My time at the Monteverde Butterfly Gardens!

                                                   For my third placement I was situated in a small town called San Juan Concepcion, at a spanish school with a huge focus on animal care, organic gardening, environmental conservation and ecological wellbeing. The school was fantastic, employing over, I believe, 60 people from the local community. There is the spanish school, a local school, a reserve that specialises in rehabillitating horses, and another big reserve with an abundance of forest coverage. At the school, there were 13 beautiful dogs, all rescues! It was incredible to learn of their stories, and to see how much happier they were at the school! The school provides immunisations to all the dogs, and gets them spayed, and provides funding for local spaying and immunisations to other stray dogs in the area. My favourite dog was called Chispe, a shy, ...

  My time at the Jaguar Rescue Center! I should start this blog with the revelation that there are in fact, no jaguars at the rescue center! The name has its origins in the beginings of the center, where an ocelot was confused as a jaguar by the locals, and word got around and everything started saying it was a jaguar going to the center, and the name stuck! I spent one month at JRC, and worked very closely with some of the animals, such as: Macaws (Scarlett and Green), howler and capuchin monkeys, sloths (two-toed), parrots, small birds, deer). The best experience regaridng the animal care was working with the howler and capuchin monkeys. The juvenile howlers would be taken to the jungle on sunny days for half the day, and we were tasked with taking them (on ourselves) to the jungle and observing their behaviour in the wild, with each other and other wild monkeys! Some tasks had animal specific duties. Such as a deer called Momo who cannot swallow her food properly due to being s...

     Where to start? I spent 11 weeks at the Monteverde Butterfly gardens in Costa Rica, learning to give tours to the general public through our butterfly gardens and insectarium on site, along with any natural history knowledge that we know! I spent the time learning all about the different bugs (and arachnids!) that exist in Monteverde, from tarantulas, scorpions, stick bugs, hercules beetles, so many different butterflies and even cockraoches (top secret = they are actually really great and incredibly useful, responsible for 40% of global decomposition by insects worldwide and they can be trained by humans!). I was surrounded by wildlife constantly; howler monkeys howling in the trees, stick bugs the size of my hand hanging around, 100's of different moths at night flying around, snakes slithering and cicadas screaming! I've met so many cool people from around the world, and got to work with many locals to the monteverde area; I've learned lots about other people and ...