Birding at a Volcano. Super Brutal.

Posted on January 24, 2012 by BourbonHawk

As promised, here are some birds from the mountains. We’ll start the journey in La Fortuna.

A couple of weeks ago we went up to La Fortuna, which is at the base of Arenal Volcano, and then to Monteverde Reserve. I saw an amazing number of birds, many of which I was not able to photograph due to foliage and poor light. However, I’ve still got quite a few to show you.

First up, La Fortuna. Awesome little town. Some parts of it are incredibly touristy but it’s also really easy to avoid them if you’d prefer a more relaxing kind of time. We stayed at a very cheap, totally friendly hostel there, with this view from the kitchen/dining area:

That’s Volcan Arenal, the reason why this place is so touristy. Up until 2010 it was basically erupting constantly, so you’d get great shows at night. Now it just sits there and looks cool and hosts a large forest reserve where you can hike and bird and such. And seriously, there are birds everywhere in this area.

Instead of spending money on tours or reserves, we decided to head out to find a “secret swimming hole” that the locals use since it was hot as hell and we were on a pretty tight budget (Monteverde costs EIGHTEEN dollars a person, guys!). We ended up walking about 3 or 4 km from our hostel and on the way there saw an awesome amount of birds:

These Southern rough-winged swallows were all over the place.

Female White-collared seedeater

Female Scarlet-thighed dacnis on the banana, tons of Blue-grey tanagers hanging out there as well.

Blue-grey tanagers and a Baltimore oriole enjoying a snack. Places here often put out bananas to attract birds for the tourists. This was in front of a little hotel.

This is most likely either a Thick-billed seedfinch or the Caribbean race of the Variable seedeater. Unfortunately the way you differentiate is the curve of the culmen, which you can’t see in this picture.

Ruddy ground-doves were everywhere, being tiny and cute. This is a male and a female.

Male Ruddy ground-dove

Bronzed cowbird

Montezuma Oropendola. These guys are all over the place at our house, but man, they are just SO photogenic. Plus they sound like power lines!

GROSS ALERT

I also found what I think was a dead Anhinga.
We also found our swimming hole:

which was as awesome as it looks. And full of tadpoles. We had the place to ourselves most of the day, except for a little while when some local kids came and swam for a while. There were tons of birds and dragonflies and such down there but I was too busy swimming to photograph them!

Seriously though guys, La Fortuna is awesome. Maybe not the rarest birds, but tons of species, all over the place. And just a really pleasant quiet place if you stay off the beaten, tourist track.

Plus you can take a boat across a lake and end up in Monteverde! OOOooooo…foreshadowing! Until then…

I SAW A QUETZAL!

Posted on January 20, 2012 by BourbonHawk

It’s true! I FINALLY saw a Resplendent Quetzal! In the next post you’ll get the rest of my birds from up in the mountains, but this guy was so important that he gets the whole post to himself.

Those of you who know me in real life, or follow my personal blog, mariecerda.com, know that for my 30th birthday last year I gave myself the best birthday present ever:

My first tattoo!
Though I had been to Costa Rica once before I had never seen a quetzal in the feathered-flesh. I have a huge obsession with old ornithological prints and the tattoo is based on this piece:

That’s a lithograph by John and Elizabeth Gould from his book on Trogons and Toucans, A Monograph of the Trogonidae published 1858-1875.

Well it took me two trips to Costa Rica, nearly three months, and one VERY long day of hiking around Monteverde Reserve, but I finally saw my white whale:

I love how you can see what will be his resplendent long upper-tail coverts coming in.

I literally hiked for over 8 hours before I found him. We woke up at 5 am, took the first bus at 6:15 to the preserve, and went in when it opened at 7. We hiked nearly all of the trails in Monteverde, with the exception of possibly 1km or so, and finally exhausted around 3:30 we went to sit on a bench near where I knew there was an Aguacate tree (their preferred food, though they actually aren’t fruiting yet this time of year up there) and wait for the park to close at 4. Around 3:40 this guy flew out from some trees above us, all huge and loudly squawking, and flew around among a few trees for maybe 30 seconds before flying off. I apologize for the blurriness but my camera behaves awfully in low-light and he was very, very high in the canopy. Also I was exhausted and totally over excited.

I know had we hired a guide we probably would have found one fairly easily, I overheard a lot of tourists saying they’d been able to see one, but that’s just not my style. The whole point of being a brutal bird detective is the “hunt”, the putting together of the clues you know and the random luck and the real trekking and just doing the effing thing. I would not have wanted it to happen any other way.

Playa Jaco (Jaco Beach)

Posted on January 15, 2012 by BourbonHawk

A little over a week ago we made a day trip to the closest beach to San Jose, Playa Jaco. Jaco is a town on the Pacific coast, small but very touristy. It’s basically the first stop tourists tend to make as they go down the Pacific, usually on their way to the town of Quepos and Manuel Antonio National Park. Since it only takes a couple of hours to get there by bus we decided to get away from the dreary cold Central Valley and made a day trip of it. Not the prettiest beach I’ve been to here, but very warm and sunny and hanging out in the sand was a great way to spend a day. And I was able to get a little birding in as well!

Great-tailed grackles are one of the most common birds in Costa Rica. They basically fill the niche that crows would back home, since they don’t have those here (and on the Caribbean coast, black vultures play raven to the grackles’ crow). Just like crows and ravens, I think grackles are beautiful and awesome. In the sun the males really are the richest, oiliest dark blue and they make great sounds. And as you can see from these pictures, just like ravens and crows, they really seem to have personalities:

Another common, beautiful bird I caught was this Great Egret. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one with a neck that looked quite this long:

I saw two lifer birds for me that day, a Laughing Falcon which I wasn’t able to get a picture of but that flew over us a couple of times, and a Belted Kingfisher. How these guys aren’t a creation of some absurdist puppeteer, I have no idea:

The combo of those eyes and that beak on that body is just….WHAT.

And while they aren’t birds, a pod of humpback whales came and hung out just off shore for a few hours, finally swimming off picturesquely at sunset. Totally rad.

Birding from my porch

Posted on January 2, 2012 by BourbonHawk

I haven’t been getting out and birding as much as I would like to, and today I slept in after a night of awful sleep, so this afternoon I decided to go sit out on our porch and see what I could see. Surprisingly, it was quite a bit, including a few birds I’d never seen before.
Part of the reason that birding from our porch is so fruitful is that our landlady’s porch is right across from ours and it’s where she keeps this guy:
That’s Verdad. The whole porch basically acts as an enclosure for him, but it isn’t screened in or anything, so a lot of birds come over and hang out and eat his birdseed and fruit. Usually it’s a lot of these guys:

Rufous Collared Sparrows.
Today was no exception. But in addition to those sparrows there was this sparrow:

The White Eared Ground Sparrow. Sorry for the semi-blurry photo but it was moving around like crazy. The field guide I have shows a much duller bird than this so it took me forever to i.d. it.

There was also a Great Kiskadee, which I wasn’t able to get a picture of but they are super common and you hear their namesake call everywhere.

Clay Colored Robins are also very common at our place, and there were a few hanging around today:

This one was enjoying some dog food:

I also got this Gray Saltator hiding in a tree:

Total new species for me!

And this Tropical Kingbird was hunting insects against the picturesque backdrop of San Jose:

This tiny hummingbird, which I think is a female Scintillant Hummingbird, is possibly the smallest bird I’ve ever seen in person, and netted me my favorite shot of the day:

And to round out this post, Blue Crowned Motmots, which are rapidly becoming my favorite bird to photograph. They’re everywhere on our property and if you’re quiet enough are incredibly easy to photograph. They love to just perch and be completely still and photogenic (minus the occasional crazy tail swinging). This one hung out outside of the porch for a while:

I came out later after the parrot’s cage had been covered and it appears he had decided to take advantage of that situation:

I also got a couple of videos of it in a tree:

and in the enclosure:

Not bad for a half hour of sitting on the porch! Gotta love Costa Rica.

Costa Rican Muscovies

Posted on January 1, 2012 by BourbonHawk

When I lived in San Francisco I always enjoyed the flocks of feral Domestic Muscovy ducks I would encounter while birding at urban lakes. Since I lived right by it, my favorites were the ones at Stow Lake:

Especially this big guy…

who was always walking around, wagging his tail and begging/hissing.

There was also a family of them at Lake Merritt in Oakland:

And I would regularly see them at the pond at the Palace of Fine Arts as well. It’s not that these guys are interesting because they’re rare, but in my mind they always reminded me of the dogs of the bird world. Just huge and friendly and a little bit dopey.

Muscovy Ducks are actually native to Central and South America, and as I discovered during a recent excursion to the awesome (and historically interesting) La Sabana Park in San Jose, the Muscovies you encounter down here are much more wild looking. They’re much smaller, and still retain most of the wild-type plumage of greenish-black feathers, white wing patches, crests on the males, and brownish eyes. The flock I came across had clearly contained a number of leucistic individuals, some of which had blue eyes and paler bills and feet. I don’t think that this flock was completely wild in the sense of having not interbred with domestic ducks, but they were certainly the closest to wild that I’ve come to seeing. Check ‘em out:

On a totally unrelated note, I do want to mention that MAGANRORD has a Flickr group located here. It started out as a place to throw pictures that we might use on the site, but I have opened it up so people can join and check out pictures that don’t end up getting posted here or so that anyone can share their bird photography.

*GROSS ALERT*

GROSS ALERT