Birding a Neotropical Paradise – Costa Rica days 5 and 6

Pacific Screech Owl

 Our home for the next two nights was the wonderful La Ensenada Lodge, our own little bit of paradise. It was by far my favourite lodge of the whole trip being remote, rustic, and surrounded by wonderful countryside and birds. It was approach by driving for an hour on what is best described as dirt track – well done Rodrigo! I very much preferred this style of lodge to the much more touristy hotels we stayed in later.

The lodge was located on the gulf of Nicoya on the Pacific side of Costa Rica where the habitat was quite different to the rain forests of previous days. Here we were in the dry forest  which has a well-defined wet and dry season. In the dry season most of the trees shed their leaves to conserve water.

 

Thursday 7^th November started again with the usual early morning coffee followed by an hours pre-breakfast birding with Paco. Down a track a short distance from the lodge Paco showed us a group of Common Tent Making Bats who have a most  curious roosting behaviour. They bite through the midrib of a large leaf so that it folds in half to form an inverted-V-shaped shelter. This "tent" provides shelter from sun, wind, and rain.

 

We then walked down to a viewpoint over the Gulf where we were treated to some dazzling views of Magnificent Frigatebirds.

 

After  a heartly breakfast Paco took us for a real treat and one of the birding highlights of the whole trip for me. One of the gardeners had told Paco that he had found two Pacific Screech Owls roosting in the garden in a palm tree. I absolutely loved these characterful lovely Owls with their prominent fluffy ear  tuffs. They seemed to  keep watch by snoozing, somewhat comically, with one eye partially open. Having said that they seemed completely unperturbed by our presence and, once again, I took far too many photographs.

 

Pacific Screech Owls

Walking further around the grounds a Brown-crested Flycatcher posed nicely for photographs in a tree. I read that this bird is notoriously difficult to tell apart from Nutting’s Flycatcher which can also be found locally in the dry forest so we were once again indebted to Pacos wonderful identification knowledge. Next up was a Lesser Nighthawk which Paco spotted roosting on a branch. This brought back happy memories of an encounter with a Common Nighthawk, the only one on the UK list, which rather incongruously spent a day perched atop a garden fence in Oxfordshire a few years back.

  

Brown-crested Flycatcher

  

Lesser Nighthawk

 Next Paco took us to a field which he was pretty sure contained at least one Double-striped Thick Knee, which, with its large globular eyes, bares more than a passing resemblance to our own Stone Curlew. After initially not finding the bird, Paco summonsed us into the field where we were treated to excellent views of this somewhat odd looking bird. It was also remarkably similar to another bird I have on my world list, the Spotted Thick knee which I have seen in Kenya - not too surprising as birds of their genus, Burhinus, are found on every continent except Antarctica. 

 

Double-striped Thick Knee

After another heartly lunch, which will be paid for by adding days to my planned new year alcohol free weight loss diet, and a short rest we headed down by coach to the nearby salt pans. These salt pans, sometimes called "Solar Salinas," use natural evaporation to harvest salt, creating unique landscapes where sun, wind, and shallow water produce sea salt and attract diverse birdlife and birdlife aplenty was certainly present! It really was a wader extravaganza  as Paco picked out more and more different waders. There were hordes of Western and Semipalmated Sandpipers and good numbers of many other waders including Willets, Black-necked stilts, Surfbirds, ,Semipalmated and Wilson’s Plovers and a solitary Lesser Yellowlegs. Of special note for me were also a small group of Marbled Godwits, the only one to have not yet occurred in the UK,  which means I have now seen all members of the Godwit family.

  

Roseate Spoonbill and a few friends

While we bird watched a number of Crocodiles kept a wary eye on us and we made sure we were never too close! We saw a Green Heron which was to become a common sighting for us  wherever there was water. I have again seen just one of these very rare vagrants to the UK,  which has just 8 records to date in, an MP’s garden in Pembrokeshire in April 2018.

Green Heron

 

Great views of Little Blue Heron and Snowy Egret again resulted in far too many photos being taken by yours truly. The Snowy Egret, which has been recorded just once in the UK and was not on my UK or World list, is quite hard to tell apart from the UK’s recent colonist, the Little Egret, but Paco told me that the latter had not yet been recorded in Costa Rica. Given the Egrets family relentless march  to occupy the whole world, I’m sure they will at some point!

Snowy Egret

Little Blue Heron

When we got back to the lodge I paid another quick visit to the Owls and rattled off yet more pictures to keep me busy during the long dark winter months.

 

  

The normal check listing with beer in hand was again followed by a heartly dinner featuring far too many calories before I dragged my weary body off to bed for an excellent undisturbed night’s sleep in this paradise called La Ensenada.

 

You’ll never guess what we did the following morning. Yep, you’ve got it, we went prebreakfast birding with Paco! We took a different route out into some open grassland. Now, I’m going to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what the bird is in my first picture of the day. Merlin cant find it so my best guess, based on our checklist, is Dusky-capped Flycatcher but it doesn’t look quite right - Update and many thanks to David and Derek , its a female Rose-throated Becard!

    

Female Rose-throated Beard

The highlight for me of this early morning birding walk was strangely enough not a bird. Rather it was a Tarantula Hawk Wasp which Jenna found rummaging about in the grass. Now there is a clue in the name for you of this wasps delightful little habit. It seemed completely obsessed  with one particular area where it soon located a Costa Rican Stripe-knee Tarantula which it had already paralysed. We speculated that it had already done this and that we had disturbed it. Now is the point where you jump to the next paragraph if you are the least bit squeamish. This adorable wasp stings and paralyses a Tarantula before laying a single egg on its   abdomen and then dragging it off to its burrow. The egg then hatches and eats the Tarantula!

 

Now, being the kind understanding parent that I am, I thought exposure therapy could help so I suggested to my very arachnophobic stepdaughter that I could bring the spider home for her as a Christmas present. She could then have all the fun of watching this intriguing natural phenomena in action. Rather harshly I thought, she then asked for my wife to cancel my ticket home!

 

                                               Tarantula Hawk Wasp

After breakfast we boarded our coach far too soon and left our little bit of paradise and headed to our next accommodation at the Punta Leona beach club and nature resort which was some 100 kilometres down the Pacific coast  from La Ensenada Lodge.

 

We had previously seen large flocks of raptors, mainly Black and Turkey Vultures, overhead on migration to South America. They like to rise up early morning on thermals to a great height and then use the potential energy they have gained to glide south. Their attraction to thermals means that they tend to migrate overland and with Costa Rica being a natural land bottle neck on their journey we had lots of good views of large flocks. It was hence nice on route to find a grounded Black Vulture perched on a tree giving us superb close-up views of this rather intimidating raptor.

   

Black Vulture

Near this spot we also had good views of the attractive Stripe-headed Sparrow. 

 

Stripe-headed Sparrow

As we drove along Jenna spotted another Double-striped Thick-knee in the grass and we stopped for some good views and more photographs. 

   

Double-striped Thick Knee

On route we also spotted an attractive grounded Crested Caracara, a type of Falcon. 

   

Crested Caracara

We arrived at Punta Leona around midday and took lunch, you might be picking up by now that there was a lot of eating on this trip, followed by a quick siesta before some mid-afternoon birding.  We had good views of an Iguana in what was to be their normal pose dozing in the mid-afternoon sun on an exposed branch.

 

A Yellow-throated Toucan, a characteristically neotropical bird that we encountered on a number of occasions, posed very photogenically for us.

Yellow-throated Tocan

 

A pair of Scarlet McCaw’s stole all our attention as they flew in. They are very loud birds and  there really is no escaping their presence. They make very loud, high and sometimes low-pitched, throaty squawks, squeaks and screams designed to carry many kilometres to call for their groups. Both the Scarlet and, more especially, the Green McCaw, to feature in a later blog, were widely persecuted for the cage bird trade but this is now very illegal and frowned on locally. Why oh why on earth would anyone get any pleasure from keeping such a beautiful creature in a cage!

 

After this thoroughly enjoyable late afternoon walk there was only one thing left to do for the day…. Eat of course!

 

 

 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!