Costa Rica Part III: Catarata Del Toro and Braulio Carrillo National Park

Ok! Well, like usual, I'm doing an awful job at blogging this bird trip...but we all knew that's what would happen. You would think that being sequestered at home all the time now that I would be churning out posts at a rapid clip, but no! It turns having a pandemic unfold around me, while being trapped with a toddler who badly wants breaks from her parents and has practically ceased napping (which, for you nonbreeders out there, is a very bad thing) is not at all conducive to bird blogging. What have I been doing in my free moments while not parenting super hard, or, alternatively, in a catatonic state of despair? Well, among some of the more typical nonbirder things (catching up on stuff like Picard and Tiger King) I've been birding the shit out of my yard, which has been a good respite from world collapse. More on that another time.

To pick up back where we left off in the last post, in the afternoon we took a trip to Catarata Del Toro to see...well, what there was to see. I used the maps.me app to navigate for the entire trip, and while it was usually solid, it took us a very weird way up to the waterfall from Hotel Gavilan. Fortunately, this route took us to our only Red-breasted Meadowlarks of the trip and allowed for a Groove-billed Ani crush.

This private reserve offers some GERI BIRDING, and also a very large garden loaded with porterweed that you have to walk a ways to get to (porterweed is manna for a multitude of hummingbird species). The feeders here had Green-crowned Brilliants, a geri standard. This one, with the extensive white on the throat and underparts, is a female.

Facemelting Violet Sabrewings were present in good numbers.

Green Hermit is the other enormous hummingbird you can expect to find frequenting feeders at certain places.

The main target bird here was Sooty-faced Finch, a Costa Rica-Panama endemic. They are not reliable at many places in Costa Rica, but they are a known commodity here. I was STOKED to find one on a path after a relatively short time looking, and then confused to watch it fly up to a cluster of nanners/platanos and just go to town on fruit. The bird wasn't exactly confiding but we got some nice long looks at the sooty-faced fiend all the same. Another target bird people come here for is Black-bellied Hummingbird, which we saw as well, though we got better looks previously at the one at La Cinchona.

Bananaquit is another common geri bird, or Geri Bird if you prefer.

An Olive-striped Flycatcher dropped down for some nice eye-level looks for a moment. What can I tell you about Olive-striped Flycatchers? Pretty much nothing, though their name is helpfully descriptive at least.

We did not do the main waterfall trail, as it is steep and loud and presumably the most peopled, but there are some really good views of it elsewhere. It's a really good waterfall, highly recommended, it's not why we were there but it did not disappoint. The birding here was not fantastic for us but I'm sure it could have been if we were there in the morning instead of the afternoon, or if the weather hadn't been so dreary.

The next morning it was off to the Braulio Carrillo National Park area. The El Tapir garden, famous for its Snowcaps (but less so for potentially good birding trails also present), has had only intermittent access since last year and now has a huge metal gate in front of it and highway construction going on directly in front of that while we were there, so no joy on getting in that day and it was yet another Snowcapless trip to Costa Rica. Ouch though. Next time...I will not fail, and go look for them at Rancho Naturalista where they are notoriously easy.

But no worries, we went just another minute down the highway to the Braulio Carrillo trails. The Quebrada Gonzales ranger station was still closed but we had no problem getting onto the El Ceibo Trail, (on the west side of the highway) before paying our entrance fees and doing the other loop by the ranger station.

We had some flocks but none of the insane megaflocks or crazy tanager diversity that we experienced in 2012. As is common here, there were some slow stretches and a number of intriguing but extremely uncooperative birds. There were multiple Buff-throated Foliage-Gleaners though, even a couple cooperative ones like this one.

These swifts blew by at one point and I fired off a clip of docu-crushes...they were gone in just a few seconds and I pretty much forgot about these photos until recently. Now I know they were either White-chinned or Spot-fronted (hat tip to Pat for ID consultation)...both of which would be LIFE BIRDS. My money is heavily on White-chinned but I will let them remain a "slash"...life is truly pain. We did really poorly with swift viewing on this trip in general because we are bad at stuff apparently.

The coolest thing we found (Jen found), if you ask me, was this thing labelled an "oriole snake" on Jen's hilarious (but surprisingly useful) laminated Costa Rica wildlife foldout pamphlet thing that she always had on her. It was long as fuck! We were trying to get a look at some distant, aggravating antwren thing and Jen noticed this snake dripping down a tree trunk in the foreground.

Very good snake. Much length. Quite friendly. Photos don't do it justice. 

You can count on cheerful Buff-rumped Warblers to provide company on trails at many places in Costa Rica. If you are creeping along a trail hoping and praying to see an antpitta or tinamou or quail dove on the trail ahead of you, you will instead see tons of these.

Spider monkey was a lifer mammal. I have no idea how that is possible, because we saw them seemingly everywhere and didn't see a single one on the previous trip. They are good at climbing and stuff. They really do use their tails like another appendage, pretty cool to see in action.

I am not as enamored with monkeys as some people but their facial expressions are undeniably humanish and regularly hilarious.

It was so good to be in the warm embrace of manakins again. This is a male White-ruffed, looking snazzy.

I think that's it for this post. I did get Slaty Antwren and Plain Antvireos as lifers, though with disappointing looks at each. The birding was not as raging as it could be and being locked out of potential Snowcap was a kick in the nuts, but you can't win 'em every time can you? Fortunately we would get a huge birding win later that day, I'll get to that next time.

Puerto Rico Winter Tour Y2K16: Humacao and Ceiba Country Inn

December 3: Again we woke up fighting the blear (do you blear what I blear?) that always comes with getting up hella early in tropical places with jetlag and without coffee. We birded briefly around Ceiba Country Inn before breakfast. We have realized by now that Zenaida Doves are abundant and widespread (though I did not come back with good enough photos), and a couple were poking around the driveway early in the morning.

Red-legged Thrushes are also easy to find in areas with second-growth forest. Unfortunately, most of the birds we saw were on the shy side. The one bird that sat 10 feet away in the sun glowing like a bastard chose to appear while my camera was out of reach (typical), though Dan and Adam got to crush it (also typical). If you go to PR, don't expect these birds to be hella approachable unless you blunder into a tame mall bird like we did.

Loggerhead and Gray Kingbird combo! A pair of Loggerhead Kingbirds briefly hung out near the inn, which we had not seen the day before. They remind me of a cross between an Eastern Kingbird and a large Eastern Phoebe.

After breakfast (toast AND cereal this time...luxurious!) we rolled down to bird Humacao ("Reserva Natural de Humacao" in eBird) on the east coast, a site that can be good for waterbirds and the two "eastern" hummingbirds of the island, Antillean Crested Hummingbird and Green-throated Carib. According to the birder's guide, this area was good for West Indian Whistling-Duck and Masked Duck, but eBird suggests that this has not been true in recent years - as both species are prone to wandering, Humacao may eventually become a good spot for both species again. Unsurprisingly, we did not see either species here.

The access situation is a bit odd - there is the "official" access along Rte 3, which has limited hours and is closed on weekends, but immediately east of there is some kind of park (across from the tire store) with concession stands and an information kiosk that essentially allows access to the same areas. This is where we entered (18.150726°, -65.772021°), and it worked out quite well. We did not try birding the northern part of the reserve (north of 3), where it looks like there is a lot of good habitat as well.

The birding here was interesting; the habitat looked very good, but it wasn't a particularly birdy place. It seemed like Humacao would be dripping with North American warblers, but as we noticed the previous day at Ceiba and El Yunque, there were relatively few migrant warblers (Northern Waterthrushes, redstarts, a Prairie Warbler, and some dude playing an Ovenbird tape). This would become a theme for the entire trip; we only found two sites that had more than a handful of warblers, but that would come later. The one exception to this rule of warbler scarcity was Northern Waterthrush, which were abundant in mangroves everywhere.

The first birds of note were white-shielded American Coots, which until recently were Caribbean Coots. Soon afterward, we got on two White-cheeked Pintails in one of the lagoons...what a refreshing lifer. I haven't seen a new duck in a long time...a long time.

As with practically every vegetated place in Puerto Rico, there were Bananaquits galore, though this photo was taken in El Yunque. In Puerto Rico, they seem to have a foothold in a wide array of terrestrial niches.

Puerto Rican Flycatchers were widespread and common during our trip at lowland and mid-elevation sites. This is another very Eastern Phoebeish bird from certain angles.

It was here at Hamacao that we had a run-in with our second Reluctant Lifer of the trip, in the form of Tricolored Munia (the first was Bronze Munia/Mannikin back at Ceiba). None of us were interested in going out of our way for filthy, disgusting exotics, but it was inevitable that we would be dealing with them. Much more interesting than the munias were our first visuals of Mangrove Cuckoos of the trip.

Mangrove Cuckoos are surprisingly common in Puerto Rico, and can be found in many different habitats.

I'd only seen them once before (in Costa Rica), so this was a nice bird to get to see almost every day.

Most sites were teeming with lizard or frogs or both. In the lizard department, we saw a lot of whiptails.

This big one was rocking an indigo belly patch. I'm into it. It could be a different species than the yellow-striped duder above or just an adult. It's not like I'm #7 in whiptails, cut me some slack.

We plodded through the mud, slowly accumulating trip birds. Dan got looks at the first Green-throated Carib of the trip, while Adam and I were gripped off and forced to stew in our juices. Further on down the trail we ran into a patch of Antillean Crested Hummingbirds (lifer!), one of which Adam brought in by hanging an orange bag in a tree. Brilliant.

On the way back to the car, we noticed the tree behind Adam (above) had a lot of yellow blossoms, and waiting around the tree ended up producing both Green-throated Carib (lifer!) and another Antillean Crested Hummingbird. I was very fucking relieved to see these birds, as we had missed them the previous day and they are much harder to find on the west side of the island, where we would be spending most of our time. The night before, in a dream, I thought I found a Carib...but it turned out to be some sort of weird Anna's Hummingbird hybrid...talk about a fucking nightmare. I took it to mean that we would be doomed in finding this bird, but fortunately it was probably just the fruit of all the emotional baggage I have with Anna's Hummingbirds. Anyways, it is worth mentioning that there were hardly any flowering trees at Humacao when we were there, and we found hummingbirds at all of them.

Having succeeded with multiple target birds (our eBird checklist is here), we decided to try the Fajardo Inn to see if we could put the crush on any hummingbirds there (there didn't seem to be much blooming across from the police station at the time, another suggested spot). It seemed pretty barren for a while.

This large, plain anoley thing was one of the few noteworthy finds at the hotel.

Eventually, Adam got on an Antillean Crested Hummingbird in a bottlebrush tree next to the tennis courts, where we had some mild success in getting photos of this little facemelting bastard with flash.

What a good bird.

These things are tiny and blackish with short little bills, quite different from the island's other hummingbirds. The males have amazing crests that glow blue in natural light. I dig the subtle iridescent feather tips on the underparts you can see here too.

That night would be our final night staying in Ceiba, so after we got back from farting around Fajardo we put on our rally caps and started looking for Puerto Rican Screech-Owls, our last remaining local target, which again seemed to be very quiet compared to our first night there. After doing many laps around the inn (these are very short laps) and walking all the way down the driveway and back up again, we got visuals of two Puerto Rican Screech-Owls next to the parking lot. Talk about grinding out a bird! Getting long looks at these birds turned out to be clutch, as not surprisingly we would not see any more during the trip. For those of you thinking about staying here, Ceiba Country Inn is a very good place to get the owls, and one of the guys running the place seemed surprised that we failed to see them our first night when they were constantly calling. Though it was hard to recover from this ruthless browbeating, we took advantage of our final chance and got quality looks.

Having secured all our local target birds in the nick of time, it would be time to move on in the morning. Up next, the nerds go west on a Plain Pigeon odyssey, and make the long sandwichy trash fire trek to Guanica.

Continuing Costa Rica Coverage: Lifering on the South Pacific Slope

Ahem. Cough. Well, as I promised last February, there is still more blogging to do...about Costa Rica! No, I was not in Costa Rica earlier this year...or last year...but I was the year before! So since I am a committed blogger and the local rarity train has drastically slowed, I think its time to catch up a little bit. After all, it is getting colder, and I haven't left the country in almost two years now...being migratory by nature, I'm getting restless. Its time to think about going down south again. In fact, I am going down south...not as far as Costa Rica, but to a place I've never been that is sure to be rich with lifers. Lifers! Don't you love those things? Seems they are hard to come by these days...but come January, that is all going to change. My U.S. #7 status will suddenly becoming meaningless, and I will be free to misidentify strange and foreign birds at will. I will be reckless.

But I digress. Here is some more coverage from the San Vito area, which is on the Pacific Slope down near the Panamanian border. Good birds are there, I wish we just had a little more time to slay more new shit.

Life birds are great no matter what they are, but life raptors? That is a thing of beauty. This Double-toothed Kite was indeed a life raptor, and I was glad to meet it. Luckily it was visible overhead in a small gap in the forest canopy, if it sat anywhere else we would have never seen it. Photographed at Las Cruces OTS/Wilson Botanical Garden.

This Tawny-winged Woodcreeper was also a sweet sweet lifer, although not one that I had previously been yearning for very strongly. New woodcreepers are great, but you don't exactly drool over them in field guides the way you do with hawk-eagles and the like. This was the only one of the trip. Photographed at Las Cruces OTS/Wilson Botanical Garden.

Crested Oropendola! This bird was definitely a major target while we were birding the area. I don't actually have a strong memory of seeing this bird, probably because it was so bloody hot out. This is a highly range-restricted bird in Costa Rica, just coming over the border from Panama, definitely an area specialty. Lifer. Obvi. Photographed near San Vito.

Anis are not hard to come by in Central America, it is known. This roadside Smooth-billed Ani was very cooperative, allowing for a solid crushing. Weird birds. Highly likable. But they are not groovy. That is a different species. Photographed near San Vito.

I find it odd that there has been such a decline of these birds in Florida...it's not like there aren't a lot of them or that they can't handle human disturbance. Did they used to only occupy a very specific habitat type in Florida, anybody know? At any rate, if you want to see a bunch of these birds, expect to run across them in southern Costa Rica.

Bananaquit, another occasional visitor to Florida. I believe this was photographed at Finca Cantaros, where you can pay a small fee and bird the property. Here they feed tanagers and you can actually see a Masked Duck. In fact, a certain someone guaranteed we would see a Masked Duck there...which of course did not happen, but apparently they hang out at the pond there on the regular. I don't think I will ever see a Masked Duck...life is pain.

Bananaquits are common in Costa Rica, if you go expect to see hella. They're charming little bastards. Finca Cantaros is right on the way to San Vito, on the way to Wilson Botanical Garden. If you're looking for another area to bird near Wilson, this is a good place to start.

This Golden-olive Woodpecker was the highlight of a medium-sized but relatively raging mixed flock. I would like to look at more of them. Photographed at Finca Cantaros.

I haven't included an absolute crippler yet in this post, so I will rectify that now with a Speckled Tanager. Easily one of the most mesmerizing bird species I have ever seen. Photographed at Finca Cantaros.

One morning Dipper Dan and I headed east out of San Vito to Las Alturas...I've never met anyone who has birded there but the bird list in the birdfinding guide was nothing to be scoffed at. And how was the birding? Well...it was fucking sick. Go there. Take a look at the site list in eBird. If and when I find myself in that part of the world again, I will not pass up another shot to bird here. We hit some good mixed flocks, which included Masked Tityras...not a rare bird by any means but a bizarre one that is incredibly distracting when you are trying to suss out less common species. I expect to be reacquainting myself with these birds in a couple months.

I like Crested Guans. I don't think of them as majestic by any means, but this bird certainly goes for that descriptor in this photo.

Looks more like an arboreal dinosaur here. I'm into it.

Chestnut-mandibled (or Black-mandibled...or Yellow-throated...call it what you think is best) Toucans are, thankfully, very easy to find in the country. Look at it. Does your face feel weird...maybe like it is melting? For someone who does not get to look at toucans every day, it's one of those birds that makes you wonder "how is this a real thing?".

Well, someday I will finish my Costa Rica coverage, and now we are one post closer to actually getting there. I still don't know what is up with blogger refusing to format my photos correctly (any other bloggers experiencing this?), so I'll continue to roll with these smaller ones for the time being. They are clickable though! Make them big! Don't be scurred!

Sarapiqui Eco-Observatory Part II: More Crushing

Mexico has Crimson-collared Grosbeak; Costa Rica has Crimson-collared Tanager. The Observatory was the best place to see this crippling bird up close; I would highly recommend visiting this spot if you are trying for bird photos down there, and the birding was very good as well. I would definitely go back again...in case you missed it, more gnarly birds from the observatory are posted here.

As you may have noticed, we had no sun the whole time we were there, but that didn't stop us from crushing on birds pretty hard. The Crimson-collareds were excruciatingly hard to turn away from though, they were the fan favorite.

Bronze-tailed Plumeleteer was one of the first hummingbird species we could find that wasn't a Rufous-tailed. This was the only one I got a good look at, and I was lucky enough to completely crush it to bits. I think the exact halfway shade between green and blue lies somewhere on the bird.

While Costa Rica is blessed/cursed with a plethora of green hummingbirds, the plumeleteer is easy to identify; it's bright pink feet are a total giveaway.

Not gonna lie, this is one of my favorite bird pictures I've taken. Once you are swarmed by Golden-hooded Tanagers, things will never be the same.

LOOK AT THIS THING!!! DO IT! KEEP LOOKING! DON'T TURN AWAY! NOT EVER!

Now that I've put up some quality facemelt, I have an excuse to put up a bird so dull it could turn your face to stone...behold the dreaded Palm Tanager.

It's worth mentioning that Palm Tanagers are incredibly difficult to photograph...not because they are rare or anything, but because they are usually surrounded by birds so colorful that you can't possibly choose to watch a Palm Tanager instead.

The humble Bananaquit.

Black-cheeked Woodpecker. They look somewhere between an Acorn and a Hairy Woodpecker, but are probably more closely related to Gila and Red-bellied...they certainly sound more like them.

Black-cheeked Woodpecker is probably a bit more common than it's Pacific Slope counterpart. On the Pacific side, we had the similar Golden-naped Woodpecker at some sort of weird bog (its all about random roadside stops) south of Dominical, but no where else.

A pair of Yellow Tyrannulets. This isn't a hard crush, but I thought it was a cool to get this pair sitting together. It took us quite a while to identify these birds (although they were not even brainbirds) because we are very bad at Costa Rican birdwatching.

We only found Yellow Tyrannulets at one other site on the whole trip...although this implies that they are rare (not true), the truth is there are so many goddamn birds everywhere that even relatively common birds can be easily missed. That, and we are very bad at Costa Rican birdwatching.

It probably doesn't hurt to throw up another Collared Aracari shot...I'll let the bird speak for itself.