Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The following pictures were all taken in the Manuel Antonio National Park. It is on the Central Pacific Coast and is one of the best places to see the animals of Costa Rica. I'd like to claim credit for the better looking pictures, however most were taken by the tour guide (who was also a gun photographer) and took them by putting my camera up to the lens of his telescope.

Pretty well everything in the park seems capable of killing or maiming the unwary tourist. The trees send you [temporarily] blind, the leaves contain toxins, the hermit crabs bite, the monkeys have rabies, and even the sloths have parasites. Having said that, it was a stunning place with beautiful beaches.


These little couple are breeding pair of bats who have the nice distinction of being the sole monogamous species of 108 bat varieties in Costa Rica. They're nocturnal and eat mosquitos so are asleep under a tree branch.


Breed of falcon whose name I have forgotten. (Sorry.) It lives on a fish diet and have incredible eyesight for locating fish under the water and then catching them in its talons.


Sleeping three toed sloth. This is a female with a baby clutched to her chest, although you can't see the baby in the photo.

One of a large group of squirrel monkeys in the Manuel Antonio National Park. These little guys have turned to crime and steal food, bags, pretty well anything left unattended. Despite lots of big signs saying Do Not Feed The Monkeys, people still do. They are probably only one generation away from car jacking tourists.

This photo is a howler monkey. Looks like a bit like gorilla, but is much smaller. As the name suggests, they are extremely loud (and can be heard up to 30km away depending on the terrain) and use their voices to establish their territory.

Very tiny grasshopper who displays these bright colours as a way of advertising the poisons under his skin. The grasshopper gets these toxins from ingesting poisonous plant leaves.

These little crabs live their whole lives in the swamps but travel out to the ocean to mate and lay eggs. The crabs hatch and grow in the ocean and then return to the same streams as their parents once mature. They are quite brightly coloured (no camoflage) so the pincers have to protect them from potential predators.

One that did not need a telescopic sight was this three-toed sloth, which climbed from the ground out of the roots of one of the trees and back up into the canopy. They only come down to the ground about once a week for a bathroom visit, so I think we were incredibly lucky to get so close to him.

PS - I can think of only one person who would immediately recognise the title of this blog entry, so for anyone else who is interested Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, which tells the story of a nine year old child who is struggling to cope with the death of his father in the World Trade Center attacks on 9-11. He is a similar sort of protagonist to the narrator in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, for anyone who has read that. Highly recommended.