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| Ferruginous Pygmy Owl |
Our home for the next two nights was the amazing Arenal Observatory lodge in the shadow of the imposing Arenal volcano. The volcano was dormant for hundreds of years until 1968 when it erupted unexpectedly, destroying the small town of Tabacón tragically killing 87 people. Thankfully it has been dormant since the last eruption in October 2010. The area surrounding Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica is characterized by a humid and cloudy climate, influenced by its tropical location and varying elevations.
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| The only occasion in two days when the Volcano was not obscured by clouds! |
The dawn chorus was a rather unusual one, Howler Monkeys doing exactly what is says on the tin. Our first morning started with the usual coffee taken on the viewing balcony overlooking the volcano. Just after first light the feeders became very active keeping us all engrossed until our communal breakfast at 7am. A Black-striped Sparrow and a brightly coloured Summer Tanager were among the first birds to appear on the balcony.
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| Scarlet Tanger |
In the soft early morning light a Long -tailed Tyrant flycatcher emerged from the gloom. In typical Flycatcher fashion it perched on a prominent dead branch whilst making quick aerial sallies to catch flying insects. While sharing our UK Flycatchers feeding habits, it was very different in appearance to our Spotted and Pied Flycatchers particularly with its very prominent long central tail feathers.
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| Long-tailed Tyrant |
A bush beyond the feeders, soon christened the warbler bush, was very busy with recently arrived north American migrants, including Tennessee, Bay Breasted and Chestnut sided, replenishing energy supplies after their long journey. A flash of iridescent blue and yellow in a nearby bush was soon identified by Paco as a Golden-hooded Tanager. A brightly coloured Scarlet rumped Tanager, a bird we were to see quite often on our adventures, also treated us to good views at the feeders.
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| Golden-hooded Tanger |
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| Scarlet-rumped Tanger |
After a hearty breakfast, an early morning walk in the grounds and surrounding forest with Paco soon yielded a number of new species. On the path down from the lodge Paco challenged us to find a snake. I can’t remember which one of our gang found it but we were soon all looking at a stunning bright yellow eyelash viper, a species of pit viper, curled up rather comatosely in a tree fork. While not being the most venomous snake in Costa Rica, being bitten by it sounds like a far from pleasant experience! While rarely fatal, I found the following description of the effects of its venom “Bites are characterized by pain, edema, and ecchymosis at the site of the bite, sometimes with blisters, local necrosis, or defibrination” Luckily it is not known as an aggressive snake and true to form, it totally ignored us!
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| Yellow Eyelash Viper |
Black-cheeked Woodpecker
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| Gartered Trogon |
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| Spectacled Owl |
Other birds of note encountered in the rain forest included the rather bizarre looking Pale-billed Woodpecker and the visually stunning Collared Aracari.
Pale-billed Woodpecker
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| Collared Aracaci |
It was an unexpected feature of the trip that the dense rain and cloud forest were less productive than the forest edges and other areas. Quite often Paco would hear an interesting bird in the dense foliage but either find it hard to locate or, if we did get views, they tended to be quite fleeting and somewhat obscured.
Back at the lodge I found another new species on my bed – I think its some form of Sloth!
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| Probable Lesser-spotted Towel Sloth |
At this point it’s probably worth digressing into the subject of photographic equipment, particularly for anyone planning a first trip to this wonderful country. The Cannon R5 body is pretty much the only one I use these days being incomparably better, in more ways that I’ve got time to go into here, than my previous 1DX bodies. My go to lens on previous foreign trips, e.g. Kenya, has been my trusty Cannon 500m F4 often in combination with an extender. I’m just about able to fit it into my cabin luggage and I find its performance across the technical spectrum flawless, even with a x2 extended installed. The in-lens and camera body stabilisation is very effective at removing hand vibration such that I’m quite comfortable hand holding it. Its big disadvantage is how bulky it is. For this trip I really didn’t fancy lugging it on long walks in the humid rain forest so I made a big compromise and took my much more compact 100-500mm Cannon zoom lens. While there is undoubtably some reduction in overall image quality compared to a prime lens, whose optics are optimised to work at one focal length, by far the biggest disadvantage of this zoom lens is its light gathering capability.
Its physically very obvious when you look at the front end of the lens with hood installed. The zoom looks like a teacup compared to the front end bucket of the 500mm. You may think that the bright equatorial light would at least partially mitigate this disadvantage but the rain forests are very dense and hence can be quite dim. This disadvantage mainly materialises itself in terms of the ISO speed required. I normally have my camera set up as aperture priority with a minimum shutter speed and maximum ISO number set. The low light in the rain forest and high f number of the zoom meant that I was often operating at uncomfortably high ISO speeds resulting in noisy images, a problem that can be overcome to some extent using Lightroom post processing software. Here I’m about to get on my old hobby horse, for goodness sake shoot in RAW if you are serious about your bird photography! A Jpeg image is typically 2 to 6 times smaller than a RAW image meaning you are throwing away 50 to 85% of the data that your expensive SSD is capturing. Basically the Jpeg format takes up to 6 pixels and averages them to reduce it to one with a very simple averaging algorithm. The noise reduction algorisms in lightroom are far more advanced than this but can only be used on the full RAW set of data.
By and large in bird photography the bigger the focal length the better but there was a big exception on this trip. You can and do get very close to the Hummingbirds at the feeders meaning two things, the long minimum focal distance of a high focal length lens is a disadvantage and, certainly with the zoom, working at the high shutter speeds required to capture the hummingbirds in flight pushes you into ridiculously high ISO speeds. Keen photographer Donna spent a lot of time capturing the Hummingbirds in flight on our trip using her 200 mm F2.8 prime lens, an absolutely ideal setup for this application.
Finally, a word of warning, be very careful swapping lenses or extenders around while in the field in Costa Rica. While the lenses are well sealed against the humidity using rubber O-rings, the open camera body is not and will be very intolerant of internal moisture caused by the high humidity. I hadn’t thought about this until another birder told me, thankfully before my trip, that his Cannon camera had failed in the field in Costa Rica because of this exact same problem. I had a sealable plastic bag with desiccant in it in which I stored my equipment overnight to help dry it out as the metal to metal seals between camera and lens are not completely watertight .
The next day we were back at the lodge bird feeders at dawn where we were treated to closer views of the Black-cheeked Woodpecker feeding on a big slice of watermelon while the Tyrant Flycatcher was again on its favourite perch.
Black-cheeked Woodpecker
After breakfast we checked out of the lodge and drove down the valley to Arenal lake. On route more birding stops yielded Grey Hawk, Keel-billed Motmot, Black Throated Trogon and a stunning Laughing Falcon. The road towards the dam was, to say the least, rather interesting but Rodrigo’s brilliant driving skills soon came to the fore! Rodrigo dropped us off a ways from the dam and we birded along the path in rather challenging misty conditions. The mist slowly cleared and at the dam we saw distant Neotropical Cormorants. Re-joining Rodrigo and the coach we headed towards Canas. At one stop, I can’t remember exactly where I’m afraid, note to self- keep a journal on the next big trip (!), we encountered the strange looking White-nosed Coatimundi, an omnivore that forages mostly on the ground for small vertebrates, fruits, carrion, insects, snakes and eggs. It can climb trees easily and, like a monkey, uses its long tail for balancing.
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| White-nosed Coatimundi |
Keel-billed Motmot Grey Hawk
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| Laughing Falcon |
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| Yellow-napped Parrot |
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| Black-throated Trogon |
We took lunch at Café Macadamia situated on a hill above the west shore of the lake. Here we watched Wood Stork flying over the lake.
After lunch we headed towards a fish farm on the edge of Canas which we birded from the coach. Here we saw lots of new species including a rather strange looking Limpkin, Snail Kite, and Osprey. Views were a little obscured over the bank from the coach hence no photos.
At another stop at (?), oh for that journal (!), we had great views of the owl of the day, the diminutive Ferruginous Pygmy Owl, a small plump Owl patterned mainly in attractive shades of cinnamon. The size of this little chap is obviously very misleading as I read that they are quite capable of tackling birds more than twice their size!
Beyond Canas we were soon in the pacific lowlands, a diverse region featuring both tropical rainforests and seasonal dry forests. We passed large rolling fields and occasional old trees, very different to the habitat we had left behind. From the coach a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, also known as the Swallow-tailed Flycatcher, was spotted somewhat distantly on a post causing Rodrigo to manoeuvre one of his many bird related reverses giving us all excellent views.
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| Scissor-tailed Flycatcher |
A long drive on rough tracks took us to the wonderful remote Ensenada Lodge in the dry forest, my favourite lodge of the whole trip and the main subject of my next blog. The check list was completed with cold beer in hand followed by an excellent dinner on the veranda with views down to the water to round off another truly exceptional day birding in paradise.
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!
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