Guanacaste National Park

At the intersection of the Western and Hummingbird Highways in Belmopan is Guanacaste National Park.  We’ve been told it is a good place to see howler monkeys, but we still haven’t seen one yet.  We have heard them.  Here is a video taken outside my husband’s classroom – listen for the low roars of the howler monkeys…. 

We did see Jesus lizards (I wrote about them in a previous post) in the park.  Here is an Eumaeus butterfly we saw there.  You can also see the suspension bridge to YWAM’s Discipleship Training School from the park.  I think this is a Guanacaste tree

 (usually younger trees have lots of good sized thorns on the trunks at the bottom).  Here is a hive

 (I’m not sure for what, but most of the bees in this area are Africanized and aggressive – glad we didn’t see any!) Here is an interesting blog entry about insects in Belize. This is a picture of my husband trying to outrun a jaguar on the trail. j.

This scene is near the confluence of the Belize River and Roaring Creek.  The pink flowering tree is a Bukut tree.  When these are done flowering, they form large heavy seed pods.   DO NOT parks your car under one of these during pod season!!

If you hear a large splash, supposedly it is green iguanas dropping into the river from overhanging tree branches.  I still want to see a green iguana (my husband has seen one traipsing across the school playground) – they turn orange during mating season. Colorful and cool!

Lizards in Belmopan

Let me introduce you to Newton, the (easily) over two foot long black iguana or ctenosaur –  Ctenosaura similis that lives outside of the BCA Physics room in the strangler fig

(Get it? The Big Fig Newton? Newtonian physics?)

(you can click on any of these photos to see them in a larger format)

A clan of juveniles lives nearby in a pile of rocks. Here is one cutie: They are also referred to as Wish Willies.

Another cute lizard around here is the Basiliscus vittatus – Striped or Brown Basilisk or “The Jesus Christ Lizard” nicknamed so because they can “walk on water” due to the unique fringe of scales on their hind toes which makes little webs that can trap bubbles of air and water beneath their feet. This keeps them from sinking into the water if they run quickly enough across. When they do stop running they don’t mind taking a little swim. The smaller lizards can run further than the bigger and heavier ones. Basilisks usually weigh between 0.44 – 1.3 lbs and may grow to be about 2 feet long although they average about 1 foot in length. We’ve seen one in our yard, several on our jungle hikes around our place, and several at Guanacaste (pronounced gwan–ah- kahst’-ay) National Park. Check out this video of one in action.

More on strangler figs:  These plants begin life as epiphytes, when their seed, often bird-dispersed, germinate in crevices atop other trees. These seedlings grow their roots downward and envelop the host tree while also growing upward to reach into the sunlight zone above the canopy. These are some pics of the one in which Newton lives: