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| 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 manner. Another strange and interesting factoid about Sloths is that their extremely low metabolic rate means that they can’t shiver to keep warm, presumably explaining their default tennis ball state. Carrying on with interesting factoids, their food can take up to a month to digest due to their slow metabolism and they only come close to the ground to defecate once a week. Depending on where the Sloth is in this cycle, faeces and urine can constitute up to 30% of their entire body weight!
It was quite hard to pull ourselves away from this extraordinary sight but eventually we had to continue our journey to a dock to catch a boat for the 30 minute river ride to Laguna lodge on the coast. This was a beautiful water side lodge with the river on one side and the Caribbean ocean on the other. After another filling and delicious lunch we embarked on the first of many boat rides over the next two days.
Soon we were treated to stunning views of a migratory Prothonotary Warbler. I was not sure what prothonotary meant so I looked it up and it is a chief clerk of various courts of law. A bit more googling informed me that it is named for its plumage, which resembles the yellow robes once worn by papal clerks. Not too surprisingly then, the adult male has a bright orange-yellow head and breast. It is one of the leaf warblers breeding in North America that has not been recorded in the UK, although it has been seen in the Azores, so I guess it must be on the radar as a future UK possibility. This would certainly result in a mega twitch!
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| Prothonotary Warbler |
We were then treated to some excellent views of both Green and Belted Kingfishers and various herons before we moved to the mouth of the estuary where Elegant and Royal Terns were resting on the sand. Another tern, whose identity had everyone scratching their heads, was hunting up and down the river. Better birders than me though soon had it tied down as a Fosters Tern, a bird I have seen precisely once in the UK.
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| Little Blue Heron |
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| Green Kingfisher |
Back at the lodge considerable excitement occurred when a large Huntsman’s spider was found resting peacefully on Donna’s bed. Luckily Paco was soon on hand to relocate it back outside but for the rest of the stay Donna’s room could be easily identified by the rolled up towels blocking the gap between the door and ground outside her lodge!
On the next day, Thursday 13th November, we assembled at 05:45 am for a prebreakfast boat ride where we had the rather strange sight of a Heron sitting in a fisherman’s boat. Apparently, they had become friends after the fisherman fed him one day and ever since they have become inseparable. Soon it was a case of rain stopped play as torrential tropical rain came down.
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| Fisherman's friend |
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| Grey-napped water Rail |
After lunch we headed out for our final boat trip and were treated to be best views we had of Green Heron on the whole trip. I think I mentioned before that this beautiful Heron is on my UK list curtesy of one that spent a few days in an MP’s garden in Wales.
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| Green Heron of the Welsh subspecies |
The Green Heron was well lit against a dark background and by underexposing by 3 stops I managed to capture this image against a seemly black back drop giving me one of my favourite photos of the trip.
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| Green Heron |
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| Viserion (with apologies to GOT) |
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| Boat-billed Heron |
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| Black-throated Trogon |
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| Fasciated Tiger-heron |
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| Caiman |
This boat ride also yielded my mammal of the trip when we found a beautiful Tamandua which was eating termites in a tree above the water allowing further great photo opportunities. Prior to this I had assumed that anteaters were always found on the ground. It was amazing to me that this large mammal could survive on a diet of termites and ants.
All too soon it was time to head back to the lodge for yet another delicious and filling dinner followed by a sound night’s sleep, only interrupted close to dawn by Howler monkeys, in our tropical paradise.
Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!
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