This article is one of a series on life in the campo, or country living in Costa Rica, as my wife and I* experienced it on our visits and after moving to Costa Rica. Each is a sort of time capsule, the stories evolving with us as we have lived more experiences and delved deeper into the culture.

A few weeks ago, as we were looking at a finca, I looked down and noticed a rather distinctive caterpillar.  It was happily munching away at a plant that looked familiar. The more I looked at the caterpillar, the more I was certain that I had seen it before, but not in Costa Rica.

After a bit, it struck me that it looked just like a monarch caterpillar, so I mentioned it to the gentleman who was with me, and he commented that he thought it wasn’t because monarchs migrate between the USA and someplace in Mexico.

Having my camera with me, I snapped a few photos and took them back to the casa to check on the Internet.  Sure enough, the caterpillar was a monarch.  Not all of them flap all the way to the North; some of them have the good sense to stay in the tropics.  The Costa Rican monarchs migrate only short distances.

We were, of course, excited about this new discovery.  This is one of the things I so enjoy about Costa Rica: the constant exposure to new things.  However, I often wonder what the locals are thinking when they see me getting excited about a bug that they have seen all of their lives and growing trees where they chopped them down so they could raise cattle.

*We are Fred and Amy Morgan, originally from the US. We bought a dairy farm in Costa Rica to plant trees in its pastures, then later caught a dream of turning all the land we can to permanently protected, sustainably maintained forest once the plantation trees have been harvested for profit. We make most of the wood from the plantations into furniture, flooring, and other wood products.

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