It’s the end of the year, a solstice just happened and a major holiday season is at its festive height. Celebrate with family, toast with friends, but most of all, go birding. Treat yourself to birds this holiday season and what better place to do so than the tropical birding paradise known as Costa Rica. […]
Counting Birds at Cangreja, Cano Negro, ...
The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of birding. Three annual counts and guiding took me to humid forests of the southern Pacific, cool air and hummingbirds of the mountains, and down the other side of the continental divide to the northern wetlands of Cano Negro. At some point after the final bird count, […]
News for Birding in Costa Rica, December...
It’s December, in Costa Rica, the month of vacations, the beginning of the dry season, Christmas in the tropics. For us local birders, we wish for holiday gifts that take the form of glittering cotingas, a White-tipped Sicklebill, a lifer or two or three. This December, my potential lifers are far too separate from the […]
Horizontes- Good Birding in Guanacaste
Known for sun, beaches, and wide open vistas, Guanacaste is a popular tourist destination that encompasses the northwestern region of Costa Rica. Acting as the southern terminus for the tropical dry forest ecosystems of the Middle American Pacific slope,the lay of the land offers an appeasing blend of windswept fields dotted with octopi-like acacias, evergreen […]
Recent Highlights from Birding in Costa ...
Road maps for Costa Rica refer to it as Route 126 but that’s only on paper or in pixels. As with most byways in Costa Rica, the signs that tell you which route is which are as scarce as cotingas. This is why us locals refer to Route 126 as “the road between Varablanca and […]
Arenal Christmas Bird Count- An Exciting...
“It’s the most wonderful time of the year…”. Christmas! Navidad! The festive season makes those brief December days and long dark nights somehow easier to handle. Or, maybe it’s just that we aren’t two months into the winter season and really tired of looking at gray skies, dirty sidewalk snow, and birdless bare branches. But […]
Early November Highlights from Birding i...
In Costa Rica, November is a low season for birding. So few birders visit, some might even call it a “non season” for birding. But the visiting birder deficit belies how good the birding can be. In November, us local birders thrive on sightings of cuckoos, thrushes, and other migrants including hundreds of shorebirds. Although […]
Birding in Costa Rica is Always Exciting
I may have written a post with a similar title in the past but, when speaking of wonderful truths, reiteration is merited, maybe even necessary. It’s a fact that the birding is invariably exciting in Costa Rica, I am reminded of it even when I’m not exactly birding. These are a few examples from recent […]
Recent Birding in the Southern Caribbean...
Each year, I hope to accomplish certain birding trips in Costa Rica. No matter where or when, up in here, although the birding is always worth it, certain situations are still an annual “must”. Even though urban birding can include binocular time with Rufous-capped Warblers, Lesson’s Motmot and the rare Cabanis’s Ground-Sparrow, as long as the […]
Costa Rica = Easy Fantastic Birding
I haven’t spent much time birding lately. Now is when the guiding season reaches a low point, and by chance, now is also when I have been working on other projects. I am still grateful though, and I still see birds. I step through the front door and swifts pattern the skies every morning. Chestnut-collareds […]