I have been more or less stuck in the not so scenic, urbanized areas of Costa Rica for the past few weeks. Work and family duties (including a children’s birthday party replete with scary clown dancing to reggaeton blasted out of an amplifier) have kept me from birding the beautiful, exciting, rainforests and cloud forests [...]
Continue reading about More great birding near San Ramon, Costa Rica
With so much excellent birding to be had in Costa Rica, it’s always tempting to make statements such as “that site has some of the best birding in Costa Rica”, or “you have got to visit such and such site”! I am careful about giving out those accolades but I can tell you that I [...]
Continue reading about Heliconias Lodge: some of the best birding in Costa Rica
One of the most exciting aspects of birding Costa Rica is the variety of different habitats that are easily accessible from the Central Valley. For example, if you get tired of sweating it out in the lowlands while watching flyovers of Scarlet Macaws, you can head up into the mountains for cool, cloud forest birding [...]
Continue reading about Highlights from guiding while birding Costa Rica this past weekend
San Ramon is a small city on the western edge of the central valley in Costa Rica. The city itself doesn’t have much to offer for birding in Costa Rica but some nearby areas have a lot of potential. Although I know of a few local birders who visit the cloud forests and middle elevation [...]
In my search for sites suitable for Birding Club of Costa Rica field trips, I had sometimes come across this place that was rumored to possibly be the best birding spot in Costa Rica. This is quite a statement for a country that boasts over 800 bird species that soar over, haunt, enliven, troop through, [...]
Continue reading about Bang for your buck birding in Costa Rica: the El Copal Biological Reserve
For birders from the north, the Grey-necked Wood-Rail is an anomaly. It doesn’t skulk all day in marshes, nor does it demand that you stumble around in the dark of the night to see it. None of that wandering around and playing tapes, making clumsy imitations, or donating blood to the local mosquito population in [...]
Continue reading about Tales of Birding Costa Rica: My first Grey-necked Wood-Rail
During my first trip to Costa Rica in 1992, I visited Tapanti for a day. Back then it had wildlife refuge status and had a cheaper entrance fee but not much else has changed since then-and that’s a good thing! On subsequent trips, including a day and a half of guiding I did there recently, [...]
Continue reading about Tapanti National Park- good, middle elevation birding in Costa Rica
There are at least 5 distinct regional habitat types or ecosystems in Costa Rica; dry forest, middle elevation cloud forest, high elevation rain forest, Pacific slope lowland rain forest, and Caribbean slope lowland rain forest. Birding in this latter habitat type is especially exciting because it harbors ecosystems with the highest number of bird species [...]
“Pocosol” may have rhythm as far as words go, but except for the occasional vampire wannabee (or unfortunates who are extremely sensitive to ultraviolet rays), “Little Sunlight” doesn’t sound all that inviting. Despite being strongly diurnal in nature, the Birding Club of Costa Rica was nevertheless undaunted in planning and doing a trip to Pocosol [...]
Continue reading about Pocosol: Little known Costa Rica Birding Destination
This past weekend I visited Rara Avis, one of the classic birding sites for Costa Rica. Lattice-tailed Trogon- a fairly common bird at Rara Avis. There were several Olive-sided Flycatchers in the area. Love these birds! Founded in 1983 by conservationists, Rara Avis started out as an organization whose goal was to demonstrate that rain forest could [...]
Continue reading about Rara Avis, one of Costa Rica’s classic birding sites
