Source: MSP Costa Rica This past Saturday, poachers plying their loathsome trade in the Caribbean region of Costa Rica were about to butcher an adult female Chelonia mydas (green sea turtle) when officers from the National Coast Guard Service and the local Fuerza Publica detachment stepped in to prevent what would have been a violent demise for the aquatic reptile.   According to a ...

Source: ASOTU Costa Rica One of the most family-friendly and fun-filled festivals in Costa Rica is happening again in just a few days. The 6th Whales and Dolphins Festival in Ballena Bay will star this Friday, September 5th. Although whale watching season in Costa Rica runs from July until October, the peak month for migration is September. Some of the activities that visitors to the Osa Penin...

Source: Ministry of Public Safety Oceangoing poachers and illegal fishing crews take note: The vigilant officers of the National Coast Guard Service of Costa Rica are actively looking for your nefarious traps and wicked gear, and they know about those hiding spots on the beach. According to a recent Facebook update posted by the Ministry of Public Safety, two recent Coast Guard patrols resulte...

Humpback whale breaching in Costa Rica The Southern Pacific region of Costa Rica is known as one of the country's major magnets of ecotourism revenue. One of the big draws to the coastal region of the Osa Peninsula is the Parque Nacional Marino Ballena (Ballena Pelagic National Park), a unique spot on Earth that is known as an “aquatic labor and delivery chamber” for many cetaceans, including ...

Source: Wikimedia Commons The few, critically endangered hawksbill sea turtles that still arrive in Costa Rica during nesting season may stop coming here altogether due to climate change. In the 21st century, hawksbills have barely arrived on the beaches of the Pacific coast. On the Caribbean shores, the number of Eretmochelys imbricata nests at the Cahuita National Park has been dwindling ove...

For me, the Osa Peninsula is one of the most worthwhile places to visit in Costa Rica. The small stretch of remote rugged jungle in the southwestern corner of the country, bounded by the deep blue Pacific Ocean to the west and the placid Golfo Dulce to the east, is renowned by scientists, explorers and nature lovers as an astounding paradise. Covering an area of 700 square miles, this last rema...

Source: Flickr CC Residents of Costa Rica know that the dry season brings a scarcity of rain and an abundance of birdsong. This is when the lovely yiguirro (Turdus grayii or clay-colored American robin) mates and breeds, which means that males will melodically sing from before sunrise until after sundown. The yiguirro is just one of dozens of songbirds that make Costa Rica their permanent or m...

The immense plains, powerful volcanoes and dry, sunny climate of Guanacaste are becoming pivotal for Costa Rica’s production of renewable energy. The second largest province in the country is being tapped for its powerful resources of wind, solar and geothermal energy. Costa Rica currently produces 91% of its energy from renewable sources: 73% from hydroelectric power, 13% from geothermal plant...

The hospitality and tourism industry of Costa Rica welcomes a diversity of tourists. From surfers to eco-tourists and from science researchers to language learners, Costa Rica loves them all –even sexual tourists, as long as they do not engage in garish behavior in public. There is, however, one special interest tourist group that Costa Rica should strive to attract for various reasons: Birdwatche...

Puma hunting howler monkey in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Photo by Professor Rob Pringle of Princeton University.A recent series of amazing photographs by Professor Rob Pringle of Princeton University show a tenacious Puma concolor (a cougar or puma) climbing the tall branches of a torchwood tree looking to make a meal out of an Alouatta palliata (howler monkey) at the Santa Rosa National Park, provin...

The shores of Costa Rica's Gold Coast are home to the occasional stranding of marine mammals, but these sporadic situations could result in massive beaching events unless human oceanic activity is conducted in a way that minimizes underwater noise pollution. Such was the message delivered by oceanographer and cross-discipline scientist Melania Guerra Carrillo at a recent presentation on bioacousti...

A business consortium in Guanacaste will be keeping a close eye on arboreal wildlife with a network of eight cameras that will monitor animals as they negotiate the forest canopy and high tension power lines. Coopeguanacaste, a major electrical utility company in the Santa Cruz canton, recently installed new devices on portions of their power infrastructure to discourage monkeys, coatis, sloths, k...

Sandwiched between North and South America and two oceans, Costa Rica is an amazing bridge of biodiversity bursting with natural wonders. For such a small country, it is home to more than 500,000 species; 250 of which are mammals. Costa Rica’s south Pacific region of Golfo Dulce (Sweet Gulf) is one of the most intense zones for plants and animals. Surrounded by the Corcovado National Park, Pied...

On Thursday afternoon, January 16th – 1st full moon of 2014 – nearly every person in Playa Hermosa came to the beach for Salve Monos Playa Hermosa, GTE., Costa Rica’s 3rd Annual Drumming Circle. The event is held each year to raise awareness of the howler monkey plight and to raise funds that benefit Playa Hermosa’s monkeys. Karol Allard, Treasurer of the Association de Vecinos y Empresarios de Pl...

A flash of brilliant red, blue and yellow, and a loud raucous squawk, and you know you are in the jungle. There is nothing quite like the sight of wild Scarlet Macaws flying overhead or contentedly gathered in bunches in a treetop to give you the full feeling of being in the tropics. Their distinctive noisy cry carries for miles, so you usually hear them before you see them. When you do sight a...

Just 30 minutes from the Daniel Oduber International Airport and 217 kilometers northeast of San José, the Gulf of Papagayo Tourism Pole (PTGP) offers white sandy beaches and lush tropical settings, with a wide variety of activities for nature-loving tourists. “The bay is rich in marine species due to the abundance of plankton in its waters, which develops in the mangroves in the area,” said Ja...

Located in the northern Caribbean region of Costa Rica, the Tortuguero National Park is home to one of the most docile, timid and elusive aquatic mammals. Trichechus manatus, also known as Antillean sea cows or manatees, once sought refuge exclusively in the canals of Tortuguero, but decades of protection have encouraged them to swim north to Barra del Colorado and even all the way south to Puerto...

Police and park rangers of the Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE) are still searching for 9 crocodiles, some up to 16 feet long, who escaped from an artificial lagoon of the Tabacon tourist centre in Veracruz de Los Chiles. According to Major Rafael Araya, head of the local police unit, 5 of the 14 reptiles have been captured. Araya said the smallest is 11 feet long. The reptiles wer...

Marine biologists who study cetaceans and fans of aquatic mammals in general know that Costa Rica is blessed with an incredible abundance of these creatures. As a result, scientists, photographers and filmmakers often visit our coasts. This time, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) went undercover and underwater with Spy Tuna, a robotic camera device that captures unprecedented footage of m...

Tourists posing for a photo at Cavernas el Venado La Fortuna is known for three major natural attractions and a variety of adrenalin packed adventures. It starts with the picture-perfect cone shaped Arenal Volcano, continues with a 26 mile-long sapphire blue lake that contrasts magically with the surrounding vibrant green hills, and finally the volcanic hot springs are found throughout the com...

Update: Portions of this article have been removed on behalf of a party involved, due to being inaccurate. The remainder of the article will stay intact as the original. Witnessing a monkey electrocuted by un-insulated power lines or transformers is a very disturbing, yet an all too common sight in Playa del Coco and surrounding beach communities. As many well know, the Coco area is a natural ...

The Costa Rica Star has previously published extensively about Costa Rica's animals being harmed or killed by electric shock from missing insulation in power wires throughout Costa Rica. In mid-November, ICE crews began insulating more than 100 transformers that have been identified in the area as danger points for the electrocution of monkeys and other wildlife. In the past five months, Nos...

Source: Santa Elena Project The late environmentalist Jairo Mora was certainly one of the most celebrated and important persons in Costa Rica in 2013. His commitment to the protection of sea turtles in the Caribbean coast ended up claiming his life and left many people wondering what makes the Caribbean region of Costa Rica so different from Playa Rajada and Playa Ostional in Guanacaste, two p...

Source: Wikimedia Commons A recent study indicates that a wading bird's appetite for the hatchlings and freshly-laid eggs of sea turtles presents an interesting situation of interference competition in which nature conservation activists and local protectors of marine life in Costa Rica are choosing one wildlife species over another. The species in question are the beloved olive ridley sea tur...

The community of Nosara will come together next Saturday, November 30th to celebrate the 2013 Nosara Ecological Blue Flag Community Festival, with the objective of recognizing the environmental efforts of a diverse group of organizations and individuals from the area. Jessica Sheffield, one of the event’s five organizers, explained that for the occasion there will be at least 15 stands of organ...

In the case of butterflies, it pays to look like your neighbor. New information about long-winged butterflies in Costa Rica is showing how the importance of “mimicry” and the butterflies’ natural promiscuity has led to interbreeding and the creation of new species that look very much alike, according to a study led by University of Chicago evolutionary biologist, Marcus R. Kronforst. “In evo...

Like the lion or the tiger, the jaguar is the “king of the jungle” in the Americas. It is the largest feline in the Americas and the third largest in the world, notes Wikipedia. With a range extending from Southwestern United States and Mexico across much of Central America and south to Paraguay and northern Argentina, there are only an estimated 15,000 jaguars left in the wild, according to the W...

The Ecological Blue Flag flies high over Playa Hermosa for the 11th year. PLAYA HERMOSA, GUANACASTE - On Saturday, November 16, 2013, on a gorgeous Guanacaste beach day filled with nothing but clear blue sky and sunshine, the community of Playa Hermosa gathered together on its "beautiful beach" to celebrate its 11th year of garnering Costa Rica's Ecological Blue Flag status (out of 12 years si...

The Tortuguero coast in Costa Rica is a 22-mile-long, desolate, volcanic black sand beach littered with driftwood and tree logs tossed up on shore from the untamed ocean. It is a wild place – like the imaginary jungle coast in Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are.” There is nothing but beach and low, swampy jungle for miles and miles. You can’t swim here because of rough surf, strong curren...

From the concrete jungle of Johannesburg, South Africa, to the wilds of the Costa Rican rainforest is quite a change. Two months ago, South African couple Gary Kritzinger and Shayne Mrazek left behind electric fences and heavy security, hour-long 6 km commutes, and a metropolitan beehive of 12 million people, for a different kind of jungle where their closest neighbors are tree frogs and toucans. ...

Source; ACG Costa Rica As marine biologists and members of the National Coast Guard Service of Costa Rica scramble to investigate the mysterious massive death of dozens of green tropical sea turtles off the Pacific coast of Guanacaste, disheartening news reports are arriving: 23 marine turtle carcasses have washed in Playa La Flor in Nicaragua, and many of them are showing inscrutable signs of...

The second-most-common catch on Costa Rica’s longline fisheries in the last decade was not a commercial fish species. It was olive ridley sea turtles. These lines also caught more green turtles than most species of fish. These findings and more, reported in a new study in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, indicate that the Costa Rican longline fishery represents a major th...

Watching an enormous crocodile approaching from a river bank is enough to make most of us run a mile. But not for these intrepid tour guides who give a completely new meaning to the phrase “staring danger in the face”. The astonishing video below shows the men standing just inches from the giant reptiles as they hand feed them chunks of chicken. Jose Eduardo Chaves Salas, 32, runs Jose's ...

The Costa Rica Star has previously published about Night Chirps in Costa Rica: Singing Mice and Clicking Geckos. Two species of tawny brown singing mice that live deep in the mountain cloud forests of Costa Rica and Panama set their boundaries by emitting high-pitched trills, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have discovered. Although males of both the Alston's singing mou...

Normally, you don’t see tough, radical conservationists attending lectures by land developers. But there they were, 100 strong, from the Nature Conservancy, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and from all over Latin America – all raptly listening to how land development can actually preserve forests. Nervous before his formidable audience, Guillermo Piedra Gonzalez e...

If you would like The Costa Rica Star to publish your business press release, please contact us. Ylang Ylang Beach Resort in Costa Rica recently launched a new solar garden project making the resort nearly completely self-sustained when it comes to electricity needs. A collection of solar panels was placed throughout the property to harvest abundant solar energy and convert it to electricity fo...

200 environment volunteers of the Costasverdes organization have reforested 20 hectares of the terrestrial maritime zone in Playa Hermosa near Jaco on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. This project is an initiative that started five years ago and involves educational centers, communities, local authorities and businesses, all of which participate in reforesting this beach as part of the Playa He...

If you would like The Costa Rica Star to publish your business press release, please contact us. The adventure with Costa Rica surf camp starts as soon as you get off the airplane. The drive to the coast is quite an experience itself, the road is surrounded with green valleys, cloud forests and dense jungle, which are signs you arrived to the tropics! Home to all kinds of amazing species of ani...

Patiently, expectantly, I gazed across deep indigo waters, ponderous swells rolling gently beneath the boat, our outboard motor silent. Suddenly eighty yards away an enormous dark sea creature broke through the surface, its long pectoral fins or flippers waving in the air, only to crash thunderously down and disappear into the ocean off Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast. It was the thrill of a lifetime t...

Costa Rica’s ban on clearing of “mature” forests appears to be effective in encouraging agricultural expansion on non-forest lands, finds a study published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The research, which was led by Matthew Fagan of Columbia University, is based on analysis of satellite data calibrated with visits to field sites in the lowlands of northern Costa Rica. ...