The Monteverde Cloud Forest is a reserve on the continental divide of Costa Rica, in Puntarenas province, a ridge at 1,500 metres that lives inside the cloud rather than under it, crossed on hanging bridges through a forest of 500 species of orchid, and the home of the resplendent quetzal, the bird that people cross the world to see, found by its call and shown in a scope trailing its two tail streamers. The reserve was founded in 1972 on land settled by American Quakers, and it is soaked by pelo de gato, cat's hair, the fine sideways mist that the Caribbean trade winds pour over the divide, strongest in December and January, keeping the ridge inside a cloud for hours; the trails run under trees furred with moss and hung with bromeliads to a suspension bridge slung across a ravine, where the canopy arrives at eye level, and an hour of climbing ends at a wooden platform called La Ventana, the window, on the line where the country drains two ways, with the wind coming through it. At the feeders by the gate a dozen species of hummingbird fight over sugar water at arm's length, from the violet sabrewing, big and bad-tempered, to the coppery-headed emerald, which lives nowhere but Costa Rica.
The quetzals nest in rotting trunks near fruiting wild avocado trees from February to June, and from March to May the males are most visible, streamers trailing between feeding trips, while the three-wattled bellbirds start calling from the treetops with a sound like a hammer on an anvil. On a night walk the forest changes cast, with kinkajous, sloths and tarantulas in the torchlight. The canopy zip-line, now a ride in tourist forests from Thailand to the Alps, started here as a research tool and became a paying attraction, and the reserve on the far flank of the mountains was paid for by schoolchildren around the world, now larger than Monteverde itself. Monteverde is a forest that lives in a cloud, and the quetzal is its reason.