![]() The entire fruit was only a little bigger than an acorn. The flesh was not much thicker than the skin, and the seed was proportionately huge. It was recognizable as a kind of avocado, and yet it was extremely different from the cultivated varieties that we grow in our yards. It was only a few more minutes into our hike when Kenneth spotted a wild avocado fruit on the ground and handed it to me. Epiphytes I noticed on the wild avocado trees included orchids and bromeliads. They get all of their water and nutrients from the air and rain. ![]() Attached to the trees, avocado and other, are epiphytes galore.Įpiphytes grow on the trunks and branches of the trees but do not use the trees for anything except structural support. Below them are flowering shrubs and vines. This was the cloud forest, where clouds are ever present and there is over 100 inches of rain in a year, where trees reach - stretch! - for the top of the forest canopy in order to gather sunlight. This was similar to almost all of the wild avocado trees I saw that day. I couldn’t have wrapped my arms around the trunk, which shot vertically with no thick side branches for at least forty feet, at which point it started to spread and have foliage. Then he pointed out a mature wild avocado tree. Avocados are one of the most common trees here.” I asked Kenneth - who was a local guide, having grown up in northern Costa Rica, despite the familiar name - if it was by chance an avocado. Yet, a mere twenty steps into our hike that day I had spotted leaves that shouted avocado to me. Only I’d never seen them in their native habitat, which most botanists agree ranges from southern Mexico down through Costa Rica and possibly as far south as Peru. I love everything avocado - eating them, growing them, reading about them. At the time, California avocado orchards were being thoroughly damaged by root rot.Īs for me, I just wanted to see a wild avocado tree with my own two eyes, at all, for the first time. The hope was that these primitive avocados might be resistant to the fungus Phytophthora cinnamomi, which causes the disease called root rot. Schieber and Zentmyer were on a quest to find wild avocados in order to collect their seeds and use them as rootstock back in California. (Read their article, “Collecting Perseas in Central America and Mexico.”) Therefore we must explore the Quetzal country.” So wrote Eugenio Schieber and George Zentmyer in the 1972-73 Yearbook of the California Avocado Society. “Sometimes, particularly in the highlands of Guatemala, native guides will inform you that only where the Quetzal bird is found there you may find wild avocados, as this rare bird eats the fruit of some Perseas. We just saw the Resplendent Quetzal! Well, except for our sleeping baby daughter.Īnd yet, before seeing the bird all I’d been interested in was what the Quetzal ate. The iridescence of its crown and the length of its tail feathers you can’t see in this photo, but they captivated me. Bigger than I expected, its colors were also brighter. I was surprised to feel so impressed by it. ![]() This is the bird we saw, as we saw it, perched majestically about forty feet off the forest floor. And plainly to anyone on the planet, it is beautiful, it is resplendent indeed. ![]() It is the national bird of the country of Guatemala. It is half of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, a bird-serpent. The Quetzal (pronounced “ketsal”) is special in many ways to many people. Seeing this bird is almost everyone’s grand goal in visiting the cloud forest. ![]() Soon we found other guides and other hikers choking the path and staring up into the canopy. He turned back to whisper, “They have found the Resplendent Quetzal.” He put the orchid down and started walking briskly toward the whistle. Our guide through the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve in the highlands of Costa Rica had just picked up a fallen orchid to show us when we heard a whistle. ![]()
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