A night walk in the woods

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On Friday night, a group of six women and one seven-year-old boy from CPI went on a two-hour night walk together. The Monteverde Night Tour is on a private reserve in a transitional forest only 1.5 km below the cloud forest.

The transitional forest was a different world, one where epiphytes and moss did not cover the trees and the precipitation was less. Much of flora and fauna were different. The lack of epiphytes surprised me the most. 

We walked on dirt trails that crisscrossed and meandered throughout the lush woods. Some of the trails were marked only with letters and numbers.

There were three different guided groups that went out on the night walk at the same time each with their own guide. The guides had walkie talkies and would announce if they saw a particular creature in the woods. When a guide announced their group could see a sloth, we retraced our steps to go back and see it. We were able to see it, but the third group arrived too late and was not able to see it. The communication was great and we saw so many more creatures because of this. 

The woods were alive. The sounds I could hear during the day of crickets chirping and birds singing were like a choir. The sounds at night were like a rock concert. I never saw a cricket, but I could hear they were at every level and there must have been millions of them. Listen to the sounds of the forest as you look for the sloth in this video.




Some of the creatures we saw included:
  • A two-toed sloth that was light brown and moved much more quickly than the three-toed sloth we typically see in the movies.
  • A crested guan which the guide told us is the second largest wild turkey in Costa Rica.
  • An orange-kneed tarantula. Its biggest enemy is a large tarantula hawk wasp that lays her eggs inside the tarantula’s body. The larva grow and eat the scorpion’s flesh from the inside as she dies a slow and painful death. Yuck!
  • Two scorpions which glowed a lime green when the florescent light was shined on them.
  • Leaf cutter ants
  • An owl
  • A three-wattled bell bird
  • Several large spiders

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