Birding a Neotropical Paradise – Costa Rica days 1 and 2

    

Green Hermit

Somehow towards the end of last year I persuaded my ever suffering wife to give me a 3 week pass out on my 70th birthday to go on a Costa Rica birding adventure organised by Heatherlea. Fast forward to 1st November this year and the day I thought would never come did and I flew with 9 other birders and our friendly knowledgeable UK guide, Jenna, on a  BA flight to Costa Rica. What would have been a fairly mundane flight over was greatly enhanced by being upgraded to business class where I found myself sitting next to none other than Jeremy Clarkson! Some eleven hours later we landed at San Jose and after a brief panic when one of my bags was temporary lost we met our amazing guide for the next 19 days, Paco, and our wonderful driver, Rodrigo.  A short coach ride through San Jose took us to our base for the next two nights, Hotel Bougainvillea in the outskirts of the capital city.

I’ll talk a lot about Costa Rica and its birding delights in subsequent blogs but here is a starter for ten for orientation. Costa Rica is on the whole safe, clean and the locals are very friendly, certainly compared to, say, my experience of Mexico. Costa Rica aligns well with my own personal moral compass. There is no army, the local saying is teachers not soldiers, and they are very environmentally focused. Some 28 percent of land is set aside as national parks and in many of them no commercial activity whatsoever is permitted. Very admirably, in my humble opinion, all hunting was banned in the 1990’s. Oh what I would give for a similar ban in the UK but realistically that’s not happening any time soon! What makes Costa Rica such a desirable birding destination is its wide range of differing habitat. The country is bisected by central mountains which starkly differentiate the climate and habitat on the Pacific and Caribbean sides such that a journey as short as 50 miles can completely change the habitat, flora, and fauna encountered. Guidebooks describe the climate as having a wet and dry season but this seems to me to be a gross generalisation. True the dry forests  located in lower elevations on the North Pacific coast do have a well-defined wet and dry season but in the cloud and rain forests it can and does rain pretty much any when. I heard Paco describe the seasons as a wet season and a fairly wet season! Vast amounts of rain are dumped on the mountainous central regions as weather blows in from the Caribbean sea. A somewhat incredible annual rainfall of 5 meters is common here and Paco told us that one area averages a truly astonishing 8 meters of annual rainfall. I found the temperature to be fairly pleasant, typically in the mid-twenties Celsius but the humidity, permanently >90%, was more of a struggle.

 

Being some 10 degrees north of the equator there is no real difference in the seasonal day length, it gets light at 5am and dark at 5 pm year round. The general daily routine was to get up early, grab a coffee and get a good hours birding in before a 7am breakfast. On our first morning I looked out over the hotel garden from my bedroom window as it got light and saw my first bird of the trip, a bright yellow and slate grey Tropical Kingbird. It says something about the wide ranging avian delights on offer that I wasn’t really giving them a second glance after a few days!

 

Our first pre-breakfast garden walk with Paco gave us an early taste of the shear variety and number of birds we would encounter in the coming weeks. Various hummingbirds were already busy gathering nectar from the many tropical flowers,  an imposing Crested Caracara sat high up on a dead branch surveying the early morning activity and a Mottled Owl dozed as it roosted in a tall dense bamboo. I had estimated that I would need a 2 Tb hard drive to store my photos on during the trip but I wondered after the first hour of birding whether this would be enough! We encountered the national bird of Costa Rica in the hotel gardens, the Clay-coloured Thrush, for the first time. This would become a daily viewing of what is, in all honestly, a rather drab coloured bird, certainly when compared to the overwhelming abundance of other startling birds. A somewhat strange choice for national bird!

Crested Caracara

The quality of the local guide makes or breaks a trip such as this. In this regard I really can’t speak highly enough of Paco. His bird identification skills and knowledge of local sites were unsurpassable. I guess you would pretty much take this for granted on an expensive foreign birding trip such as this. What made Paco extra special in my humble opinion were his superb people skills and his unwavering friendship.

Rufous-tailed Hummingbird

Blue-grey Tanger

After breakfast we made our way by coach to the small café Soda y Mirador Cinchona (also known as Colibri Café or Soda Mirador Catarata San Fernando).  This roadside restaurant and viewpoint is located in the middle elevations of the Caribbean slope. Here we were in the Caribbean foothills where the moist air coming off the Caribbean sea rises, cools  and dumps predacious amounts of rain with an annual rainfall of 6 meters being common. Like many restaurants and cafes in Costa Rica, hummingbird feeders were viewable from a veranda and we enjoyed our first tase of what would be many an enjoyable hour engrossed in the comings and goings of the Hummingbirds at the feeders as we drank another excellent cup of Costa Rican coffee.  The Hummingbirds, being completely habituated to humans,  buzzed and danced around our heads as they moved from feeder to feeder.  Violet Saberwing seemed to be the thugs of the show, aggressively chasing off other hummingbirds from their favourite feeder. Most places also put out a selection of fruit, mainly bananas and pawpaw, to bring in other birds. We saw gorgeous Red-footed Honeycreepers, migrant Baltimore Oriels and brightly coloured Red-headed Barbet to name but a few. 

Green-crowned Brilliant

Black-bellied Hummingbird

Copper-headed Emerald

Female Copper-headed Emerald????

 

       

Violet Sabrewing

Red-footed Honeycreeper

    

Silver-throated Tanger

Baltimore Oriel

Red-headed Barbet

Summer Tanger

From here we moved onto the Peace Waterfall gardens where we again enjoyed the Hummingbird feeders. One of the staff suggested he take down the feeders for a short while and instead photographically position a bromeliad flower which he filled with sugar water. The Green Crowned Brilliants perched very obligingly on the flowers as per some of the pics below. 

  

Green-crowned Brilliant

Buff-throated Salator

A relaxed lunch in the restaurant was followed by a walk along the steep paths towards the waterfall.  After a first bird filled day it was time to return to the hotel Bougainvillea to fill out our checklists and have dinner.

   

      

The rain forest and waterfall at La Paz Waterfall gardens and Peace lodge

   

Tufted Flycatcher

Day two started with another very enjoyable and thoroughly productive pre breakfast tour of the garden. My personal favourite was a very photogenic and visually stunning Lesson’s Motmot which was perched on a somewhat incongruous statue in the garden.

Lesson's Motmot

A feature in the gardens and on the rest of the trip were the numerous migrant North American Warblers recently arrived to avoid the harsh northern winters. I think we saw most of the commoner North American Warblers in “winter” attire, the plumage that rare vagrants to Europe have in autumn. Bay-breasted Warblers, in particular, seemed very common.

 

After breakfast  Paco and Rodrigo loaded up the coach with our bags and we set off towards our home for the next two nights, Arenal observatory lodge in the shadow of Arenal volcano. Yet more excellent birding stops were made on route at La Fortuna and Bogarin’s trail. I particularly liked Bogarin’s trail where we had our first encounter with the numerous beautiful Herron species that Costa Rica has on offer.

 

An incredibly confiding immature Bare-throated Tiger Heron was looking for prey in the small pond next to reception and I took far too many pictures of it. I’m totally reliant here on two things with my species identification. Firstly Paco’s immeasurable birding skills and secondly that I’ve ticked the correct Tiger Heron box on my check list as first year birds of Bare-throated, Fasciated and Rufescent Tiger Heron are very hard to tell apart. While photographing the Tiger Heron an attractive Grey Napped Wood Rail briefly took my cameras attention. Along the trail we also saw Yellow-crowned Night Heron, the visually stunning White-throated Euphonia  and our second Motmot species, the broad-billed Motmot. An example of the Night Heron was famously found in Ireland last year pulling in birders from far and wide. On the road to the reception an adult Bare-throated Tiger Heron walked nonchalantly across the road without a care in the world seemingly totally oblivious to our presence and cameras pointed in his direction.

First year Bare-throated Tiger Heron

  

Grey-napped Wood Rail

    

Yellow-crowned Night Heron

  

Broad-billed Motmot

Yellow-crowned Euphonia

Adult Bare-throated Tiger Heron

We also encountered the rather strange looking Great Curassow with its head crest raised. Apparently they were a favourite of hunters prior to the nationwide ban.

   

Great Curassow

After another thoroughly enjoyable days birding with excellent company we made our way to the amazing Arenal observatory lodge, which will be the subject of my second blog.

 

As I’m almost entirely reliant on memory for locations etc, a very dangerous thing at my age I might add (!), any corrections to the inevitable mistakes would be greatly appreciated!

Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!