Animals

Howler monkeys. Our first night in Tikal, I woke up in the dark to the sound of howlers, only I didn’t know that it was howlers at the time. I was expecting something like the whoops of the gibbons at the SF Zoo, but the sound that howlers make is more like the roar of a lion. (Molly can do a fair good imitation if you ask.) In the middle of the night, it was very, very spooky. We saw howlers in the trees around several ruins and heard them again several times, mostly notably at sunrise as we sat at the top of Temple IV. At El Pilar, a howler decided that we didn’t belong there and began throwing shit at us.

Spider monkeys, especially at Tikal. The spider monkeys have white bellies, longer, more spindly arms, and move more quickly through the trees than the howlers. Both the howlers and the spiders seem to move in family groups and to make a fair amount of noise as they move through the trees, so they’re easy to spot. And if you find one, there are usually others close by. Yes, the babies are very, very cute.

A huge wasp. On the sunrise hike in TIkal, we are staggering down the trail at 4:00 in the morning. At one point, our guide, stops and points to a small hole in the ground. He takes a stalk of grass and pokes it into the hole. Nothing. He pokes again and a huge, black wasp crawls out. It seems, like us, not to be especially used to early morning hours, and crawls slowly away. Later someone explains that the wasp was probably a tarantula hawk and that a tarantula lived in the hole. Tarantula hawks lay their egss on a tarantula. The larva hatches out and proceeds to eat the tarantula from the inside out, eating all the non-essential organs first, so the tarantula stays alive, and waiting until the very end, just before it pupates, to eat the heart. Very clever. Not like the incredibly stupid scarabs. (See below.)

Also in Tikal we saw several grey foxes – small, somewhat bigger than house cats, but not much. They would walk calmly through clearings, paying little attention to us. We saw a coatimundi which is similar to a raccoon, but slower and less threatening, and we saw several wild turkeys. These turkeys are much more colorful than our turkeys with incredible blue feathers on their tails and little yellow polka-dots on their heads.

Various centipedes, millipedes, butterflies, and caterpillars.

Green iguanas and black iguanas. We went horseback riding one day in San Ignacio and the stable yard was full of iguanas, feeding, apparently, on what the horses left behind.

There were geckos everywhere and I saw a Jesus Christ lizard on the lawn outside our room at the San Ignacio Hotel. It’s called a Jesus Christ lizard because it runs across the surface of the water. Most of the time, they move around slowly on all fours. Then a crest goes up on the tops of their heads and they stand up on their hind legs and run like crazy. I remembered them running like that from some ancient Walt Disney nature movie.

A Jesus Christ bird (it also walks on water, or, at least, on lily pads on the water) on the river on the trip to Lamanai. Before the rain began. And bats, also on the river on the way to Lamanai. (We’re riding up the river on this boat and the guide pulls over to the side, points at a tree and says, “Bats!” We look. Can’t see bats. “Where?” “There.” He points. Someone says, “Oh, there.” I still see nothing but bark. Then someone takes a picture with a flash and suddenly there are the bats peeling themselves away from the tree and disappearing in flight.)

Scarab beetles. Thousands and thousands of scarab beetles, many of them dead, mostly in and around San Ignacio. Apparently this happens every June. Thousands of these fairly large (inch and a half long) beetles are attracted to the streetlights. They apparently hit the lights and fall to the pavements underneath the lights. Many land on their backs and lie there waving their legs helplessly in the air, unable to turn over. Then they die or are crushed by passing cars. In the morning, shopkeepers sweep the dead bodies off the sidewalks in front of their stores. Now I can understand that they might be confused by electric lights – in terms of their evolutionary history, after all, electric lights are a very recent innovation. But why have these creatures not evolved the ability to turn over when they happen to land on their backs?

Leaf-cutter ants. I kept trying to take photos of these incredible insects, but wasn’t able to figure out how to focus the camera in macro mode until almost the end of the trip. The one here is the best I could do. It doesn’t do them justice. We’d come across lines of leaf-cutters marching across the forest floor, each carrying a piece of leaf like a tiny sail. (They take the pieces into their nests and use them to grow fungus gardens that they use for food.) In Tikal, where someone had planted grass in many of the plazas, the leaf cutters had such dependable routes between their nests and the leaves they wanted that they had cut grooves through the grass. Other places, there were trails, sometimes running hundreds of feet, over and around obstacles, up trees.

This last photo is not an animal. It's a predacious plant. Strangler figs wrap themselves around other trees – sometimes two trees at once – and use their support to climb towards the light. Eventually they do strangle them. We saw some that seemed just to have begun the process and others that had just about totally encased the tree they were swallowing. This one seems to be about half-way done.