Saturday, February 17, 2007

Critters

The wildlife in Belize is amazing! The entire environment in the ocean, air, and ground is teeming with life.

The nights in our hotel room on the ocean were so quiet; the water inside the reef is protected from waves, so we really didn't hear the ocean crashing at all. Occasionally in the deep dark, we would wake to hear a "tick-tick-tick-tick" noise. We, at first, thought it might be a nocturnal bird of some sort, but one night Kathy was on the balcony enjoying the breeze at 2:00 am, and she saw that the noise came from the lizards that are all around keeping the hotel free of bugs.

Indeed, we didn't see many bugs while we were there. Very few flies, a few tiny ants in the kitchen, and of course mosquitoes, of which we saw quite a few.

Kathy collected some tiny, tiny shells from the beach, brought them into the hotel room, and before long, some of them had walked across the counter! The very small hermit crabs inside were not one bit interested in being taken back to snowy Colorado, so Kathy took them out behind the hotel where she had found some larger hermit crabs earlier, and during our entire stay, she kept those crabs well fed and happy.

We saw crocodiles, a snake, monkeys living wild in the trees around the Mayan ruins, small bats that slept on the sides of trees and blended in so completely that you couldn't see them until our guide pointed them out. The bats indignantly fluttered around us when our guide splashed a bit of water at them.

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