When animals attack

We were down at the beach one day when the dog pictured above ran out to Candler in the ocean and started playing with him.
Sidenote - There are dogs everywhere here - I'm surprised I haven't seen one smooshed in the road yet. Ticos do not keep their dogs in the house, so they just kind of run around and will follow you down the beach. All the ones we have encountered have been really friendly.
Sidenote #2 - The animals here very lean compared with animals in the US. Cows, cats, dogs, horses, everything is just leaner.
On with the story...so this dog starts playing with Candler on the beach, and when it is time to leave, he follows us. Eventually we start getting closer and closer to a pelican that was just standing on the beach, watching to catch fish. The dog sees the pelican and runs up to it. To my surprise it doesn't fly away, it just stands there. The dog stops about 5 feet from the pelican and slowly inches his way closer. The pelican just watches the dog. Then all of the sudden, the pelican starts charging the dog with its beak flapping. This goes on for a few seconds, just long enough for me to get a shot with my camera. Candler and I are standing about 10 feet from the dog on pelican brawl when the pelican has decided he's had enough of our heckling and runs after Candler and I. We both run. I run off barefoot over the hot sand, in turn burning the bottoms of my feet in the process. So, apparently pelicans are mean. Who knew?

While on the subject of Costa Rican animals...the squirrels here look different than the ones back home. I wanted to get a picture of this, and one day walking into town I saw one not too far away in a tree. I took several pictures, and decided to see if I could get closer for a better pic. This squirrel would not move. When I got this close, I started to get kind of scared because it just sat there looking at me, like it was daring me to come one step closer. I really think it wanted to gnaw my face off. Don told me not to get any closer because it looked like it was ready to pounce on me, so I backed off.

Also, today on the way back from the beach we came across a bunch of howler monkeys in a tree. I never seem to have my camera when we find howler monkeys. Howler monkeys are maybe 2x the size of a house cat. To me, they sound like King Kong when they "howl". The first time I heard it when we were zip lining, I couldn't believe that the sound I was hearing was coming from something that small. The howler monkeys here are all black, except the males have white balls. Apparently this way the spermies stay at a cooler temperature. I can't help but giggle everytime I see them. So, Candler and I stop to look at the monkeys for a bit. One starts to poop. Then he pees. The pee is closer to us. Another one moves down the tree closer to us and relieves itself as well. We take this as our sign to leave before we get rained upon by monkey feces. I found this pic on the web, if you look, you can see that this is a male .