When I was in Costa Rica for a bird photography tour recently with Tropical Birding, I had an opportunity to visit Frog’s Heaven, a place that specializes in catching wild frogs for photography. The frogs are subsequently released back into the environment. These tiny frogs are getting harder to find, even in the optimized environments […]
Throughout the 2nd millennium BCE there existed in Costa Rica small, disperse villages, non-nomadic agricultural communities that used ceramic bowls and utensils, and tools made from wood, bone and stone for agricultural tasks and food preparation. The oldest of these agricultural village communities (2000–500 BCE) has been found in the province of Guanacaste. More recent […]
Since I am visiting Costa Rica for a bird photography tour, I thought I would write a post on the pre-Colombian cultures of this area. Costa Rica appeared to be a dynamic, fluctuating frontier zone between two major spheres of pre-Columbian cultural influence: Mesoamerica (central Mexico through El Salvador) and northern South America, primarily Colombia. […]
Since I visited Denver recently to visit my mother, I decided to indulge in a bit of winter birding to get her out of the house. Although many people like to look for birds in the summer, when the weather is nice, winter allows you a unique opportunity to actually see the birds without the […]
Across the forests and prairies of Asia, and vast savannahs of Africa, live secret societies of tiny termite architects. They are masters of construction, their sophisticated green-energy designs perfectly adapted to their often hot and arid surroundings. Most homeowners are aware of the destructive power of an army of termites but the fungus termites of […]
Peru
Peru is best known as the heart of the Inca empire, but it was home to many diverse indigenous cultures long before the Incas arrived. Although there is evidence of human habitation in Peru as long ago as the eighth millennium BC , there is little evidence of organized village life until about 2500 BC. It was at about this time that climatic changes in the coastal regions prompted Peru’s early inhabitants to move toward the more fertile interior river valleys. Today, Peru’s population of about 23 million is divided almost equally between the highlands and the population centers of the coast, and the division marks a sharp cultural as well as geographic divide.
