TODAY BEGAN AT 4:30, ZERO DARK THIRTY in military parlance — a trend that we would repeat every day — for the long drive to La Selva on Costa Rica’s Caribbean side. We stopped at every “birdy-looking” spot and racked up about one hundred species today. The Aussies are really cleaning up; nearly every species is a lifer for them. Joel and Kathy have been to CR before and, like us, have seen a lot of these birds before. Many are on their winter migration from the US and Canada.
Broad-billed motmot
The education/research station at La Selva is a comedown from Robledal — very basic rooms with bunk beds and a communal dining room. But it is surrounded by rain forest and our time here promises to be especially productive. On day one we logged 111 forest species, tanagers, motmots, warblers and puff birds. Forest, who has a special thing for raptors, looked skyward whenever there was an opening in the trees, taking meticulous counts of the hawks and vultures overhead for his e-birds reports.
Green Violetear
Mornings at La Selva begin with hummingbirds on the way to breakfast. But today we traveled to Rainforest Adventure, a rainforest preserve complete with zip-lines and a gondola. We were on the lookout for ant birds, ant wrens and ant vireos, secretive birds that live in the thick foliage on the forest floor. Surprisingly, ant birds don’t eat ants! They hop around at the head of marauding columns of army ants, feeding on anything that’s fleeing in front of the stinging ants. And it shouldn’t be a surprise that they are a stone bitch to photograph. They are hard to see in the first place, they don’t sit still and there is absolutely no light, especially in the rain.
I skipped the afternoon session, a wise decision as it turned out. Just ten minutes after they left on the muddy trail, the skies opened up yet again. While the Aussies continued to rack up new species, Connie logged #4000 with a black-crested coquette, one of Costa Rica’s many hummingbirds. Total for the day, 90 species.
#4000, Black-crested coquette (photo pirated from internet) and a long way to 5000
