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!

Onward To Melty Face/South to San Vito

Behold; one of my most wanted needed birds of all time.  

In the spirit of finishing what I start, I think it's time, once again, to revisit the Costa Rica trip that part of me seems to refuse to finish wrapping up.  The Great Ornithologist Felonious Jive thinks you readers out east could especially use some tropical facemelt about now...so here we go.

After our second round of birding the Talamancas, Dipper Dan and I headed south for unbirded territory.  Once we passed the turnoff to Talari Mountain Lodge in San Isidro, everything was new. We made good time heading south, and didn't stop to bird much except for a Bat Falcon here and a Smooth-billed Ani there...the Southern Pacific Slope of Costa Rica has been heavily deforested for agriculture, at least along the road between San Isidro and San Vito.  There just wasn't much to see. There was one positive aspect to driving through miles of pastureland though...I knew we would have a chance of running into a certain flycatcher that I was hellbent on seeing.

When a Fork-tailed Flycatcher swooped by our car it was all I could do to keep from diving through the window to get a better look at it; a vein in my forehead exploded, sending geysers of blood all over the front of the car and temporarily blinding Dipper Dan.  I wailed and moaned.  My entire life, up to this moment, had been spent waiting for this brilliant bird. There turned out to be a roadside pair that were extremely obliging; I actually got these photos by walking up to the birds instead of gawking at them from the car (which is how I get most of my kingbird and Scissor-tailed Flycatcher pictures).

Much like the Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, this is a bird you have to see to believe.  I had one shot at seeing these birds before coming to Costa Rica; I was assured that we would find one in the lowlands east of Veracruz, Mexico, but the day we were to look I was bedridden with intestinal agony. Redemption is mine!  This was one of my top target birds for the trip; we only saw one other during the trip, out near the Esquinas Rainforest Lodge.

That night we met up with Leslie Tucci and Dave Spangenburg, both friends of friends who happened to be living in San Vito at the time.  The next morning it was off to San Vito OTS and the Wilson Botanical Garden for another dose of lifers.  Before we started birding the grounds we got stuck at the fruit feeder, where a suite of sweet tropical birds were going to town on fresh fruits. Silver-throated Tanagers are everywhere in Costa Rica but its hard to not look at them, for reasons I suspect you understand.

As sharp as the Silver-throateds are, very few birds can touch what a Speckled Tanager brings to the feeding station.  It's been two years since I took these photos and I still can't believe this is a real bird. This creature brings the facemlt like few I've ever seen.

The mind reels...and boggles. Talk about a crippler.

Crippling, blinding, facemelting...this bird has it all.  This was a species that I first saw in a field guide, thought "Oh, that looks pretty cool", then saw in real life and thought "Holy shit! How come no one told me about these things?".

Although completely outmatched by the Speckled Tanager in boldness and looks, it was still nice to see a Thick-billed Euphonia come in to join the morning tanager salad.  If you haven't birded south of the border, euphonias of different species are common throughout Central America and occur in a variety of habitats.  I wouldn't be surprised if one showed up in the U.S. someday...for example the distance between Scrub Euphonias in Mexico and McAllen, TX, is shorter than the distance between McAllen and Kingsville.

Above the fruit fray a Blue-headed Parrot stopped in for  a few minutes to catch some sun.  This singular (and very easy to identify) parrot was the only one of the trip, if I remember correctly.

This hawk is a Roadside Hawk.  Along with Gray Hawks, this is one of the most abundant and highly visible raptor species in the country (from a car, anyway), and they can indeed be found along roads and in a variety of disturbed habitats.  We never did see a Gray-lined Hawk though, oh well gotta go back.

Scale-crested Pygmy-tyrant!  This post needed a real rainforest bird, one that will not be drawn into the open by the allures of fresh fruit or sunlight.  This bird was ricocheting around in the foliage right in front of us, flashing it's gigantic, ridiculous crest that is 100% not visible in any of the photos I got. Awesome bird though.

While walking around the woods, we were greeted by a small flock of Crested Guans on the trail. Not an unusual event in many parts of Costa Rica by any means, but as a pinche gringo it takes some getting used to.  If you had only seen turkeys a couple times before and then walked in to a flock of them, you would find it weird too.

More to come from the Southern Pacific Slope...eventually.