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I had a few days to get caught up on things back in La Guacima. On Monday I went briefly to The Butterfly Farm to visit with my growing group of friends and then returned to start packing for the next sojourn and to wrap up loose ends for an early departure Tuesday. |
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In the morning, I caught a ride into San Jose with Tony, one of the several tour bus drivers employed by The Butterfly Farm. There I rendezvoused with William Camacho and we took a bus to his Jardin Ecologico Pierella near Las Horquetas on the Caribbean slope. Boy, what a beautiful place! |
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Out on the road is a sign that mostly guides pre-arranged tours by school groups and tourists, generally a few hundred visitors each month. Since only William gives tours, Pierella generally doesn’t have drop in traffic except from the community. |
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William has been breeding butterflies for about seven years and all that the garden and his home is has been built from scratch from that income. His property, formerly farmland, is currently about half developed as garden and exhibit areas. Because of the extensive grounds, all neatly manicured, most of his butterfly-rearing activities are done in sleeves over plants in the ground. It is only as the larvae are approaching pupation that they get transferred to rearing cages. These are the nicest I’ve seen, not unexpected given his public profile. |
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A concrete walk leads the way to his home, an all wood structure. He uses the large patio as a classroom and the altar-like table holds a variety of dried birds— road-kills he has picked up in the area. He also has a number of dried terciopelo or fer-de-lance, Bothrops asper. Because most people bitten die from these, locals kill any encountered and bring them to William for his collection. In addition to the dried birds and reptiles William uses in his educational tours, he has a number of living animals as well. A couple of faces familiar from the Sonoran Desert region are also common here—javalina (collared peccary) and coyote.
William also had a pair of toucans, Micha and Filipe, the pride and joy of this 28-year old bachelor. Three pairs of parrotlets, a pair of agouti and a pair of paca rounded out the collection of animals that had been rescued in one manner or another. He also has a couple of water impoundments surrounded by fencing. These will someday house the paca and agouti but for the moment, are home only to native catfish, eels and frogs, visible mostly at night. As expected, the mammals and birds are the most popular with his visitors.
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