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Our 1500 acre rainforest preserve
in Costa Rica at 5:00 am. What you can't hear are the howler monkeys as
they bark out their reservations for a continental breakfast across the
valley.
A two-year old pillow tree (ochroma
lagopus). We found hard to foresee the size of this specimen when we first
planted the seeds. When you rub the gigantic leaves together, you get an
odour of peanuts.
A lucky shot taken on Tierra Buena...while
surveying the property we came across the half-eaten carcass of a small
pig. Not far away, we spotted this ocelot. I managed to get 20 feet downwind,
crawling on my belly to get this shot with no zoom lens. The ocelot, a
female, picked up my scent and with a hiss she was gone. The piglet
belonged to a local farmer who was a little perplexed at his loss.
A small gift set things in a lighter vein. As for the ocelot, she's still
out there, doing what she does best.
A squirrel monkey and offspring
in a Guave (cocktail) tree.
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Seedings growing in Toronto in
December under a gro-lux bulb (available at any hardware store).
A papaya tree (front) and a jungle
banana tree (background), facing east.
A four-year old papaya tree (carica
sp.) which my wife grew from seed. Each spring we bring it out onto the
deck where it's shaded by a big oak tree. It flowers every August. Indoors,
we keep it in a sunlit east room where it stands to the ceiling (12'),
but we manage to trim the root to keep it to its proper size.
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