There’s nothing I love more than a fiddlehead, perfectly curled with potential and about to unfurl into full-leafed beauty.  Maybe I have a special place in my heart for ferns.  They blanket the forest floor in my woods at home and my father used to dig one or two up and bring them home and plant them in pots.  I love looking up toward the sky through the leaves of a tree fern, its umbrella-like leaves silhouetted like lace, with sunlight climbing through to the forest floor below.  Where I live in Vermont, it is spring, and the fiddleheads are in abundance, sold at farmers’ markets to be boiled, then sauteed, and eaten as a tasty springtime delicacy.  This fiddlehead is from the side of a trail in a Costa Rican rainforest, where the humidity and moisture provide the perfect, cool dampness that ferns love.  Its curves collect the rainforest’s beauty like a small treasure.

At the fruit stand, I was in heaven.  I ate mango: sun-warmed, sweet, juicy, a piece of the sun and earth.  With sticky fingers, I tried guayaba, tough, seemingly unripe, and filled with small, hard seeds.  The caimito, a fruit I had never seen before, was three consecutive experiences.  First: soft and sweet, tender; second: even sweeter, like the brown sugar of a bruised apple; third: bitter, like the core.  Piña and papaya and melón remained on my tongue with their sweetness.

I found several beautiful green feathers littered on the forest floor before I found the Emerald Toucanet (Aulacorhynchus prasinus) camouflaged amidst the green leaves of the canopy.  Smaller than the colorful Keel-billed Toucans we saw flying over an open field, these birds still have impressive beaks, used to pick fruit and capture invertebrates such as spiders and beetles.  I watched it buzz about, flying back and forth and landing on the trees’ branches while foraging.  Green is the perfect color for a rainforest bird.