Recent content by forrestdweller

somehow i'm not surprised to read this... shame their natural habitat is disappearing (due to logging and palm oil plantations :cry: ), "orang utan" translates as forest dweller" in english which also happens to be the translation for my name...

(as usual sadly no pics...) my collection currently includes a skull of: raccoon, coati, sloth, monkey and crocodile (found an entire 4ft carcass on the beach recently) and an indigenous stone axe and stone adze head each (=found along the river, our area is rich in old burial grounds and...

two evenings ago i had a pair of red eyes approaching my shelter at night: they belonged to a large Opossum("zorro pelon", meaning "bald fox" in local spanish BUT they're NOT foxes!) , America's only marsupial. some folks claim their meat to be tasty but you've to get past the rather strong...

are you planning to stay in it during winter, too?! not entirely related, but i spent one winter in Japan in a tiny cabin which was built by others as a project to provide housing for homeless people. it had neither insulation (i added some) nor heating, which made living a bit interesting...

thanks for the info reg. owl species! sadly the tropical environment (=humidity) has killed my beloved "Fuji finepix 5600" camera (and gets it's waterproof smaller sibling as well...), so my only camera is now my phone which is mostly turned off. and i still haven't figured out how to post pics...

last night i had a small owl (ca. size of a large pigeon) sitting chest high on a branch in front of me when looking for foam frogs (up to 7" long and rather tasty but tricky to get close enough) -- no idea about species sometimes you can see large owls in the trees, especially around full moon...

yesterday evening i bumped into an agouti (= a rodent about the size of a hare, guatussa in local spanish): brazil nut trees rely on them for propagation as they're the only animal capable of gnawing through their rock-hard outer shell, no brazil nuts here but a relative called "olla de mono"...

sorry to hear that and speedy recovery!

google tells me cat gut is made from animal intestines, mainly from goat and sheep. i found several references of cat gut in books -- if anyone has a copy of "for the term of his natural life" by Marcus Clarke: Rufus Dawes uses goat intestines to make string for traps and to construct a coracle...

not in Costa Rica although the indigenous people have moved on to firearms... sorry for some infos not exactly related to the thread, but it was meant for entertainment only -- playing with arrow poisons can easily go wrong! to get back to the subject of the thread: last two days i saw a big...

some european some european plants are suitable for making arrow poison, too Antiaris Toxicaria is the tree used in Borneo to poison blowpipe darts -- not sure how strong it is, but the Golden Poison Frog (Phyllobates Terribliis)from Colombia is strong enough to kill 30 people and iirc you...

and early sniper rifle scopes iirc -- judging from our local spiders easy to believe (they like to put their nets at head hight across the trails in the jungle...), one spider in New Guinea produces nets strong enough to catch small fish...

occasional guide for tourists (national park and nearby private property which includes bowdrill demo ), still stuck in paperwork to obtain my license... no special wildlife today, just the normal hummingbirds, herons/ egrets etc. along river and poison dart frogs outside my door (i don't know...

no, unfortunately not... if there any around it would be most likely high up in the mountains where there's less destruction (=lot's of land clearing along coast for construction and inland for farming, + (illegal) logging :-( ) today however saw my third Red Brocket Deer since coming 7years ago...

i wish i'd be half as good as him, but after watching a few of his videos my accuracy seems to have slightly improved :-) -- i'm still a long way from being dangerous for our local critters, though...