Sunday in Caño Negro, and by mid-morning, the sounds of singing poured out of the local Jehovah’s Witness Hall, a couple of hundred meters from the hotel.
After nailing down reservations for the next leg of the journey, I wandered back down to the marshlands and hiked the trails along their edges. Not the mad photo feeding frenzy of yesterday: more of a chance to breathe deeply, take in the nature of the place and to slow down a bit.
Enjoy!
The basis of the Cano Negro economy
Kiskadee
My old friend, the little blue heron.
Haven’t seen one of his kind since the time at Loxahachee swamp in Florida
Ibis and friends
A word about this next photograph. I had no idea, until I got back to the hotel room and downloaded the images to the computer, the incredible drama unfolding here. The irony is that for one protagonist, it is the moment of truth. For the other, meh, just another lunch.
Kiskadee 1: Frog, well we can’t be totally sure.
And this next one. I was slowly creeping up on a flock of stilts  — not slowly enough, as they suddenly took off, all together as is their wont. So I snapped several images of them in flight. Back at the computer, the potential of this particular image intrigued me, so I spent a little more processing time than usual with it. Normally I tend to nudge the saturation levels a tad, but here I brought them down, striving for a more monochromatic feel to the image, while still retaining some colour (the pink in the legs). Leaving the small branch at the lower right corner in the crop gives it, for me at least, a Zen, almost painter-like quality.  The main elements: black, white, yin, yang, flight purposeful, water tranquil, down to the subtle shadows of the birds on the water, all conspire to make this a keeper.
Harmony and balance
Tomorrow, I’ll head back out on a boat in the early morning for a couple of hours, then on to Santa Elena and the fabled Monteverde Cloud Forest in the afternoon. It’s about a four hour drive south.