Exploring the Osa Peninsula
The next day’s plan was to go on a longer hike deep into the rain forest to Cerro Brujo (Witch Mountain). Reinaldo was uncertain of the trails himself despite 15 years of exploring the peninsula, so we stopped at Rancho Quemado and picked up a friend of his named Carlos who knew the way. Along the way we saw my first poisonous snake of the trip, an “eyelash pit viper”, sunning himself on a fallen tree.
Eventually we came to a place that Reinaldo was looking for, where he had discovered a new tree species, of the genus Pleiodendron, family Canellaceae, that had previously been known only from Africa and South America. A Costa Rican newspaper article in La Nación of March 2005 reported that only two of these trees had been found, one farther north of Quepos, and the other one that we were looking at that day. Such is the nature of the Osa Peninsula which has a fantastic diversity of species and endemics. Reinaldo proceeded with slingshot and twine to try to capture some fruits from the upper branches to send to Barry Hammel at INBio in Santo Domingo.
As for Costus, mostly I saw the more common ones like C. pulverulentus and C. laevis, but there was also a thin stemmed, tightly spiraling form of Costus scaber that I have seen a few other times on the peninsula, and it seems to me to be a different variety of that very common species.
That night we stayed in a thatched roof hut with mattresses on the floor. After that long strenuous hike I probably could have slept right on the hard ground. The next morning we woke to the sound and sight of bats flying around over our heads.
