Spirit Coatis — Pale in the Green
Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica
White-nosed coati · Nasua narica
I had come to wait for a tapir.
Before sunrise, I had set out for a waterhole near the southern tip of the Osa Peninsula, hoping to photograph a Baird’s tapir. For several days, I had returned to the same place and waited for hours.
A tapir would have been worth the wait. What I found instead was perhaps more extraordinary still: six pale adult coatis among the darker animals of a larger band. Their coats ranged through white and cream, with darker patches still visible on their limbs and tails.
Locally, they are known as spirit coatis, a name that echoes the white spirit bears of Canada’s Pacific coast. Seen between the palm leaves, it felt fitting.
Pale lives in a forest of shadows.
A local ecologist identified their unusual colouring as leucism, a reduction in pigmentation that can leave the coat partly or largely white. Finding six adults together left me with more questions than the scattered accounts I could find would answer.
Against the deep greens around them, their pale fur seemed conspicuous. In a landscape shared with jaguars and pumas, that visibility raises questions about the cost of standing out. All six, though, had reached adulthood.
Shared ancestry might help explain why several pale animals belonged to the same band. Their lives together, and the cover offered by trees, could also influence their chances of survival. An hour of observation could reveal little of how those influences balanced.
Even here, the forest meets gardens, paths and places where people stay. Whether that proximity changed the risks for this group remained an open question.
An hour within their morning.
I spent a little over an hour with the coatis. They stayed mostly in the trees, coming briefly to the ground, alert as the rainforest stirred around us. Palm leaves concealed parts of their faces; branches broke the outlines of their bodies. Their colouring caught my eye, while much of their lives remained hidden.
I had arrived with a particular photograph in mind. The coatis drew me into a morning unfolding on its own terms. Their local name stayed with me: something of the spirit of this forest, where life keeps appearing in forms I had not thought to look for.