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May 2021

-  Tree Frogs  -

The cloud rainforest of Monteverde in Costa Rica is a truly wondrous place. "It's always humid and foggy there," my husband Klaus told me, recalling a previous trip. But climate change isn’t sparing the cloudy rainforest either, because when we arrived there, it was glistening in the sunshine. 'This is Marsupilami country', I thought on this sunny colourful day, fascinated by the sight of the tall trees with lush canopies, long lianas on their mighty arms and many bromeliads on their trunks.

Wondrous little tree frogs live in this primeval forest. They are only the size of a thumb. But it is not the fact that they can secrete toxins to protect themselves, but how touchingly they look after their offspring that fascinates me about these animals. Before we left, I had seen a film report about the frogs that amazed me. They lay 5 to 6 eggs in a small pool of water on the ground. The hatched tadpoles soon 'climb' onto their mother's back. The frog then carries one tadpole after the other to a bromeliad on the trunk. Water collects in its calyx – and the frog lets the little tadpole slide into its new nursery: one in each bromeliad. Day after day, the mother returns and lays an unfertilised egg in each calyx, on which the tadpole feeds until it has developed into a frog.

Of course, I did not succeed in painting the little animals in their natural habitat. After all, they live in the treetops and are nocturnal. So, we visited a nature park's ranarium – and I was lucky: I was able to paint two small tree frogs there for the first time, but they hurriedly sought the darkness. After that, the 'red-eyed tree frog'. Sleeping, it is almost invisible, because the green of its back does not differ from a leaf. But when it wakes up and stretches its limbs, the most colourful animal I have ever seen appears. In the cloudy rainforest, it is surely surpassed in its colourfulness only by a bird, the long and colourful feathered quetzal, which was sighted very close to me on the day I painted the bromeliads. Unfortunately, it did not show itself to me – or did I simply overlook it among all the orchids, butterflies and hummingbirds in the wondrous forest of leaves?

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