It’s 2014 and it looks like the El Nino warm water deal is back in town. This is when the normally cold, nutrient rich water in the eastern (South American) Pacific becomes much warmer and less nutrient rich than normal. The small fish aren’t where they are usually found and the birds and larger fish [...]
Continue reading about A Ferry Trip in Search of El Nino Birds in Costa Rica
All of us birders love cotingas. Along with the manakins, those weird, beautiful birds are the neotropical convergence answer to the birds of paradise, and like those Papuan feathered crazies, a lot of cotingas are brightly colored, make weird noises, have weird shapes, and would be proud, card carrying members of the feathered fancy fab [...]
Continue reading about Need Turquoise Cotinga near San Jose? Visit Rancho Mastatal!
Sometimes you go birding and it’s nice but pretty much an average experience. Other times you head into the field and end up seeing an uncommon bird or two. Those days are always special and appreciated but they are overshadowed like an eclipse when you see a bunch of good birds and the first documentation [...]
Continue reading about Why it Would be Great to Have a Bird Monitoring Station at Chomes, Costa Rica
When I started planning my first trip to Costa Rica in 1992, I followed the same routine as every birder did before taking a trip to a place overflowing with potential lifers. Since we didn’t have the same crazy amount of Internet-based information available nowadays, trips were based on conversations, information derived from the the [...]
Continue reading about Where to See Birds in Guanacaste, Costa Rica
It’s no secret that Costa Rica has a healthy abundance of great birding just about everywhere one goes but but some places stand out for the avian attractions they offer. One such place is the general vicinity of La Gamba, a small village in southwestern Costa Rica. I have had some nice birding there on [...]
Continue reading about La Gamba- My New Favorite Birding Site in Costa Rica
Carara is usually on the list of birders visiting Costa Rica so in thinking of a topic for this week’s blog post, I decided to write a bit about the area, especially because I did some guiding there over the past three weeks. Since all of my birding/guiding around Carara has taken place on the [...]
As luck would have it, very few of the 2013 Costa Rican Christmas counts landed on dates that worked into my schedule. However, as luck would also have it, the one that did fit in was the Osa Christmas Count. This exciting day long survey of all things avian took place on December 20th and [...]
Continue reading about The Bosque del Rio Tigre 2013 Christmas Count
Sierpe is one of those out of the ways places that few birders visit when doing Costa Rica. It’s off the beaten track, isn’t exactly surrounded by large areas of protected forest, and is easily bypassed for such better known southwestern Costa Rican sites as the Osa Peninsula, Esquinas Rainforest Lodge, and Wilson Botanical Gardens [...]
Continue reading about A Synopsis of Birding around Sierpe, Costa Rica
On Sunday, I took a trip to Chomes and the Colorado salt pans with a friend of mine to look for shorebirds, to look for the Maguari Stork that showed up on September 16th, and get recordings and digiscoped shots of various feathered creatures. Although every trip to that area has been good, this one [...]
Continue reading about Don’t Disregard Chomes when Birding Costa Rica
Carara National Park is such a fantastic area for birds. Beautiful old growth rainforest harbors healthy populations of various antbirds, wrens, a fantastic bunch of flycatchers, manakins, trogons, and so on, etc, and lots more. If the park has any drawbacks (other than the fracking hot weather), those would be the opening time of 7 [...]
Continue reading about Nice August Birding (and Butterflies) on the Bijagual Road
