Cameras have come a long way from the days when we worried about our film being affected by x-rays at the airport. Nowadays, while we still call them cameras, the digital photographic devices of the 21st century are on such a different level that perhaps it would be better to refer to them as Digital [...]
Continue reading about Want to Take Pictures of Birds in Costa Rica? Visit the Nature Pavilion!
North American birders who are in Costa Rica for a couple of weeks won’t be going to the Chomes shrimp ponds. The reasoning is straightforward: Why watch shorebirds that you can see at home when you have tropical forests replete with flocks of glittering tanagers, sneaky antbirds, woodcreepers, and dozens of interesting flycatchers at your [...]
Continue reading about A Fine Spring Day of Birding Costa Rica at Chomes
Antbirds just might win the prize for being the most popular family of birds with the least amount of colors. It seems like just about anyone who birds in the neotropics ends up feeling a certain degree of fondness for antbirds. Even before I came to Costa Rica for the first time, I was fascinated [...]
The dry season on the Pacific slope is quickly coming to an end and that’s very welcome news because we could use the rain! This year’s dry season seemed to be especially bereft of agua as the sun hammered the fields into a brown landscape with relentless UV rays. Nevertheless, since the birds that live [...]
Continue reading about Some Updates and Perspectives for Birding in Costa Rica, April 2013
Ok, so we come to the final segment of Pat and Susan’s Big Day, 2013 in Costa Rica. At the end of part dos, we finished up in the Caribbean lowlands and were about to move up in elevation for a different suite of birds. We departed the Caribbean lowlands and headed to the middle [...]
Continue reading about Another Big Day in Costa Rica part tres
When the calendar reached Saturday morning, March 30th, it was time to saddle up, think about thousands of bird calls, and head on over the mountains to Tirimbina! That day being the day before Easter and one of Costa Rica’s major holiday weekends, we saw droves of vehicles at the Waterfall Gardens and a major [...]
Continue reading about Another Big Day in Costa Rica Part Dos
Who says you can’t go extreme when it comes to birding? Those of us familiar with the ins and outs of our avian-focused hobby (or lifestyle) know that birdwatching is nothing like the old-fashioned stereotype of some clumsy, eye-glass wearing person stumbling around the woods with binos around the neck, wide-brimmed hat on the head, [...]
Continue reading about Another Big Day in Costa Rica Part Uno
One of the innumerable cool things about watching birds compared to say, mammals, is that many tend to be colorful, decorative, and downright ornate. Not that there aren’t ornate mammals too but let’s face it, the general color scheme for mammal species happens to be brown. Some bird species have even managed to get “ornate” [...]
Cano Negro is a small village, a place to fish for monster Tarpon (yes, they are monsters), and an access point for one of the two major wetland sites in Costa Rica (the other one being Palo Verde). Since it’s a five hour drive from the Central Valley, I don’t make it up that way [...]
Continue reading about Birding Costa Rica at Cano Negro Wildlife Refuge
The Manzanillo-Puerto Viejo area doesn’t make it onto the birding radar of most first time birders to Costa Rica. It’s too much of detour to take, especially when you can see many of the same birds around the Sarapiqui area. Nevertheless, Manzanillo and many parts of southeastern Costa Rica are more forested than most of [...]
