Field Notes: May 17, 2025 Location: Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, Costa Rica ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Encounter Summary: A hiking party sent me footage of Lumenfloris cataracta, known to local guides as "Quetzal’s Lamp," a calf-sized dome of slate bracts half-buried in rootmats. When they paused, the mass heaved and opened: five ember-orange petals unfurled, veins lacing like green lightning. The center seemed to blaze. Petals fanned and rippled but the animal held its ground, no threat beyond wind and

Field Notes: October 24, 2025 Location: Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, Costa Rica Encounter Summary: The night in the cloud forest is a profound and absolute blackness, a velvet void where the only light is what life itself creates. I was following a trail, my headlamp off to let my eyes adjust, when I saw it: a cluster of what I thought were bioluminescent mushrooms, glowing on the forest floor like a fallen constellation of turquoise fire. It was a perfect, silent, and beautiful colony. I cr