram – sort of a cable car but open, through the forest. We really wanted to see that and it was planned for our first day, however having a private driver paid back here because from his colleagues he heard on the first day, that on the way to the park there has been a mudslide which happens rather often in Costa Rica unfortunately and that had caused road closure. So something that would normally take 30 min drive, would have taken us 3h on another road. So we decided to move it to the third day and combine it with the Selva station. So we headed first thing in the morning to La Selva Biological Station. It is a research station where naturalists, botanists, ornithologists and biodiversity researchers come to study the nature of Costa Rica. The species richness of La Selva is outstanding, with more than 2077 species of plants; 125 species of mammals (72 of them bats); 470 species of birds; 48 amphibian species; 87 species of reptiles; 45 species of freshwater fish; and tens of thousands of insects, arachnids, and other arthropods. You cannot enter the part without a guide. The only exception is if you book accommodation there and sleep at the station, then you can explore the trails on your own, but otherwise it is not possible.
The weather that day was more than horrible. Adding to the 100% humidity, was dull, grey weather, with rain. Because of that we had to put on our raincoats and we died of heat. I couldn’t bear it. Add to that a constantly following literaly swarm of mosquitoes, it was literally unbearable. I did spray myself with a shitload of DEET and despite dying of heat, I did not remove my raincoat because i didn’t want to expose my arms to the mosquitoes. And as soon as you stop moving, they start going into your face, your mouth, eyes, everywhere. I’ve never experienced such a horrible thing with these mosquitoes. However, while this was horrible, let’s not focus only on it. Our guide was an ornithologist and he could point out so many birds, I loved spotting birds with him and asking him info on them. Rad also asked him a lot about plants, which is definitely her domain. We saw two species of toucans, monkeys, many other birds, including 2 raptors and a very special snowy tanager which, as our guide pointed, was a super rare bird and an ornithologist had recently been there for 2 weeks trying to spot that bird and we saw it pretty much out of luck. Super cool! We also saw vultures, parrots, and caimans – a mother and her baby caimans 😀 And the giant blue butterfly that I have seen in the Rotterdam zoo’s butterfly area – the Blue Morph butterfly. It was soo gorgeous. It also stayed still on a leaf with the wings not up closed but sort of open, so we could clearly see the blue-coloured wings. The guide said that this is not normal and he would’ve thought that the morph is dead if he hadn’t seen it fly, it is not a typical position for a butterfly.