Okay Douggy, here's some highlights of this herp-mediocre-at-best trip.....remember, it's a family vacation and herp action occurred sparingly. Here we go...
beautiful lowlands just outside of the hotel . . . every day i gazed out and fantasized what COULD be . . .
and every morning this jackass would walk up to the barbed wire fence and greet me . . . . *sigh*
the first herp I encountered was a baby Sceloporus (ssp) darting across my path. I siezed the moment . . .
finally by the third day of soaking in the pool we decided to hire a driver for a few days and head out of San Jose and into more lush areas on the way to a local (Poas) volcano . . . the fantasies continued as we drove and my mind wandered . . .
first we encountered a 3-toad sloth as we headed up the mountainside . . .
...ohhhhh how I fantasized as we headed into heavy rainforest . . . all I could think about were fer-de-lances and eyelash vipers . . . but, we saw none however heard reports of recent sightings including a jaguar leaping across the same road we drove on a week before we were there . . .
the bullet ants were insanely huge, about 1.5 to 2 inches long . . . don't wanna get nailed by these, as they don't call them bullet ants for nothing . . .
so many damn butterflies of all shapes and colors . . .
a few red and blue poison dart frogs, mostly in bromeliad-type situations . . . only saw three of these, and tough to shoot in such tight quarters . . .
saw two vine snakes, one of which I had the chance to hold for a while (not pictured) just before zip-lining, and this one photographed (poorly, I know) by my wife while I was in the forest canopy . . .
saw a couple of these anole-type lizards here and there *yawwwnnnn* . . .
more very cool moths and butterflies abound . . .
leaf-cutter ants eveywhere, and very cool indeed I might add . . .
finally, a gecko (house gecko?) upon the hotel walls after 5 nights of seeing none at all . . .
the day before we leave we head to a coastal town, Jaco, wereby I saw more herps in one day than the entire trip . . . tons of rock iguanas of all sizes . . .
several brown basilisks . . .
even passed a few flipping opportunities, of which only one I hit because no one told me about the f'ing FIRE ANT colonies that like to build their homes around things like this . . . combine that with gringo feet in flip-flops and it's a recipe for disaster . . . my foot was fine after a few hours . . . and to add insult to injury, nothing was under this pile . . .
then I encounter a swarm of TVs flying above my head as I walked down the road where I'm supposed to meet up with my family to take a river croc tour for the next couple hours . . . and this one TV (turkey vulture) swirled around in descending circles until he landed on the wire just about 50 feet from me . . .
. . . only to see him glaring down at the HIGHLIGHT of that day, a fresh-killed d.o.r. CORAL snake . . . ! ! !
. . . . I took so long with the coral snake, tat my wife came back to look for me with our driver worried that something had happened to me. I was disgusted, particularly after our driver had spoken to our croc tour guide asking for me about any local snakes whereby the croc guide said that a "coralilo" was "just run over" on the road 5 minutes before we arrived . . . . this pretty much sums up my feelings after hopping into the car and being told that (this was MY in-situ shot) . . .
SO, we get into the boat and make our way down the river while I'm still seething . . . was nice to see a combo shot of a green iguana, a heron, and an ibis on the same river bank at the same time . . .
seeing things like this were soothing as I tried to forget about that poor coralilo . . .
until the croc guide starts slapping raw chicken on the river surface . . . "heeeere kitty kitty..." . . .
damn things were everywhere . . .
first croc feeding . . . I suggested that they might use BIGGER pieces of chicken, which were barely the size of a standard cutlet . . .
contentment post-feeding until it did a 180 and disappeared below the water as if never there . . .
then we came upon of the larger crocs in the area, aptly named Mike Tyson . . . it as decided to leave all of his approximate 16 feet alone . . . I agreed . . .
a nice spoonbill watching over Tyson below . . .
we get to the next croc which swam about 100 feet over to one side of the boat secondary to our croc tour guide doing his usual routine of chicken cutlet slapping until the croc disappeared under the water and remained unseen for about a solid 5 minutes . . . I decide to look over the OTHER side of the boat and there was this MONSTER glaring up at me, my face just barely 3 feet above the water's surface . . . I needed a change of underwear after this . . .
again, big croc . . . little cutlet . . . wackadoodle . . .
monstah content post-snack . . .
the last good shot while looking for various parrots or monkeys (of which there were none), a raptor in which I don't recall its name however I was told a rare sighting . . .
So Doug, that's about it. Many other shots of Costa Rican daily life were taken as well as other vacataion-oriented shots. All in all, it was a great time. I might also mention the $28 per person airport departure tax that each and every person (kids included) gets hit with prior to leaving the country. That sucked big time. Would I go again? Absolutely... 
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Jerry Kruse
UPDATED!
www.zonatas.com
And God said, "Let there be zonata subspecies for all to ponder..."
