Along came a Pica Caballo

Number of ticks removed to date: 22
Number of days tick-free: 13 (maybe tick season is finally over??)

Rob and I were eating dinner by the light of the crescent moon at a table outside our room when we saw a dark shape moving along the ground. Tarantula. The first one I’ve seen around the Hacienda. And while it was not huge, it was larger and darker than the three or so I’ve seen in the forest. Still, no shrieking. “I’m amazed at how calm you are,” Rob said as we studied it. Clearly, he remembers the days when I couldn’t even touch my Animal Behavior textbook because there was a picture of a spider inside.

One of the guys who works as a volcano guide was walking by, and we gestured to the arthropod. He shone his flashlight on it and stood looking at it for several long moments. I asked him (in Spanish), “This is not dangerous, is it?” He looked at me earnestly and assured me that yes, it was dangerous. He said that if it bit your thumb, you would lose the thumb. I know I wasn’t confused by the Spanish because he used gestures to illustrate the point. He went on to say that if a horse got bitten by one of these on its foot, the horse’s entire leg would become immobile. My throat tightened. “This is a pica caballo?” The fabled horse-biting tarantula that almost made me reconsider doing fieldwork in Nicaragua. “Si, si, es un pica caballo,” he assured me. He said that we should kill it. Speaking over the lump in my throat, I told him that I had a machete in my room and he said that would be good. I usually have a no-kill policy concerning wild animals, but when it comes to spiders, that flies out the window. I thought of the time that Pablo (my professor, not the grad student) told me he found a fer-de-lance (poisonous snake) on the trail in Costa Rica and although he normally wouldn’t have killed it, he did so because he didn’t want it to bite any of the students who would be coming through later. I thought maybe this was a similar situation. The offending arachnid was really close to the rooms (ours included), and I wouldn’t want someone to lose their thumb or worse. So I handed over my machete and the deed was done. One less pica caballo in this world to worry about; how many others are out there? I feel like I need to wear a full suit of armor when I go to sleep tonight.

Local people generally know what they’re talking about when it comes to the flora and fauna around here, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t believe (or doesn’t want to believe?) that this thing was actually a pica caballo. All the pictures of pica caballos on the internet show them as being much larger and much hairier than the thing we saw. If only my entomologist sister-in-law had been visiting, she could probably have told me exactly what it was.

At any rate, I’m exhausted after a 14-hour work day that even included the Toughness Tester, so I’ve got to sign off and get some sleep soon. Thanks for reading.