The Buddies Eclectic

Two nights ago, a couple of the cats decided they needed to take a tour of the house. Outside the house. Unsupervised.

But maybe I should back up.

Our house has been turned a little topsy-turvy lately. When we bought it three years ago, it had a lot of deferred maintenance and we’ve been working on trying to take care of that ever since. We didn’t get much done right away because pretty much the whole first year and a half here was taken up with working on residency requirements, so most of the work has been done in the last year or so.

An unexpected consequence of all this extra activity in the house has been that none of the cats can be found in their regularly scheduled hang-out spots. Normally, Lionel would be in the main bedroom–he now hangs out in the living room and dining room and on the porch. Stella had pretty much glued herself to the dining room table, which was how the dining room table became “Stella’s table” and the porch table became where we eat our food. Now, Stella spends most of her time in my office while I write my book and work on other things on the computer. And Zelda, who normally spent her time on Sean’s desk, supervising his work, has now started lounging on the bar stools in the kitchen. (Before this dramatic territory shakeup, we didn’t even know her short little legs could jump as high as the bar stools, and it’s taken a little getting used to.) Now, she’s a Bar Fly.

So, I guess we shouldn’t have been so surprised at who the apparent ringleader of this little walkabout turned out to be.

I was heading outside to take some uneaten food out to our “compost bin,” which most people around here refer to as “the jungle.” Rounding the corner of the kitchen area, I found Nigel lying in the hallway with his back against the wall, gazing out at the front door. I stopped to talk to him and give him a scritch, and wondered absently to myself what he was staring at so intensely.

I turned around to check, and found the front door wide open. Maynard stood in the open door, looking concerned.

This is actually the third time Maynard has been involved in these kinds of shenanigans. The first time was before we left the States. It was Thanksgiving, and Cooper had decided he needed to go outside and check out the back yard. The back yard that, some of you might remember, occasionally contained alligators. Maynard doesn’t seem to spend a ton of time thinking deep thoughts, but he thought enough to know that playing in a favorite sunning area of a 400-pound reptile probably wasn’t the best idea. So he stood in the slightly open doorway and cried until we noticed the door had been pushed open. A Cooper rescue ensued and all was well.

The second time, we think Maynard may have released himself on his own recognizance. We were alerted to his absense because Stella (his fellow former shop-cat), sat staring at him through the back sliding doors with a look that clearly said: “What kind of crazy mess have you gotten yourself into this time, you tail-free fool?” I walked around the house and picked Maynard up and carried him inside, giving him a very stern talking-to about how there are venomous snakes around and toads that are poisonous when you lick them and spiders and scorpions, so he needed to stay inside the house from now on. Mischief managed.

This time (after I’d gotten over the shock of Nigel calmly watching the proceedings instead of joining his brother at the door) I called for Sean to come help for what felt like the seventeenth time, between the Nigel and Maynard and Mister escapes. As per usual, we divided labor quickly–I did a head count in the house, he headed outside to start beating the bushes.

He didn’t have to look very far, however, because here came Zelda (ZELDA!!!) walking around the corner of the house like it was her birthright. She’d just needed a breath of fresh air, apparently, and to see the butterflies and hummingbirds up close. This is the same cat who never gets into altercations with the other cats. A cat who barely meows when she meows–her vocalizations are just a big open mouth and a tiny, sharp “eh” sound. A cat who has never done a naughty thing in her whole entire life.

But it seems like she’s branching out more than we realized.

Maynard and Zelda kept hanging around the porch for about an hour after that, waiting to see if the Magical Door would swing back open again so they could check out Costa Rica at night.

Honestly, not an awesome plan.

But at least the door stayed closed this time. And the door now has not one but two new latches on it to make sure it doesn’t ever happen again.

Sean and I have a little game we sometimes play with ourselves. Every now and again, since moving to Costa Rica, one of us will say something that the other one will comment on because it’s such a weird, unlikely thing to say that we would never have believed we would eventually say it three years ago. Things like “there’s a wood rail (bird) bathing in the pool” and “a scorpion is threatening us from under the front door.” Costa Rica has a way of putting you in bizarre situations that you would be unlikely to find yourself in in the States, or many other places for that matter.

Yesterday, we got to add another one to our collection: “Sean and I spent close to six hours cleaning bat guano off literally every surface of our laundry room.” Except for the ceiling, because that’s where the bats had been.

Maybe I should back up. Friday morning greeted us pretty much just like every other morning in Costa Rica: the birds were singing, the creeks were gurgling, sunshine was pouring over the giant tropical trees in front of our house.

Except for one teeny-tiny thing. Or twenty.

Sean was alerted at first by the noise. Scratching mainly, but in previous days the sound had been coming from the top of the roof. This time, the sound was coming from inside the house (said in my best horror-movie voice).

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where exactly the noise was coming from, because there, clustered around the back door leading out to our screened-in laundry room, were three of the cats, staring fixedly at the door and the direction of the sounds.

Sean came to get me to tell me he needed my help with something, which in our house, always puts me on high alert. Long-term readers may remember the time he calmly told me that we had a snake on our back porch that Cooper wanted to play with (https://buddies-eclectic.com/?p=30).

But I digress.

We shooed the cats away from the back door and darted quickly into the screened-in laundry area. I was in my pajamas, but I had prudently thought to put on a jacket with a hoodie and the widest pair of glasses I own. I definitely needed them. Because when we entered, there were twenty to thirty tiny little flying mammals alternately flapping through the sizeable laundry area or clinging to the ceilings and walls. They really do cling from just a tiny piece of something on the ceiling, looking for all the world like giant chrysalises up there. Here and there, some were clustered together, appearing to be one huge bat until they all flew away at the same time.

It turns out that they had been attracted by a very large bunch of bananas we had had hanging from the decorative bars in the open-air, screened laundry room. The bananas were primarily for the birds, who are mostly fruit-eaters here, but we also eat them ourselves, of course. They were so attracted, in fact, that they felt it was imperative that they avail themselves of said bananas at their earliest opportunity. Which they decided to create that very night.

The lovely bunch of bananas had been decimated. Broken banana bodies lay piteously across the floor, black pieces of peel strewn around their gnawed remains. Behind the handful of bananas that still remained on the bunch we found a tiny hole, just the right size for a winged rodent to wiggle through.

We had stumbled accidentally onto a crime scene, and a messy one at that. There was only one thing to do. We opened the door and grabbed some brooms. But before we could start cleaning up the mess, we had to convince the bats to leave the banana smorgasbord. Which, admittedly, was harder than you would think.

We both used our brooms to try to gently nudge the bats from their perches towards the door. This sounded like a brilliant idea in our heads…not so brilliant in actual fact. The bats merely flew from one side of the room to the other, perching there impudently as though they had never left. We followed them and tried again. Back they went to their original hangout. Many times they flew so perilously close to our faces that we had to jerk backwards in response.

In addition to the bats, we had a few other obstacles to deal with that day, such as the fact that, as I mentioned before, every single surface of everything in the room was covered in bat poop. Also, I may have mentioned that this is a laundry room, which in Costa Rica means, in a lot of cases, that you have clothes lines (in our case, six of them) running the length of the room. Also (and perhaps most importantly) we had only just minutes before woken up, and neither one of us had had our coffee yet.

Let’s just say that after about 20 minutes or so, the score was: bats-30/Sean and Julia-0. But there were a few fouls in there when Sean and I accidently hit each other with our brooms, so maybe the score should be in the negative numbers for us.

Fast forward to us contacting everyone we could think of who might have some experience with this, and that meant Ticos–people who were born and raised in Costa Rica. Turns out, nobody else had ever had this issue before, and really couldn’t give us any advice. One of our Canadian friends suggested the pool skimmer, so I tried that for another 15 minutes or so, but the little buggers just flew right past it every time I tried to catch them in it.

I should pause here to say that we actually love bats, and these guys were adorable. Check the fuzzy picture below if you don’t believe me. If it had been up to me, we would have just kept them and charged admission to people–kind of like an bird aviary or a butterfly house–but the Costa Rican government would probably have a problem with that. Also, we would need to build a new laundry room. Which is to say, this was not a practical solution to the problem.

But nevertheless, our plan (if you could even call it that) to solve the problem was not working. So we gave up, left the door open, and went to drink our coffee. We figured maybe they’d decide to leave on their own once it got dark, and honestly, what choice did we have at that point?

About ten minutes in to our coffee, we hear the sound of a motorcycle, and two of the workers from one of the contractors we had called about this (all of whom have become our friends in recent months, by the way) came motoring up the driveway. The cavalry had arrived!!

We were a little sheepish about it, honestly. First, I was still in my pajamas, and second, we didn’t really think we needed any physical help–we had just been looking for advice. But it turned out that these two guys were exactly who we needed.

Ticos (the local folks) have a reputation for being hugely resourceful about handling pretty much any problem that can come along in Costa Rica. Most of them probably feel like there’s not a lot that would surprise or shock them.

I think we may have given them the rare exception. After they stopped laughing at the absurdity of the situation. everybody put their thinking caps on and we went to work. Jefri came up with the idea of holding a big black tarp up halfway across the room, and convincing the bats that the room had gotten smaller so that we could gently herd them towards the door. We had already had a few bats (accidentally) fly out, so by this time we were down to 15 or so. I had my doubts, but we decided to try it anyway.

First, we had to take down the clothes lines to make this work. Then we grabbed the ladder. Jefri and Albin held up the tarp as high as they could get it on the vaulted ceiling and I played sweeper (not in the soccer sense, but in the literal sense), trying to convince them to dislodge from the walls and ceiling. Sean called out from outside when any of them left. (We had long since given up the idea that we could both reasonably do the sweeping role at the same time.)

I wouldn’t have believed it, but Sean started calling out escapees, one by one. A few figured out the tarp distraction and flew over, but we swept them back to the other side and started the process over again. In what felt like an hour but was probably only ten or fifteen minutes, we had convinced all of the visitors to leave!

Jefri and Albin are brilliant and fearless, and if we ever have a zombie apocalypse, I definitely want them on our team. We are eternally grateful for their friendship, good humor, great attitude, and willingness to help a couple of hapless gringos who might be the first people in the world to have gotten themselves into this mess.

So that, Dear Readers, is how we ended up spending our Saturday cleaning and sanitizing our laundry room. Turns out we’re actually pretty efficient at cleaning up crime scenes.

Another quote that we never thought we’d say three years ago: “Turns out we’re actually pretty efficient at cleaning up crime scenes.”

Disclaimer: No bats were harmed in the making of this blog post, but I think a few of them will probably think twice before trying to break into our house again.

Here’s a bit of a departure from our regularly scheduled program. Around 6pm Friday night we headed out to dinner, but we never made it. We had lost power around 5pm during a game of Wingspan and were going out to dinner because there was no way to cook anything. As we were driving through the neighborhood we noticed a Two-toed Sloth crossing one of the power lines in front of us, which is not necessarily an everyday occurrence. We stopped the car to see what was going on because she just kept going from one side of the road to the other, back and forth, and seemed unable to get down. I say “she,” because a photo I took of her revealed that she also had a young baby clinging to her belly.

Neighbors came out to help. ICE (our electric company) was called. They made two valiant attempts to save her with their bucket lift but were unable to do so. We called the Administrator of the WhatsApp group for our town, Johan, and he called the fire department (Bomberos). When they arrived, they came with specialized gear, but Mama Sloth wanted nothing to do with any humans coming between her and her baby.

Four and a half hours later, they finally got the baby in the bucket lift, but Mama just kept right on fighting. About another half hour after that, they were finally able to get her into the bucket. I have never seen a wild animal fight so hard for what she believed was her freedom. It was excruciating to watch, and I’ll admit I lost my s+#& a few times, but ultimately inspiring, and it filled me with relief when she was finally captured. Mama and baby were put into a sack (I helped a little getting her to let go of the catchpole; Sean brought the sack) and the firefighter who had gone “mano-a-mano” with her sharp teeth and giant, lethal claws released her into the forest.

Those ICE guys and Bomberos are heroes, full stop. If it were only for the fact that they kept the power off to our neighborhood until the sloths were safe and sound, that would have been enough. But that ICE employee and the firefighter who went up into the bucket to do battle with the mighty mother sloth and ultimately get her to safety are braver than the average human, and more compassionate, too. I also want to send a big thank you to Rigo Pereira from Alturas for answering his phone on a Friday night after hours and offering advice, support and the number for Fernando. Fernando (don’t know his last name) also works for ICE and answered my texts after hours as well, and he doesn’t even know me! He works on their environmental side and he provided invaluable tips for the best way to catch her, and all kinds of moral support for me. (Can I mention again he’d never met me but answered his phone anyway??)

It’s one of those nights when you feel proud to be a part of something bigger than yourself, and also humbled when you see the true face of bravery, tenacity and dedication on the ICE guys, the Bomberos, and that precious Mama Sloth.

Hello, and welcome to your Yearly Post about our Buddies in Costa Rica! Okay, hopefully going forward, they will be a little closer together than a year (and four months). But Maynard had an adventure recently that I really couldn’t NOT write about. So here goes.

Maynard has had his share of adventures since we moved to Costa Rica. Like the time he got to go hang out by the pool in his carrier. And that time he walked through the screened porch door that had blown open in the wind and ended up behind the house at the sliding doors, meowing to come in, Stella watching him dispassionately from the living room.

But his biggest adventure to date happened on Easter Monday, about a month ago. The day started out pretty much like any other one around here. Sean had played with each of the buddies before the start of his workday. He used a string toy on a stick and another very long (about 4 feet, or 1.2 meters) piece of striped blue and green nylon ribbon that had come out of a pair of my shorts. So far, all good.

The day went by uneventfully until I left the house to take some wood over to a friend’s house, and when I got back, there was a little puddle of saliva on the porch, with one-quarter of the vomited-up four-foot long ribbon in it, slightly knawed on one end.

Ruh roh.

I called for Sean and the two of us started checking each of the cats to see who might have swallowed it, although I think we both knew who it was. Maynard has an ongoing obsession with eating things that aren’t food, primarily plastic, and we have learned to make significant changes to the way things like trash cans and boxes are handled in our house (high altitude for the former and out of the house immediately for the latter due to the tape).

So when I came around the corner in the kitchen and Maynard was giving me his best Princess Diana look (you know the one–head slightly down and to one side, eyes up beseechingly), I knew instantly he had the rest of that damn string inside him.

Sean was not so sure. He went on an immediate and thorough search of the house, convinced that there was NO FREAKING WAY a cat that size could swallow a length of ribbon four feet long.

I let him look (heck, I even helped him) but in my heart I knew the truth. Maynard’s belly was full of three feet of ribbon and it was going to shortly be making its way to his bowels. Which was going to be disastrous.

So, once again, we jumped in the car with a cat in a carrier (does it seem like a bit of a theme with us?) and rushed him to the nearest vet, 30 minutes away. The vet checked him over, took his temp, looked at the ribbon part that had already come up, and agreed with Sean that he felt it was very unlikely that a piece of ribbon three times that long was still in him. So we gave him Valium to try to make him vomit it back up, just in case (it didn’t work, by the way), and then we went home to wait it out. We were instructed to watch for vomiting (signaling an obstruction) and to make sure he was pooping. Also to check the poop. Thoroughly.

When we got home, Maynard and I spent a nice little vacation in the guest room, waiting for his internal guest to come out, one way or the other. We researched other cases where similar things had happened, and Sean just kept checking the house, trying to think of any place where the rest of the string could be. Maynard, for his part, was acting fairly normal, pretty relaxed, would even let us touch his stomach. So after a day went by, and then another day, and another without seeing any sign of the string from either end, even I started to believe that maybe it wasn’t actually in there. Logically speaking, it just didn’t make sense that it would be.

Fast forward ten days. Yes, TEN. I was now in the States, two hours earlier than Sean. I had already gone to bed when the following drama unfolded:

Sean noticed that Maynard had started vomiting earlier in the evening while I was still awake, but only saliva. He usually does this when he eats plastic, so we rationalized that he may have found a little piece from the packing for the ceiling fan we had just had installed.

Then, later in the evening, Maynard vomited up his treats, which is not at all like him. He began pawing at his face, and when Sean checked inside his mouth, he saw just the hint of something blue and green in there, waaay back in his throat. Maynard gagged again, and it came out a little more.

Sean had reached a pretty critical decision point, and, like the incident with Mister and the coat hanger lo these many years ago (https://buddies-eclectic.com/?p=189), he had to make it all by himself. He realized that if he didn’t take advantage of this opportunity, he may not have another one.

So he heroically reached his fingers into Maynard’s mouth, grabbed the ribbon, and started gently and cautiously pulling. I should pause here to say that Sean never believed that, even if that ribbon WAS in there, that it was as long as I said it was. And it didn’t come out all at once, because Maynard wasn’t loving having a string pulled from his belly out of his mouth, and tried to run away. But Sean was determined and insistent, and he grabbed Maynard again, and slowly, VERY slowly, proceeded to pull out what turned out to be three feet and one inch of string from Maynard’s tiny body. He said it stunk to high heaven and Maynard was pretty traumatized, but at least it was out, and he could tell that it was the end of the string. The ten-day ordeal of constantly worrying about Maynard was finally over. All because Sean was observant, patient, and happened to be right beside him when all this unfolded.

Maynard had a couple of days there where we were calling him Kim Carnes. His voice had a growly, scratchy quality that was quite a divergence from his normal dulcet trills. After a few days, he reached reverse puberty and his voice started breaking–in the opposite direction. By the time I came home a few days after that, it was completely back to his high-pitched, trill-y self.

And new protocols around the storage of the kitty toys have now been implemented.

I would love to say that Maynard has been entirely Adventure-Free ever since. But about a week after that, he was bitten on the hind quarters by something and went tearing around the house like a mad cat. (Note to self: Maynard cannot tolerate Benedryl and will drool ropy lengths that would make Cujo blush if you attempt to give it to him.) Once that was over, he had a day when he walked around the house with a pronounced limp, probably from a leap off a piece of furniture gone awry. I don’t know when Maynard decided to become the Mayor of Trouble Town, but I’m hoping he gets it out of his system soon so we can go back to normal things. Like eating the plastic out of the bathroom trash-cans.

You knew this had to happen. It was only a matter of time before the gaping energy hole that was created when Cooper changed forms became too much for all of us to handle and we had to remedy that. We had four delightful, playful, loving buddies, but there was still something missing. A je ne sais quoi, as the French would say; some imperceptible, unnamable thing that seemed to be absent in our house after Cooper left. The energy level had definitely shifted. It became much more sedate and orderly.

Enter the kitten.

Nigel came into our lives from El Refugio, an animal shelter in Uvita, in the middle of December, a little over a week before I was scheduled to get on a plane to head to the U.S. to spend the holidays with (the other half of) my family. If Cooper had been a walking, talking Category 2 hurricane on a regular basis, the kitten kicked it up a notch, at least to a Cat 3. There was intense playing. There was chasing. There was batting at one’s elders while they tried to sleep and a good bit of screen-climbing on the porch. There was intense studying of high places and gauging of just how much “oomph” would be required to leap up to the top of ______(fill in the blank). (Extra points if you could cause any other objects on the top of _______ to come clattering to the floor.)

Just your average run-of-the-mill kitten mayhem.

Surprisingly, the older four are taking a very philosophical approach to his presence. He has successfully “played” with Zelda some; evenings and early mornings are filled with the sound of him and Maynard chasing each other joyfully around the house; and even Stella manages not to run and hide when he wants to sit close to her. Lionel is currently the only holdout. I think Lionel secretly hoped he would one day be Alpha, and while Lionel is indeed a very nice cat and a very loving one with his people, Lionel was not born to lead, and I say that in the kindest, most affectionate way possible. He tends to lean towards autocracy, which, as you might imagine, goes over not so well with a bunch of independent-minded cats.

All of this is to say that Lionel seems unamused by the newest member of his family, perhaps suspecting that this furry cyclone may be the Kitten Who Would Be King, and any pretenses he previously had for the throne are now effectively null and void. Hopefully he will get over it. There are moments when he accepts the fact that a sunny nap he was enjoying on the porch has suddenly been marred by the sudden existence of a kitten on his head. More often, it results in Lionel running back to the safety of the bedroom, where he will lick his wounded pride and sullenly plot his ever more unlikely ascendance.

Baby Nigel bears a resemblance to our beloved Coopie, and he shares many personality traits with him as well. I’ve already mentioned the Lean Mean Playing Machine part, but there are other parts, too. He seemed to gravitate toward Cooper’s favorite two sleeping spots in the house–one on top of the TV stand, and the other a tiny box on the breakfast bar that Cooper used to occupy, but that didn’t actually fit him. He does the same playing “forward roll” maneuver that Cooper used to regularly pull, and he delights in nipping at Sean’s forearms (or ankles, or toes, or knees…) as a form of affection.

It’s Cooper’s patience that seems the most obvious similarity, though. Long-time blog readers may remember how Cooper convinced Zelda they should be friends–by camping out on the level below her on our 7-foot kitty tree in Asheville and “sleeping” there until it desensitized her into accepting him. Nigel does the same thing, sitting either on the kitty tree or next to another cat, quietly staring off into the middle distance as if their presence wasn’t really on his radar at all. (“Don’t mind me, I’m just a helpless, sweet little kitten that I’m sure you will come to love if I just sit here quietly long enough.”) (“P.S. If that doesn’t work, I’ll chase you around and nip your hindquarters.”)

Bottom line is, not every cat in the house is 100% convinced that they love him yet. But what is certain is that Sean and I love him to pieces already, and that’s a pretty good start.

Most people who know next to nothing about tropical birds have absolutely no trouble identifying a Toucan. If nothing else, you can look no further than your favorite childhood breakfast cereal. Toucans are kind of amazing animals. It seems like it should be impossible for them to fly with their giant, boat-like beaks, but nonetheless they defy all logic by doing so. They are, however, only really able to fly in short bursts, usually from a higher level to a lower one, so you won’t see them up in the air making all kinds of racket with that other well-known tropical bird, the parrot.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t hop nimbly from limb to limb of some really high trees, and that they don’t make a racket.

The first time I was in the Yellow-throated Toucan and the Fiery-billed Aracari enclosure, I discovered the first interesting factoid about toucans: you have to carry the trash bucket of cleaned-up old food with you at all times. Otherwise, the toucan will attempt to steal food right out of it, often knocking it over in the process. When I first started volunteering there, I was so focused on what I was doing and making sure I picked up every single tiny little spare piece of food that I forgot to focus on what the animals themselves were doing. (Okay, I actually still do that. Cut me some slack–I’ve only been doing this once a week for two months.) I paid attention to the important things, like not letting them out of the enclosure, but there were multiple times when I stood up suddenly from bending over to pick up a piece of food and found myself, well, eye-to-eye with a toucan. I love toucans, so this is not a bad thing at all. But there’s something about standing up to see that giant chestnut- and yellow-colored beak inches from your head that gives you pause for a second, even if you have no actual fear of them.

A few weeks after that first encounter, I was cleaning out the toucan enclosure again, and had just recently had a tiny scare from one of the Collared Peccaries, wild pigs who can be slightly aggressive. I had made the mistake earlier of peeking over the wall where they’re enclosed and had one lunge at me when I wasn’t expecting it, so I was already kind of primed to be nervous about them. I was by now quite used to being close to the toucans, but up to then had only heard their normal whistley-chattery call. I was once again bent over, concentrating on picking up the food pieces they didn’t want, when I suddenly heard the grunting sound of a pig.

And it was in the toucan enclosure.

Okay, the pig wasn’t exactly, but the sound definitely was. I looked around trepidatiously, but the only thing on the ground was…you guessed it…the very piggy toucan. And that was the first day I learned my second interesting toucan factoid: toucans can make a noise that sounds for all the world like a pig. Apparently it’s their alarm call, but you won’t find that sound anywhere on eBird, because I looked. (I would have thought I had just imagined it if Sean and I hadn’t heard some of the toucans at our house making the exact same sound today. I felt a little vindicated being able to share that experience with Sean.)

Speaking of wily and “piggy” animals who aren’t actually pigs, there are two non-resident (resident) monkeys who hang around the property at Alturas. One is a White-faced Capuchin monkey and the other is a Squirrel monkey. The Squirrel monkey specifically has no discernible concern about us measly humans, and has no qualms about stealing food out of the food trash buckets, which is the other reason that you really need to keep them on your person at all times. You don’t want the monkey getting sick because he steals food that used to belong to another animal, so we have to do things like hide the food in the peccary enclosure so that the Squirrel monkey doesn’t find it. (It never works. He always does.) It is a funny feeling having to shoo him away from the door when you let yourself in to the peccary enclosure though. He’s a cunning nuisance, but he’s also an adorable one, and you have to kind of act like you don’t notice the adorable part.

The other non-resident (resident) monkey, the Capuchin, has not been as omnipresent as the Squirrel monkey, at least not when I’ve been there. My one close encounter with him was a week or two ago when I was feeding the Capuchin residents. I made the mistake of putting the food a little too close to the bars of the enclosure and went to place more food around the enclosure. When I turned around, there was the Capuchin with his body pressed against the enclosure and his long arm reaching as far as it would reach, trying to get some tasty egg and fruit that was not intended for him. When I realized what was happening, I shooed him away and moved the food closer in to the enclosure so he couldn’t reach it.

Today I had another chance to clean the toucan/aracari enclosure, and this time the toucan followed me around, pecking at my muck boots with his ginormous snoot, while the aracari actually got within an arms’ length of me for the first time. Piggy toucans are my favorite kind, as you’ll see in a future post about our new fruit feeders at home. Stay tuned…

I had already seen a Brown-throated Sloth in the wild. When you go on a birding trip with Carlos Chacon and Ricardo Gomez, you are almost guaranteed at least one sighting, and I had done that back in September of 2019. Sean, on the other hand, had never seen one. We had, of course, scanned the trees relentlessly in our yard since even before the house was officially ours. We knew that sloths were around because our house was formerly a vacation rental and people on the rental sites had posted that they had seen one by the pool, hanging out while they swam. Additionally, one of our friends here, Martina, had rescued one from the road in front of her house, which is only about a half-kilometer from ours. We went to nature preserves and scouted for them in the trees around Dominical, where they are frequently sighted. No dice. Sloths don’t move very much, they’re often very high in the trees and they blend into their environment splendidly because they are brown and have a greenish tinge due to algae that live in their hair.

So imagine our surprise when, on October 16th, nearly six months to the day of when we moved here, we came home during a rainstorm after a lunch with friends, and Sean saw a small greenish-brown blob in one of our several cecropia trees. I was actually under the weather that day, and had gone to bed to take a nap before dinner. Sean knew that I had been really disappointed that we hadn’t seen one yet, and that this would be just the ticket to make me feel better, so he woke me up.

He was, of course, right. It did make me feel a whole lot better. We watched him until it got dark, then got up at first light the next morning to find him again. He was exactly where we had left him. It was now October 17th, exactly six months to do the day when we moved here, and also six years to the day of Wanda’s passing, which seemed oddly meaningful and appropriate to me. Such a happy surprise on what had before been a sad day of reminder.

We observed him for the next two days, checking on him frequently and monitoring his progress as he eventually decided to make his slow way further out into the forest. Watching him eat was pure joy, and we delighted in seeing him make decisions about which juicy leaves to choose next.

Sloths are entirely herbivores and leaf specialists. They have very slow metabolisms, and only relieve themselves once a week, climbing painstakingly down to the ground to dig a small hole, defecate, and then cover it carefully up. They are covered in algae that serves as camouflage from several predators, which is useful since speed is definitely not their strong suit. Interestingly, the algae has whole ecosystems in there. There are some scientists who think that the algae may also serve as extra nutrition during lean times! They’re just amazing creatures.

The sloth really embraces everything about the Costa Rican concept of Pura Vida for me. And the fact that they’re usually difficult to see made our lucky extended view seem all the more precious. We ended up naming him Ojalá (pronounced Oh-hah-lah), which relates to the Costa Rican sense of luck. Six months after St. Patrick’s Day, the name seemed oddly appropriate to this Irish girl. (Also, “hoja” is the Spanish word for leaf, so since the “h” is silent, it’s kind of a play on words.) He is indeed our “Hairy Grail,” and we feel fortunate to have been able to spend some time with him in this beautiful place we all call home.

I just realized that I’ve been terribly remiss. Anybody who has kept up with my blog already knows this. I’ll go months, even years, without posting, which means that a lot can happen in the interim. One of the things that was happening in the interim, every single day of our kitties’ lives for at least the last three or four years was a little game Sean used to play with the cats. The game itself didn’t actually have a name, but most of the component parts did.

Some background first: Sean, for years, has played with all the buddies with feather toys on sticks, and also these things called “Cat Charmers,” which are essentially pieces of sewn-together strings of fleece on a stick in bright multi-colors. The cats love them; they can be turned into a snake or a bird with just a few flicks of the wrist, and the cats will leap and race and run around in circles to try to grab them. In addition, we had a number of cat beds that, on the whole, remained dust-collectors on the floor, since all the cats had long before staked out favorite places to sleep on the bed or Sean’s desk or the lanai furniture. One day, something made me decide to take one of the beds, a covered jobby with a little slit in the front for the cat to crawl in, and another one (plain rectangular fluffy cat bed), and put them together so the first one looked like a mouth and the second looked like a big rectangular tongue coming out of the mouth. Later that day, Cooper inexplicably decided to sleep on the monstrous-looking creation. Then Sean decided to use it as part of the play environment. He figured if Cooper liked it, he might also like the idea of “defending” it from the feather toys and the string toys. Turned out, as usual, that he was right.

Voila, Fort Coopie was born.

The thing about Fort Coopie, is that you have to say it with a very hard, pronounced “T” sound, like ForT Coopie. We’re not sure why. You just do. Cooper would come running from all the way across the room to slide into Fort Coopie, often doing a forward roll over it, as he rushed to “defend” it from the invaders. Sean would egg on this behavior by telling Cooper that “Fort Coopie is being attacked! You have to protect ForT Coopie! They’re invading the barracks! They’re raiding the mess hall!” Cooper, as per usual, took this imaginary game very seriously. And by “seriously,” I mean that if ForT Coopie was being attacked, Cooper was right there to defend it. Every. Single. Time. And he loved defending his fort.

So much so that he recruited his sister, Zelda, into defending truth, justice, and the Feline Way. Zelda has a wooden S-shaped toy that she had gravitated toward and that she could lie on and play under and on. Now, the well-loved toy was newly christened as Camp Zeldoo. So then, on any given day, there were enemy attacks on both ForT Coopie and Camp Zeldoo, and some very patriotic cats doing their civic duty to defend them.

One time, Cooper got so excited about defending Fort Coopie that he overshot it when he was dashing to its defense and accidentally (or maybe not) ended up in the Buddy Stroller, which somehow was suddenly commissioned into the role of armored vehicle (with no particular name) and started rolling across the foyer. Since, at this point, it was rolling away from Fort Coopie, Cooper had to abandon it and run back to defend his beloved fort. We were both laughing so hard at this point that defending it wasn’t terribly difficult.

Cooper’s imagination was nearly as big as his beautiful heart. But when playtime was done, Cooper often went back to sleeping at the fort. Rest in peace, Cooper. (But keep an eye out for enemy feathers or fleece, just in case.)

Here’s the thing: Cooper would not want us to be sad. Not about this; not about anything. Cooper, at his core, was the happiest cat I’ve ever known, and that includes Elroy. Literally everything made Cooper happy: fleeing a hurricane https://buddies-eclectic.com/?p=27; playing the world’s most terrifying game of hide-and-seek https://buddies-eclectic.com/?m=201508; voluntarily choosing to go for a wild ride in a cat carrier https://buddies-eclectic.com/?p=10. I guess you picked up on the past tense part, hunh?

(I will not be sad.)

(Deep breath.)

Cooper passed away suddenly on Thursday.

He died after doing the thing that made him the happiest: playing with his Big Buddy Sean. One minute, he was chasing a string toy and some feather toys, doing forward rolls over Fort Coopie in his excitement for his morning play ritual. The next moment, he jumped up on the porch table and his back legs collapsed. Minutes later, he was growling in agony and unable to move. We think it was most likely something called a Saddle Thrombus, which is essentially a blood clot that starts in the heart and moves down to where the aorta branches to supply blood to the back legs, and it’s painful and horrible to experience as well as to watch. It’s almost always fatal.

We did not know this at the time, which was why we immediately put him into a cat carrier and rushed him to the closest vet, about 35-40 minutes from our house. He died en route.

This is one of the hardest things we’ve ever been through, losing a 7-year-old cat who seemed healthy and in the prime of his life, but Cooper would not want us to be sad.

Instead, I will say that an energy vacuum has been created in our house. Cooper seemed to almost single-handedly fill the house with energy. It started when we got him as an adolescent and never really seemed to stop: https://buddies-eclectic.com/?p=37. Cooper was either wide-open all the time or sleeping. Those were his two speeds. Except for the times that he waited patiently, preternaturally so, for someone to play with him: https://buddies-eclectic.com/?p=17.

As Cooper got older, his appetite for play never abated. When we moved to Costa Rica, he exuberantly embraced the new screened-in porch and took immense joy in navigating the ledge that we made sure was added to the railing, and making leaps from one side of the door to the other. His patience never waned, either. But his affectionate nature just got stronger. He started a habit of sitting on the kitchen breakfast bar, sometimes in a little box that seemed way too small for him, and insisting on head bunts. He did it on our bed, too, with a storage piece that backed up to the head of the bead. From there, he would chew on your hair to let you know that the food bowls needed cleaning and filling, usually when Lionel ate too fast and vomited into them. He loved to be picked up and carried around at head level so he could rub his face on you (some things never change) and then sometimes climb on to your back to bite your hair. It was all good, clean fun for Coopie. And we were so lucky to get to experience every fun, loving (and fun-loving) minute.

If Cooper had a message for the world, it was this: Get out there and LIVE your life. Everything can be fun with just a little imagination and a lot of enthusiasm. Obstacles can be opportunities if you squint at them just the right way with a smile on your face. Hurricane evacuation is an opportunity to take in the scenery in a BRAND NEW PLACE! Vet visits are a chance to make NEW FRIENDS! Rain is an opportunity to GET WET! If you’re sitting around waiting for your life to be exciting and easy and perfect, you’re going to be waiting an awfully long time. You’ve got to make your life exciting NOW, while there’s still time.

While there’s still time.

There are few things in life I want more right now than more time with Coopie. But things happen for a reason. Beings come in to our lives to share our lives, sometimes for a short while, and to teach us something along the way. And there’s no doubt that, objectively speaking, Cooper had a zest for teaching.

LIVE your life. Every moment of every day. Be happy NOW. You don’t know how much time might be left, and you don’t want to waste whatever time you have moping around. And when things are not going the way you want, HAVE PATIENCE. If you give things some space and some time, wonderful things will soon happen, you’ll see. These are Cooper’s lessons. Crazy though that cat may have been, and believe me, Cooper was plenty crazy, he was absolutely sober and sane about these important messages.

So I refuse to be sad. I see his sweet, smiling face and his endearing antics in my mind’s eye, and I’m laughing through the tears. I’m remembering his messages, and hugging Zelda and Lionel and Stella and Maynard just a little tighter. Zelda has even taken to sleeping with me some, which is a delightful surprise. Sean is still playing with them, every day, twice a day, doing what Sean does best: making their lives a little more fun and a little more exciting and a lot more happy.

Just like Coopie would have wanted.

One of the things I was most excited about when we decided to move here was being able to visit and hopefully volunteer at Alturas Wildlife Sanctuary in Dominical. Alturas is a place where people can bring injured or sick wild animals to the veterinarians there, and they will take care of them until they are able to be released back into the wild. A small percentage of the animals who survive their injuries end up becoming residents because they are unable to be released for various reasons. Many of the full-time residents are there because they were illegally kept as pets and are now unable to fend for themselves in the wild, or else they have imprinted on humans so completely that their lives would be too fraught with human conflict if they were released, as is the case with the crocodile and the ocelot.

The first day I volunteered, on September 29th, I showed up quite a bit early for my 7:00am training, but was greeted anyway with a cheery “Hola!” I was walking down the stairs to get to the kitchen area and assumed I would round the corner and find that the volunteer coordinator had also gotten there early and was there to greet me, but instead I rounded the corner and found…nobody at all. Still, the cries of “hola” (Spanish for “hello”) continued. I turned slowly in a circle and finally noticed the parrot enclosure, where Julieta, one of the resident Yellow-naped Parrots, was now laughing maniacally. Julieta has apparently learned most of her language skills from children, and she has the unsettling habit of alternately cackling merrily or suddenly bursting into “tears” of despair, often switching gears within two or three seconds. (I had sudden visions of someone walking by the sanctuary at night and calling the authorities because they were certain that a child had been trapped inside the sanctuary–it’s that realistic. And also a little creepy. But I digress…)

I donned cleaning gloves and wished fervently that I had thought to purchase some mud boots prior to the shift. Also something to keep my hair back. For the time being at least, my volunteer job will consist of cleaning out the animal enclosures, which includes picking up both excrement and uneaten food, hosing down the places where the animals perch, their food platforms, etc., and then giving them fresh food and water as well as enrichment. Their diets are extremely well-researched and freshly prepared twice daily, based on the individual dietary needs of each of the animals. Enrichment can include anything from simple games or Kongs that allow the animals to “hunt” for their own food, new items from outside that they can crawl on and explore, and even novel smells (such as today when part of my job included squeezing lime all over the peccary enclosure so they would have something fun to sniff).

The first day I started by learning how to clean the giant parrot enclosure, which has about twelve parrots (three different kinds) and eight different platforms for eating. Some of the parrots are unable to fly, so you have to make sure that everyone gets their fair share by placing the food in as many different places and different elevations as possible. Parrots are messy, so a lot of the work there is hosing down where they have relieved themselves. It’s an amazing thing to feel the brush of their wingbeats as they swoop down hoping to convince you to get to the feeding part sooner. (One of the cardinal rules about the animals is that we do not touch them, but that doesn’t meant that they don’t sometimes try to touch you, which happens pretty frequently, as I’ll relate later.)

Next, we moved on to the slightly smaller enclosure for the two Scarlet Macaws. Macaws are funny–they have certain people they like and certain people they simply don’t care for. You find out pretty quickly which bucket they’ve put you in. I think I might have made the cut for the “acceptable human” category, mainly because I talk to them and I don’t get ruffled when they try to intimidate me by squawking indignantly and nipping at me with their giant, strong beaks.

The third enclosure I learned was the one for the pair of White-crowned Parrots. The enclosure is such that you have to spray it from the outside rather than the inside, and one of the parrots in particular is a big fan of taking a shower. He flips upside down and hangs on the side of the enclosure with his magnificent blue wings spread out like the world’s biggest Morpho butterfly, just hoping you will keep up the waterworks. Once you get to the feeding part for them, it’s not unusual for him to go to the ground and walk across the dirt to beg for his favorite food. I learned early on that he kind of likes papaya, but that what he really loves is a nice crunchy chickpea.

Finally, after a few hours, my training needed to end so that the first tours of the day could start. I was exhausted after learning so many details of the animals’ care and all the physical labor, but I was also indescribably happy. Anyone who loves animals (and if you’re reading this blog, it’s a safe assumption you do) knows that all animals have personalities, temperaments, likes and dislikes. It’s such an interesting thing having so many animals all around you, all with different, wonderful personalities that I will have the pleasure of getting to know during my time here. This, to me, is one of the things true Pura Vida is all about–living in harmony with nature and learning about all of the myriad things that make our natural world so wondrous and so compelling. These animals have been thrust into a relationship with humans that they didn’t ask for, but now it’s our job to make their lives with us as natural, comfortable, and interesting as possible while also respecting their right to still be wild animals. Even though they’re in enclosures, of necessity, they’re still wild, and some are a little wilder than others, as you’ll see in future posts.