Day 7

Today was our seventh day in Costa Rica. We met at 5:30 today by the corner store to go on a guided hike in the Quetzal National Forest with Johann, a quetzal/nature/biology enthusiast and a tour guide for Santos tours. We left central Providencia and went to approximately 8,000 feet in elevation. The exact place we were at wasn’t through the national park but actually a man named Carlos with several hectares of land in the forest that are inhabited by the quetzals. On his property he cares for a small herd of cows and bulls, and we were lucky enough to get to milk one of his cows, some of us were naturals, I however was not… To assist the quetzals habitat Carlos planted avocado trees in his property some 35-40 years ago for the quetzals. They enjoy fruits and specifically a type of avocado roughly the size of a grape when they are full grown. What’s really interesting is the male does the feeding to the chicks; Quetzals are not nesting birds they go into holes in trees or old woodpecker nests, when it’s feeding time the long tale covers of the male Quetzal look like plants growing out of the tree, so predators won’t check that area assuming a plant is in that hole. We learned tons of interesting facts like this, like the fact that Costa Rica has 942 species of birds and about 100 of those are not native, meaning they don’t breed in Costa Rica but rather migrate through. I could go on and on about our time in the forest but we also had another incredibly culturally rich experience with a tour of a recently converted conventional to organic coffee farm and following that coffee tasting. While we were on the farm we discussed the effects of climate change on the local coffee farms and how they are fighting back. Using sustainable methods like returning the topsoil to its rich natural state, after it’s been harshly effected by the pesticides and chemicals used in conventional farming, and using the natural biodiversity to shade the coffee plants in the dry season and enrich the soil during the wet season when the leaves and plant matter fall. After a walk through the farm we stopped at the biofabrica where we learned the several processes that the organic coffee farms in Providencia use. The two are honey and natural, and one they don’t use is a method called full wash, which requires a massive amount of water, which would afterwards then be dumped into what would be clean water supply. Green communities has the only sustainable micro-miel in Costa Rica. After we had lunch, we finally got to try some of the organic coffee that is grown here in Providencia. We tried 3/10 coffee tasting methods: fragrance, aroma, and taste. Fragrance is when you smell the grounds dry, aroma is after adding hot water, and to taste you remove the foam, and slurp (not my words). As a group we blind tasted and got to guess which coffee was which at the end. Two bags of high grade Providencia coffee and two bags of low grade coffee still made in Costa Rica were used, and we ended up matching up them all correctly. We ended off the activity by drinking cups of the honey processed coffee in the restaurant and retiring to our home stays :) -I <3 LeBron.

-Gabriella

Our tour guide Johann

Quetzal through the scope