Casita Chuparosa

We went back to Cerro to fix up some of the unfinished work left undone by the work crews. First, we wanted to get the rocks, sand and gravel piles (some of which are visible in photos of the wall on our preceding post) out of the road and on to our property. The fact that this construction material has been half-blocking the road for a couple months seems to bother nobody, but we didn’t want the eyesore out front. Plus kids playing in the sand pile and spread it out so it nearly crossed the entire road.

We hired a couple young men to haul everything into our lot, and pile it behind the house along the neighbors wall. I gave them $15 each for the half-day of hard labor, which is the going rate for an unskilled working man.

We also got the electricity hooked up, and hired someone to fill in the gaps under the roof where the laminate didn’t sit down on the cement. They also caulked the gaps between the pieces of laminate — those were closed before, but when the original workers filled in the big spaces under the curves, it lifted some of the pieces off their adjoining pieces, so they had to be filled in to keep the rain out.

Those were some of our goals this trip, but this report is really about the wildlife we have observed on the site. I’ve already mentioned the bats, foot-long lizards that appear to be house geckos, smaller anole-like lizards and bats. We also see plenty of black grackle-like birds, unidentified LBBs (little brown birds) and pigeons. Less numerous, but not uncommon are a small yellow and black bird I have yet to identify, a red-headed woodpecker of some sort, and small black and red birds. This trip we found a dead owl in the former (outdoor) bathroom:

Later we also found a dead iguana, though I don’t have a picture of that. We also see plenty of squirrels — they are medium sized, gray with reddish fur on the back of the head and on the rump.

The most interesting wild visitor came in one afternoon the day after the rocks were moved in off the road — an immature black iguana:

A neighbor has a large wood-pile that is full of the adult form of these guys, and they get big — about 75 cm (not including the tail). This juvenile, probably male, took up residence in the rocks, and could be seen sunning almost every afternoon. They live in communal groups, and have a surprising small territory, rarely straying more than five meters from their shelter. I suspect it is a Ctenosaura pectinata, though it doesn’t exactly match the pictures of those I’ve found online.

A neighbor reported seeing a green iguana in our fig tree a few months ago — we are not sure if it was the green species that lives in this area, or simply a young Ctenosaura pectinata, since the young are bright green, and darken as they get older. The young ones eat bugs mostly, while as adults they eat mostly vegetation, including fruits and leaves. We observed our guest eating leaves off some of the wild plants just beyond the fig tree.

Don’t know if that guy will still be there when we return, but if he is we want to figure out how to get him to move — we want to put the whole rock-pile nearer the back of the lot where we plan to leave one corner for growing wild native plants. We also plan a small pond, and so will probably put that within the five-meter home range of the iguanas. That will make a much better home than where he is now, but it might be difficult to explain that to him!

Speaking of plants, I have already mentioned some of the trees we have — coconut, banana, guamuchil, mango, limes and lemons. The guamuchil trees were in fruit, which is called guamuchili — green pods with round white fleshy parts surrounding black seeds. That white fleshy part is edible — Isabel and I both like them a lot. Here is what the look like:

They are sweeter when the pod bursts open and the white part begins to turn red, but they are also more likely to get wormy. If you look close before eating them, it is easy to separate out any with worms for the compost pile. We were also able to eat some ripe mangoes, though most of those were still green.

There are some sort of bracket mushroom growing off the roots of the fig tree, but they are too tough to be edible: