I went to a refugee camp in Jaco where they had frogs, snakes, butterflies, parrots and some other animals. The place was called NeoFauna and was just my cup of tea. The staff at NeoFauna takes care of injured animals as well as reproducing different species with the aim to release the animals in the wild. In some cases this is not possible, for instance with monkeys that will have difficulties to be accepted into a hierarchic group of monkeys. They had a macau with only one wing, a tucan with a broken beak, etc. Animals which for obvious reasons cannot be released back into the wild. Either way, I had a great time as my private guide showed me and talked about the animals in the camp. Unfortunately my iphone went completely dead at one point (managed to bring it back to life first when I was back home in Jaco) so I couldn't take photos of the famous tree frog. The cool thing with this frog is that it only shows its colors when it's awake. In sleeping mode the frog is just green and camouflaged to look like a green leaf. We can always pretend that I was the photographer of the two photos below 🙂
Another cool frog in the camp was this bullfrog - the largest frog in Costa Rica. It sounded like a kitten and could play dead if you just pointed with your finger to its chest and said plah!
Bull frog in Costa Rica plays dead
The NeoFauna also had a big room with butterflies. They are really hard to capture on photo with their wings open since they are constantly flying as if they were drunk (perhaps is this actually the case since they feed on fermented bananas?). Once they are still then of course they most of the time keep their wings folded, revealing only the underneath of their wings which never is as colorful as the top. One of the most famous butterflies is the morpho butterfly has a beautiful blue shimmering top side, but the bottom side is quite fascinating too with its camoflague! Can you see the three different animals it can imitate?
