Green Heron After one final visit to the bird feeders and breakfast we left Selva Verde and made our way by coach towards our next port of call, Laguna lodge on the northern Caribbean coast. On route we drove through a large banana plantation, where we saw the banana equivalent of a railroad crossing as huge bunch after bunch of bananas were pulled across the road on a very Heath Robinson looking contraption. This is a memory that I’m sure will float back to me the next time I am enjoying a Costa Rican banana. Driving further along the road we saw a group of people looking up into a tree where a Two Toed Sloth was miraculously right out in the open munching on leaves. The others we had seen were more like big furry tennis balls curled up and asleep. Two-toed sloths spend most of their lives hanging upside down from trees. Strangely, they actually can’t walk, so they pull themselves hand-over-hand to move around in their characteristic extremely slow ma...
Eastern Black Redstart The attractive Eastern Black Redstart has been on my radar for some time as a bird I would like to see and photograph. This winter there have been two of them in the UK, one at Filey in Yorkshire earlier this winter and more recently a first winter, i.e. hatched this spring, male at Sheringham on the Norfolk coast. So on Wednesday I set sail on a pre-storm Goretti visit to Sheringham. Black Redstarts tend to spend a lot of time on the ground foraging and the Sheringham bird, true to form, had spent a long time in amongst the formal gardens on the esplanade at Sheringham. I arrived just before 10am on a truly bitterly cold morning and was immediately very glad that I had dug my thermals and warm hat out for the trip. Half a dozen people were milling around the general area the Redstart had been frequenting and it had been spotted once that morning on a roof. It took another hour or so for it to put in another brief roof appe...