Flora and Fauna

Flora: well, that one’s obvious. The word looks enough like “flower" to fool no one. “Fauna" on the other hand…unless you’re a Bambi aficionado (in which case you know he’s a boy!), you are forgiven to think is the name of a Roman goddess! Oh wait, it is…and somehow from there it means ‘animals of a particular region’… As if the name “Bambi" weren’t curious enough!

Anyways, my point with this blog is to talk about some of the animals and plants we encounter here in this part of Honduras. It should be noted that these are not necessarily daily encounters…in fact, some are pretty rare. But still, some of these birds I will talk about are native to this part of Honduras. The unfortunate thing is that they have often been hunted for food, or regarded as pests and subsequently killed. These are the noisy birds belonging to the parrot family. And they can be quite vicious actually! We recently visited a bird sanctuary called Macaw Mountain just north of Copan Ruinas, and we saw a lot of these beautiful creatures! (I like the word creature, because even evolutionists use it, but it literally refers to something that was created! Maybe they should say “evolutures"…) Anyways, one of the large bird cages houses red macaws, and you can walk right through it. The macaws leave you alone, maybe squawk at you…but the very next cage, is green macaws, who show their strength by biting apart tree branches and attacking the cage as close to you as they can! Even some of the smaller parakeets will jaw at you if you get close enough! I guess they are tired of being hunted or culled… I learned at this place that parrotlets, parakeets, parrots, and macaws all belong to the same family…except I guess Adam ran out of P-names when he got to the macaws… Interestingly, sometimes the only way to tell a male from a female parrot, is to take a DNA sample! Unfortunately, I had forgotten my pocket-sized tester, so I could only call them all “Polly"…maybe shoulda been “Pauly"…

Towards the end of the tour, they put a few macaws on your arms and shoulders to take pictures. I didn’t realize it then, but which one do they put right beside your head? The violent green one! But he (or she??) was fine and seemed more relaxed outside of a cage… For a moment I felt like a pirate..but with both eyes and legs and hands. Maybe the macaws would poke out one of their eyes necessitating the patch…who knows? I would actually say the toucans were a little scarier to be around. We saw what a macaw could do with its beak, now imagine a bird with a beak five times longer, and keenly interested in what we were doing in its cage! It’s a beautiful bird though, and I really wanted to pet it. At least have a bowl of fruit loops with it… Now that I think about it, the toucans were very into eating fruit… It was interesting to see how they turned their head to see the fruit, then blindly, and with perfect precision picked up a small piece of fruit in the end of its beak, then tossed it and caught it in the back of its throat! The toucans have an interesting way of hopping along tree branches: they start facing one direction, then hop and do a 180 and land facing the other. Back and forth like that they will go!

At this sanctuary they had other birds: hawks, owls (that blink the whole time), and some ground-running fowl that no doubt tastes like chicken… They have all kinds of plants too…they label them and give a description which is very helpful!

Picture below: having taken horses up to Haciendo San Lucas (http://www.haciendasanlucas.com/index.html) we had a panoramic view from the city of Copan Ruinas to the ruins themselves! (The ruins can’t be seen in this picture…)

More on flora: Mangos, a favourite fruit here can be very plentiful when in season. I mean, VERY plentiful! There are different varieties, and I mostly see the smaller ones around these parts, and they absolutely cover the trees! At one place where we go to study the Bible with 2 deaf siblings, they will give us bagfuls every time, because it’s too many for them to use up!

Picture below: Mango seeds sprouting below a mango tree.

But that’s not all they’ll give us. They often give us lemons. So we make lemonade. Well, we do all kinds of things with the lemons really… What’s interesting is that most “lemons" look like “limes", but the cognate word for “lime" is “lima" which is a much more different fruit than one would expect. It’s still citrus mind you, but not as flavourful. Hence, I am thoroughly confused as to which is which, but some gringos will adamantly assert that these here are limes, not lemons, but I tend to disagree with the dogmatic approach…fact is, there’s different kinds of most fruits, so just because their lemons look different, doesn’t mean they’re not lemons. Besides, who’s the idiot who named the “pineapple"? Not a Spaniard, so we shouldn’t implicitly trust our linguistic ancestors to know what’s what! On a side note, “lima" can also mean “file", a tool for sharpening, but a “file" can also be an “archivo" in Spanish, which is of course, an “archive"…

Picture below: a “limón" and a “lima".

Really, Honduras is a beautiful country. The variety of animals is not always easily seen, but it’s there, just hidden in the hills. The plants, the flowers, the trees, can range from the intriguing to the inspiring! But most curious of all, is how did I go all these years not knowing Bambi was a boy??