August 2026 Archives

Three Top Birding Sites in Costa Rica that aren’t eBird Hotspots

Going birding somewhere new? In the pre-digital days, we sought bird finding books, kept magazine articles, and even paid (!) for trip reports. Hard to imagine but a lot of things were different back then in the pager, pre-mobile device times. It was also a time of common birding discovery, especially when birding abroad.

Forget birding apps, a lot of places lacked proper field guides. We took care to remember field marks, made field sketches and notes and tried to figure things out after the fact, often, with visits to libraries. University libraries could be especially good; they often had obscure field guides, bird books, ornithological tomes, and access to scientific journals.

Digital cameras and the Internet have largely erased those old time necessities but it’s still a good idea to pay close attention and take field notes, at least if you are interested in improving your field identification skills. As for preparing for a birding trip and figuring out where to go, although many of us still read trip reports, it seems that lots of people go the social media route; asking questions in birding groups and forums.

From what I’ve seen, as expected from crowd sourcing, the answers don’t necessarily provide the best information. Instead of answering the question, I see a lot of comments or suggestions that reflect personal experience; a factor that, although valid, is often limited by the inherent inexperience of being a tourist. We could say the same about many forums and social media posts equally faulted by affording the same weight to answers from everybody.

Anyone can comment but who knows best? How do we know who the experts are? But then again, if you are only looking for nice places to take photos of pretty birds, hummingbirds, and quetzals, do you even need answers from experts? Maybe not but, if it benefits a birder to know that Great Green Macaws aren’t necessarily present in certain areas during wet and dry seasons, or that Agami Heron colonies are mostly active during the summer months, well meaning comments from tourists might not be adequate.

It’s also worth knowing that quetzals aren’t limited to the Dota Valley or Paraiso Quetzal (even if Facebook posts might hint otherwise). Those are wonderful and beautiful areas but quetzals occur in other places too, sometimes just an hour’s drive from the airport. With such potential shortcomings in mind, it’s nice to know that at least we have eBird.

This fantastic worldwide resource is another major modern birding boon (maybe the biggest, on par with affordable digital cameras, improved optics, and the Internet in general) and whether you make eBird lists or not, you can still use it to see where other birders have been seeing birds. It can be a great resource for planning a trip, especially with that hotspot feature. Check those out, give em a whirl and you could easily plan your whole trip around eBird hotspots.

You could certainly do that but, there’s an important catch to consider. Since eBird is also based on crowd-sourced material, it only shows what people put into the system. This brings up a couple of obvious but important points:

If no one goes birding in a given area, there’s no bird information for that area, no matter how good the habitat might be.
If an excellent area or site does not have hotspot status, it doesn’t mean that the spot isn’t good for birding, it just means that it has yet to be officially declared as a hotspot.

In other words, there might be a lot of good birding sites out there even if you don’t notice them in eBird (which makes sense since birds live in appropriate habitat). Although Costa Rica gets increasingly better eBird coverage, there are still a number of great birding spots off the eBird radar including the following three sites:

The San Rafael de Varablanca Road

Of all the accessible, underbirded spots in Costa Rica, this one comes to mind front and center. I always have the place to myself, I’m a bit loathe to share the info but, since that goes against my core belief of helping all people experience more birds and our natural world, I’ve got be honest and share the gen.

In this case, we’ve got a good, paved road around an hour’s drive from the airport that passes through and next to cloud forest, much of which is at the edge of or in the buffer zone for Braulio Carrillo National Park. Bird there and don’t let the road and pastures fool you; you’re raisin bins at the edge of wilderness, beautiful cloud forest prowled by Pumas, surely some Jaguars, Tapirs, and more.

Probably undescribed plants and bugs, maybe some other things too? Most pertinently, the habitats along this roads are home to countless birds and the birding can be fantastic. It of course varies but I often see a couple of quetzals among an excellent assortment of cloud forest species. If the raptor flying conditions are good, Ornate Hawk-Eagle, Barred Hawk, and Great Black Hawk are also regular and, in certain places, at certain times of year, I’ve also had umbrellabird.

Yeah, it’s a good area alright and you can bird it for free and at any time right from the road, at least up to where the road is unpaved and, shortly thereafter, supremely rough. If this road could be paved or at least improved for its length to the foothills, it would be the best birding road in Costa Rica.

A couple of my better lists from this site:
San Rafael Road June 7, 2025

San Rafael Road, April 24, 2026

A one night cloud forest birding itinerary for this area,

Casa Manigua Restaurant

Thousands of birders have surely driven by this spot without stopping and I don’t blame them. You’re on a tour or schedule, you can’t be stopping at every random site. Do that in Costa Rica and you’ll be here for years (most of this bio-packed country is a natural hotspot after all). However, you might want to check this place out.

Located on Route 32, just north of the Aerial Tram, the Casa Manigua is a good restaurant also very good for birding. Surrounded by foothill rainforest, you might see a mixed flock from the balcony, might notice a Laughing Falcon perched across the street, or see raptors and parrots in flight.

The highway can be noisy but the birding can still be very good with coquettes and other hummingbirds visiting flowering trees, and Sunbittern on the river down below (nice trail but it can be slippery).

Overall, a worthy place to stop for a cold smoothie or tasty meal including wood fired pizza. I have yet to try that but it looks promising. Check out this list.

The Rio Negro Jaguar Reserve

Lastly, we have this spot much further afield from the Central Valley. It might not be labeled as such but this is the name for the lowland rainforest north of Rincon de la Vieja. Only a small portion is accessible by a good road but it’s still worth birding it. Very little visited, I wouldn’t be surprised if this forest harbors rarities like Tawny-faced Quail and even Speckled Mourner (it is near a place that has recorded those rare species).

I haven’t been there very often but on my few visits, I was pretty impressed and yearn to investigate that site further. There were Slaty-breasted Tinamous, I heard Black-eared Wood-Quails, saw Black-crested Coquette, Snowy Cotinga, and many other birds. In 2017, a Harpy was seen near there, bellbird can be present, and I bet umbrellabird and Lovely Cotinga too. I can’t wait to go back!

A list from this site.

Costa Rica birding site guide updated for 2026!

I always want to return and bird these places but lately, I’ve been thinking more about these and other similar sites for another reason. Recently, I’ve been working on updating “How to See, Find, and Identify Birds in Costa Rica” and can finally say that the fourth edition is available. Updated to include a high percentage of birding sites in Costa-Rica, recent edits include:

Information for nearly 300 sites in Costa Rica.
Updates for many sites.
Updated information about bird identification and birding in Costa Rica in general.

Of course it also includes information about the three sites mentioned in this blog as well as many other little birded spots. Prepare for birding Costa Rica in 2026 and 2027 by purchasing this 1,000 page ebook. You’ll also be supporting this blog, I hope to see you here!

Book Review- Aves de Costa Rica/Birds of Costa Rica by Ensifera

There’s a few field guides available for Costa Rica along with a massive wealth of information (ranging from accurate and insightful to simple fantasy). It wasn’t always like that; for my first trip to Costa Rica, in 1992, the only book that completely focused on the birds of Costa Rica was the classic “Stiles and Skutch”, a fair-sized tome published in 1989.

The information in that book was and still is golden; it contains a culmination of decades of avian studies still pertinent to this day. The main drawback was its size; a bit large for the field (most of us still carried it anyways) and better suited for the library. Eventually, it also became outdated in terms of additional species found in Costa Rica along with more rounded information about them.

Jumping to the present, this year, many of us birders in Costa Rica eagerly await the third edition of “The Birds of Costa Rica: A Field Guide” by Garrigues and Dean. Scheduled to be available in October, and having heard about the hard work and improvements made to update it, that book promises to be a must have field guide for any birder visiting Costa Rica. However, I won’t be writing about it until at least October. Today, I’ve got another book to talk about, one that was published earlier this year.

It’s called, “Aves de Costa Rica” or, “Birds of Costa Rica” by John Jairo Reyes Londoño and Luis Alberto Peña, and illustrated by Miles McMullan. Published in Colombia by Ensifera, this and their similar Birds of Panama mark their first field guides covering a region outside of Colombia. I’ll start by saying that although it does qualify as a field guide, the small yet handy dimensions make it more of a pocket guide and I mean that in a good way. Light in weight, protected with a handy plastic cover, and graced with less than 130 pages, a birder could certainly fit this little book into any pack (and probably a lot of pockets too).

It’s a far cry from the hefty Stiles and Skutch but, the difference in size brings up a valid question; how on Earth could a field guide for a country with well over 900 species be so small when the first and much larger field guide covered fewer than 900 species? Some pocket guides solve that issue by simply showing fewer birds, others have left out a lot of text. This one meets the challenge in a few ways described below.

QR codes instead of text

Instead of text about habitat, behavior or other interesting and valuable information typically found in a field guide, this book vectors the reader to said information via a QR code. There’s one for each species that brings you to a page with buttons for the species account in eBird, Birdlife International, Xeno-Canto (for sounds), and a couple other sites. While this feature could be a boon for younger birders or people otherwise synched with the digital age, it won’t work as well for folks who like to read books.

This of course also means that you won’t see that QR linked information without a good connection. Lack of connections being common in many birding spots in Costa Rica, this will be an issue in the field but, on the other side of the coin, in all honesty, I don’t believe birders are doing themselves any favors by reading text in the field in any case.

Honestly, given the natural rarity of many tropical birds and the few looks one typically gets, I think birders are better off leaving every field guide closed until the birding has seriously quieted down (say 9:30 a.m.) or, until lunch time. Keep reaching for a field guide during mixed flock madness or other bird activity and you’ll miss lifers. All of that said, with this book, no matter where you are, you’ll need a phone with a QR reader and a good connection to check out info. about the bird in question.

Minimal and small illustrations

The other way to fit 900 plus bird species into fairly few pages is by showing anywhere from 8 to 10 species per page. To show that many, large illustrations are impossible and there can only be one or two per species. This does save a lot of space but ends up giving a fairly limited visual overview for each species. This is in contrast to various modern field guides that strive to show as many images for a species as possible to try and cover every identification angle, juvenile plumages, flight views, behavior in their habitat, etc.

Therefore, illustrations are fairly small and limited and the overall scheme is more of an illustrated checklist but, will they still help the reader identify the birds they see?

Quality of illustrations

In answer to the previous question, I would say “yes” and “no”. While various illustrations are good and fairly spot on (like the Green Honeycreeper), many others are sort of funky but still mostly show enough features for identification. However, various illustrations are just not really up to par for adequately identifying some of the more challenging groups like Furnarids, Empids, shorebirds, and warblers.

The same goes for most of the raptors in flight. Shown on the inside cover, while various plumage details look alright, the most important factor for raptor identification (the shape of the bird) is not quite correct. Something else to mention is that the Great Black-Hawk pictured is the subspecies that occurs in South America (and could perhaps end up being a different species?), and one of the more frequently seen raptors in flight is missing- the Common Black Hawk.

Maps and information about bird abundance

Maps also take up space and is why this guide doesn’t have them. However, as with text, that is fixed by visiting the sites in the QR code, at least two of which give pretty good ideas about bird distribution in Costa Rica. The same goes for habitat but, the book does show information about elevation, size, abundance, and some idea of where a species is seen most often.

It does this with numbers related to abundance and Costa Rican provinces explained at the beginning of the book. For example, common species like the Vaux’s Swift have a “1” for being an abundant bird (although I’d call it common), and a “2” to indicate they are seen most frequently in the province of Alajuela.

While this does give a fair indication of how common or rare a bird is, it might not reflect how rare some species really are. For example, the Comb Duck is given the highest level of rarity (“6”) while the White-cheeked Pintail and Greater White-fronted Goose are given a “5” and the Fulvous-Whistling Duck is given a “3” for being “poco comun” or “uncommon”. These assessments are made with eBird sightings but could be more accurate. The pintail has been seen several times but most sightings were of the same bird, the geese were the same flock of 5 seen on several occasions, and I would call the Fulvous Whistling-Duck “rare” as it seems to only occur in small numbers in a restricted area. All of that nit-picking aside, overall, they do a fair job of generally indicating how rare or common a species is.

As for province where a species is seen the most, I’m not sure how useful that is. The problem with associating birds in Costa Rica with a certain province is that most provinces have several, very distinct habitats. It would have been more helpful to have a map showing where different major habitats or bioregions are since these factors of course determine where birds occur. Like so, we would know that the Vaux’s Swift is just as frequent in other highland areas of Costa Rica as the highland parts of Alajuela province.

As far as I can tell, the closest this book comes to mentioning this critical factor (habitat) is indicating elevational range for a species. Once again, using the QR code will bring you to information about habitat preference but, opting for indicating some form of distribution by province instead of anything about habitat within the book itself doesn’t seem like the most useful idea.

For example, since the very rare Speckled Mourner is shown as being seen most often in Guanacaste, once a reader somehow realizes that Guanacaste is mostly dry forest, they may conclude that the mourner must use that habitat and/or be possible in places like Nicoya and Liberia. In reality, this mature lowland and foothill rainforest specialist is only shown for Guanacaste because the main spot where it has been seen (Pitilla Biological Station) happens to just fall within a part of the province that has its habitat.

Granted, the book does mention that their measure of species abundance and occurrence is based on the eBird hotspot with the most observations but that raises a valid question- Should a field guide (1) indicate where birds are historically known to occur or expected to occur based on known range and habitat or, (2) show where a species has been seen the most in eBird? While option 2 is helpful, since I know I can get that information from eBird, I would much rather have a field guide show option 1.

It would be a bit like a field guide for North America mentioning Minnesota for Great Gray Owl instead of anywhere else in its large range because most sightings come from the Sax-Zim Bog area (I’m assuming most sightings come from there).

Good information for beginning birders

One of this book’s highlights is the very good information provided for people just getting started with birding. There is some excellent information in particular about how to identify birds as well as good birding ethics (even mentioning to warn nearby people when you are about to put on insect repellent). The book also has a small box to check for every species, a few pages for note taking, tips on binocular use, and an illustrated index of bird families and orders.

With all of the above in mind, although I wouldn’t recommend using this field guide to identify every bird in Costa Rica, and it won’t be useful for birders who prefer the best illustrations and books with in-depth information, it will work for Spanish speaking folks with an interest in birds who’d like a very portable book about birds in Costa Rica, especially if they also like to use their phones.

I daresay the authors made this book with this goal in mind. In particular, I think this small book would be an excellent way to introduce people to birds, especially young people who use their mobile devices for just about everything, and folks just getting started with birding. It also does well at showing just how many birds have been seen in Costa Rica (more than 940!). Given its size and dynamic, digital connection approach, this book would be an especially good tool for teachers and organizations in Costa Rica who aim to foster more interest in birds.