Costa Rican Frogs, Snakes and Lizards

From November 14 through November 19 of 2023, I spent a week on a bird photography trip in Costa Rica led by Mark Smith (YouTube & Instagram), the same photographer I worked with on my February 2024 Florida trip. While the trip was focused on photographing birds, the first place we stopped was Frog’s Heaven, a family ranch converted to ecotourism. There we photographed four species of frogs and two types of pit vipers. By focusing on frogs, snakes, and lizards, this blog post will be an interlude between posts about my Florida bird photos and my Costa Rica bird photos.

The frog above is a Red-Eyed Tree Frog. This image makes me think of Kermit. Somehow, the shape and pose of this frog leads me to imagine Kermit looking at a rainbow and writing the Rainbow Connection song in his head - if only Kermit had a stunning blue, yellow, and green outfit and had orange rather than white eyes.

This is a photo of a Splendid Leaf Frog also called a Barred Leaf Frog. In this photo, I like that only the eyes, mouth, and left leg are in focus. In photography, this is referred to as a shallow depth of field where the depth of field is the portion of the image in sharp focus. More generally, this style of photography is called macro photography, where one takes photos of small things usually from very close distances. Using a digital camera, this usually requires a special macro lens that can focus up close. Most cell phones are capable of macro photography. For those of us whose eyes have trouble reading small print, this feature of cell phone cameras can be very useful.

Above is a Blue Jeans Poison Dart Frog also referred to as a Strawberry Poison Dart Frog. Poison dart frogs have toxic skin. They get their name because indigenous people used rub their blow gun darts and arrowheads on the backs of these frogs to make them poisonous. If one touches these frogs with bare hands, your hands can become tingly or numb. Eating these frogs would be bad and possibly even fatal. However, getting the toxin directly into your blood stream is the worst exposure and extremely dangerous. Interestingly, poison dart frogs are not actually poisonous in one sense. Their toxicity comes from alkaloids gained by eating formicine ants and other small invertebrates. In many zoos, these frogs are fed diets of different insects such as fruit flies and crickets which do not have alkaloids, so these captive frogs end up not having toxic skin.

Here is a Black and Green Poison Dart Frog. Each of the frogs above were caught on the Frog’s Heaven property; however, once caught, they are kept in captivity for some period of time to allow people to photograph them. In the ranch itself, the family owners have actively nurture a supportive habitat for these frogs to survive. For us to get these pictures, a handler will spray the frog with water to ensure it is clean and give it a nice reflective sheen. They will then place the frog on a branch or leaf, and hold an LED light to illuminate the frog. All of this allows us to get beautiful images of these frogs and to practice our macro photography technique, but it is important to understand that these are staged photos. I was not walking through the jungle, searching and finding exquisite frogs perched perfectly in natural light.

In addition to the four frog species, Frog’s Heaven has two different types of pit vipers. This is a Side-Striped Palm Pit Viper. What a person thinks of a photograph is highly subjective. For me, I absolutely love this image. I do not think I can really describe why. I can easily point to features that I love such as the tongue, the eye and the scales around it, the water droplets on the scales on the far right, or the blurred coils of the snake in both the foreground and background. However, for me, there is something more that I cannot describe that makes the photo just feel right.

This second snake is an Eyelash Pit Viper. I have had some people say that they find this shot rather intimidating. Obviously, the fact that the pit viper is pointed at us makes it feel more threatening. Additionally, the pit viper is above us looking down. This is generally a position of dominance which can generate anxiety. Finally, the viper is very close, so it does not feel like one could jump back fast enough should this snake strike.

The next day, while photographing birds at a place called Pierella Ecological Garden, I spotted this Green Basilisk on a branch. Unlike all of the other photographs in this post, this photo was not staged. I did not photograph from up close this using a macro lens, but rather from a distance using a huge telephoto lens.

On our third day, we were photographing birds at a place called Donde Cope. In addition to a wide variety of birds that would show up at their carefully nurtured natural gardens, they also had two types of glass frogs (below) and this Helmet-Headed Basilisk. I am captivated by the color of the eye in this photo.

Glass frogs are named such because it is possible to see some of their internal organs such as heart, blood vessels, and bones through their translucent skin especially their underbellies. This particular frog is a Reticulated Glass Frog.

Finally, to finish up, here is a photo of Ghost Glass Frog. I find the eyes on this frog simply amazing.

Next up will be a series of bird photography posts from this Costa Rica trip.