Puerto Rico Winter Tour Y2K16: Guanica Dry Forest, Cabo Rojo NWR

This is going to be a massive post...hopefully friends who are about to head to Puerto Rico in the coming days will appreciate it. So without the usual preliminary bullshitting, here we go...

For our first morning on the west side of the island, we checked out the famous Guanica Dry Forest. The habitat here is unique and occupies a very small area; the endemic Puerto Rican Nightjar is almost completely dependent on this habitat, and a number of other great birds are found here as well. We accessed the main entrance (17.979549, -66.881285), which was very straightforward, and birded two different trails. One of the main trails that goes east from the parking area (17.972138, -66.867011) was the most productive...Adelaide's Warblers were singing all over the place (we had still yet to see one) and we heard multiple Key West Quail Doves, a lifer heard-only for all of us. Another Puerto Rican Emerald put in an appearance, which I failed to photograph yet again, but possibly the best bird we saw was this Antillean Euphonia.

I had no idea this was such a facemelting bird! I've seen quite a few euphonia species in Mexico and Costa Rica, and can confidently say that only the legendary Elegant Euphonia tops it in crippleness. Euphonias aren't the most attention-grabbing birds in most of their tropical range (they have a lot of competition), but this species is an exception. Not only did we have great looks, it was also the only one we would see on the trip! Clutch bird.

Guanica is littered with Adelaide's Warblers, and we got plenty of good lucks finally. The Grace's Warbler resemblance is strong. The area was devoid of any North American species.

As with many places on the island, we got more good looks at the bizarre and confiding Pearly-eyed Thrashers. This bird won't make your brain roll over in your head, but it will stick with you nonetheless.

Officer Searcy bends the knee to some Caribbean mushrooms. The dry forest was not all that dry when we were there, but presumably looks quite different later in the dry season and lacks much in the way of exotic fungus.

You were expecting tody pictures, so here are some tody pictures. These are truly hilarious, lovable birds, and are absolutely not worried about hanging out right next to the trail. I suspected that they might be awesome before the trip, and my suspicions were confirmed. Luckily, they are common and widespread on the island, and though they can be hard to spot they are easily located by their little fart sounds they frequently utter.

This bird got remarkably close to us. Better views not desired. Mission accomplished.

Unlike the todies, Puerto Rican Bullfinches do not want to be close to you or let you admire their goodness, so I was stoked to get this shot. Though not at all rare, it is one of the best birds on the island I reckon.

Nerds strut through El Seco during a gluttonous morning of lifering.

If you want to glance at the eBird checklist, it's right here. Not hella species on there, but they are almost all excellent birds and include quite a few lifers for us. The screech-owls on there were vocalizing late in the morning (bizarre), and that was the last we would hear or see of them on the trip.

After this Great Success, we went to do what we do best, which is bird someplace really hot in the middle of the day. Our choice for deploying this highly recommendable tactic was Cabo Rojo National Wildlife Refuge, near the southwestern tip of the island. It turns out Cabo Rojo is a pretty big place, so if you are wondering we birded the trail at 17.980970, -67.168364. This area consists of scrub, grassland and open forest, with a couple small ponds, perfect for birding in the middle of the day with blazing sun. The birding was very slow at first (shocker) but by the time we got back to the car we had seen some decent stuff. There were massive numbers of butterflies around the whole time though, so do check out this area if you are into that sort of thing.

Sometimes when there aren't birds to look at you look at robber flies doing inappropriate things.

We lifered Antillean Mango earlier in the day at the dry forest, but got slightly better looks at this one. Like a great many pretty crippling hummingbirds, they look like shit in bad light, but we caught occasional glimpses of their brilliance during flybys. Getting Antillean Mango meant we swept all five of the island's hummingbirds in four days! This was very relieving considering my hummingbird failure that was the Mexico trip from earlier in the year, which still haunts me to this day. Amethyst-throated Hummingbird, Bumblebee Hummingbird, Mexican Hermit, and Sparkling-tailed Woodstar are going to have to wait. Little bastards.

This little pond on the trail looked like it might have some Masked Duck potential, but as expected there was no Masked Duck.

There was a pair of Least Grebes (trip bird!) with chicks though, which was a soothing, cute and family-friendly consolation. The other trip birds we got were Yellow-faced Grassquit and Indigo Bunting, which have much to offer but lack the character of an ani...

Smooth-billed Anis galore! They are very common in areas with any open habitat on the island and Cabo Rojo was no exception. Anis have almost nothing to offer but character and some greasy shagginess.

Officer Searcy found this very pleasant little nest, which I assume was constructed by an Antillean Mango, though we had emeralds there also.

Near the parking lot we got looks at Caribbean Elaineas, another bird we had lifered earlier in the morning at the dry forest. They have a conspicuous, vireo-like song, and like vireos they were unafraid of belting them out in the middle of the day. Here and the dry forest were the only places we'd get this bird.

Presumably this is the caribaerum subspecies of American Kestrel endemic to Puerto Rico and the Lesser Antilles. Lots of new subspecies available for visual consumption on the island.

After our long, hot mid-day walk we decided it would best to bird more instead of do something reasonable like eat lunch or drink beer. There was a potentially very good shorebird spot just a few miles away, so we lurked over there (17.968347, -67.178826) in the quest for more trip birds.

A Puerto Rican Flycatcher teed up on a power line, but the real draw was the salt flats and lagoon on the other side of the road.

A massive flock of peeps here contained Least, Semipalmated and Western (trip bird!) Sandpipers. Other than this flock there weren't a whole lot of shorebirds though. But we didn't let a few Greater Yellowlegs get us down...Dipper Dan found a distant gull! A gull! The first gull of the trip! We hemmed and hawed over Laughing vs. Franklin's Gull (Laughing is expected, Franklin's is considerably rarer), but I finally settled on first cycle Franklin's, due to the dark and well-defined hood and lack of any gray wash on the nape, neck and breast. The bird did have a bizarrely large bill (not that you can tell in the photo below) but everything else fits Franklin's nicely.

It swam around contentedly picking bugs off the water; we would see it again a couple days later as well, doing the same thing further west. This is, presumably, the rarest bird of the trip. Though we didn't know it, according to eBird someone actually found it earlier in the morning, so I guess we can't really take credit.

There was still one more group lifer we would get that day, but this post is too damn long. ¡Ya basta!

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!