Jack Ewing

If you saw a small Irish man with a beard and bushy eyebrows who lives in the forest, loves the color green, and has a passion for gold you might think he was a “Leprechaun”. But if that forest happened to be on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, more

When You Quit Chopping the Weeds the Jungle Returns With a Vengeance By Jack Ewing Environmentalists and people in the real estate business don’t usually like each other very much. The former tend to blame the latter of environmental destruction while the latter accuse the former of obstructing development and

International Recognition of our Natural Treasures By Jack Ewing Those of us who live in this area and have been active in the environmental movement are proud to inform our visitors, friends, and the general public that on Wednesday, June 14, 2017, in Paris, France, UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere

By Jack Ewing All of you cat lovers out there aren’t going to be very happy with my use of the word “torture” to describe what your beloved pets do to little animals like mice, frogs, birds, and geckos. It’s hard to think badly about your beautiful, soft, cuddly friend

Tree Mining, Cardboard Boxes, and Poison Sawdust  By Jack Ewing Carpenters, builders and sawmill operators love it; chicken and pig farmers hate it; and environmentalists have mixed feelings about it. I have heard people say that the gmelina tree (Gmelina arborea) is a plague that should be eradicated from the

Many years ago on a Saturday afternoon, having gone to the police station in Matapalo for something or other, I found a hand cuffed, bare footed, blood covered man with a deep cut starting on his right shoulder and extending across his chest. There was blood on the floor, the

By Jack Ewing The book Mammals of Costa Rica by Mark Wainwright describes 21 different species of carnivores found in the country, two from the dog family (canids), six from the raccoon family (procyonids), six from the cat family (felids), and seven from the weasel family (mustelids). This last family

Their Intelligence Rivals That of Monkeys By Jack Ewing Although I have lived at Hacienda Barú since 1972, I had never seen a peccary in the wild until 1997. Volunteers had come here, stayed a week or two, helped on environmental projects, and during that short time many of them had

39 Years as a Rural Letter Carrier By Jack Ewing Marvin and Carmen Espinosa were the first pioneers to settle the area around Hatillo. Originally from northern Panama they came to the area in the late 1920s. Working together they took possession of all of the land between Hacienda Barú

Lots of Wild Animals Love Cacao Seeds By Jack Ewing More than a dozen years ago when I wrote the original article “Monkeys Are Made of Chocolate” for Quepolandia, little did I know that it would later become chapter one of a book by the same name. It talked about

A Fun New Way of Monitoring Wildlife by Jack Ewing “Oh my God”, I blurted out to no one in particular. “Absolutely incredible”. A full grown puma was walking straight toward me on the computer screen. The two receptionists who were in office and heard my exclamation hurried over to

The Best Job Ever By Jack Ewing “The biggest caiman in the swamp always takes possession of the pool that surrounds the area where the cattle egrets nest,” I told the guests. “Whenever a clumsy egret chick falls in the water he grabs it.” We had been observing a nesting

A Glimpse of Intelligence and Adaptability in Tropical Nature by Jack Ewing The Jungle Chicken The great tinamou, called gallina de monte or jungle chicken in Spanish, looks like a grouse. With great effort it can fly, but not far or high. When you are walking through the jungle and

By Jack Ewing Everyone I know who has ever crossed a river on one of those old cable cars has gotten their fingers pinched at least once. Years ago this was the only way to cross some of the major rivers in rural Costa Rica. There was one over the