The size of some of the leaves on tropical plants are hard to believe if you don’t see them up close and personal for yourself. Seeing is believing. I put my hand on the top of this massive leaf to give an idea of scale.
I took this photo in Costa Rica, while living at the field station Campanario in the Osa Peninsula. I’ve been missing Campanario and have been a bit nostalgic lately for jungle living. That’s what five months of city, town and village living do to me. “Civilization” makes me miss the jungle, the vast open sea and all of the wildlife that call these ecosystems home.
To help cope with the emotions of longing for what was, I began sorting through my photos to reflect back on my wondrous time living in Osa for 10 months in 2008. As I sorted through the pictures a few caught my eye, which I hadn’t yet used on my blog. This is one of them.
By the way, I’ll be returning to Campanario in August to get another dose of Osa before going to North America in October and November. But then I’ll come back to Costa Rica and Nicaragua before the over-commercialization of the holidays numb people out in the U.S. The Costa Rican jungle and remote Nicaraguan mountains form part of my DNA now, and I can’t imagine living too far from the southern mesoamerica hotspot.
Ninety percent of life on Earth lives in 34 hotspots: the world’s most biologically rich but most threatened places. To date, every hotspot has lost at least 70% of its original natural vegetation. Since January I've been living in Costa Rica, which is part of the Mesoamerica biodiversity hotspot, the third largest hotspot in the world. http://www.conservation.org
floras and fauna
landscapes
people and places
Conservation Artists