Solimar Siesta: Birding Costa Rica

This is a picture of people having fun on the patio at Hacienda Solimar. I think we were waiting for lunch. A pleasant prospect, as all the food on the trip was delicious, fresh and abundant. We're relaxing. Not having to think about much of anything except moving from one awesome sight to the next. What a blast! That's the goal on these Costa Rica and South Africa trips I co-lead. Figure out a route, great places to go, great places to stay; (That's Main Guide Mario and Debbie from Holbrook Travel and our terrific driver Jimmy's genius); get people there and let Amazing Mother Nature do the rest. Dart around and direct attention, Vanna White style, to this and that and the other. (Zick's job). And oh, does Mother Nature come through for us.

Guanacaste is Costa Rica's cowboy country. It's comparatively dry, hot and scrubby, with low forest. That makes it easy to see birds and animals. This Harris' hawk looked at home against a brilliant blue sky. Mario took this shot for me out the bus window. 

Southern lapwings run around on stilty legs. What a beautiful bird! This one is checking for peregrines, I'm sure. 

A beautiful male green kingfisher was making a sound like two marbles clicking together for several minutes before any of us spotted him against the bank, just a pebble's throw away. 

A white-necked puffbird, a bulky giant-beaked Coraciiforme, sort of like a landbound kingfisher, subdues an enormous grasshopper. It masticated the insect for awhile, then gulped it down.

A pair of orange-fronted parakeets were sitting nervously beneath their nest, which was excavated in an enormous termite colony mound.  You can just see one of them directly beneath the black nest, framed in a rectangle of heavy limbs. The termite nest is made of frass, which the termites produce when they eat wood. When a parrot or trogon burrows into the nest, the termites simply wall off the birds' newly excavated nest chamber and go about their business. Nobody gets upset. It's pretty cool.

I witnessed an interesting phenomenon in this pair. Here they are, not displaying. Eyes dark, right? Maybe a dark-medium gray. 

Het up by our presence, they began displaying to each other. Look at their eyes now.  Probably best to click on the photo to see it well, and sharp. Suddenly their irides look white. Anyone who has lived with a parrot or macaw knows this look. It's when you're about to get bitten. When Charlie did it, I used to call it "pinning her eyes," or "pupils pinned." The pupil contracts down to a small dot, and the smaller that dot, the more likely I was to get bitten. It's a pretty dramatic difference in the appearance of the bird, isn't it?

It was hard to leave Solimar, so abundant and impressive was its avifauna. But we had to press on toward Villa Lapas, our lodge, one of my favorite places to stay. There, we are immersed in wildlife, can't get away from it. The landscaped grounds and nearby riverine forest are a strong attractant to all life forms. 

On the way, we saw a great gathering of birds at Caldera Bay. We pulled over and beheld more black terns than I've ever seen in my life, or ever expect to see going forward. And I've been on the North Dakota prairies, where they breed, for a week at a time for 12 Junes. But this was something else again. Black terns littered the beach, and floated like mosquitoes over the bay. It was stunning, astonishing. These are two halves of a panorama. I got tired of counting the preening flock when I got around 800. It hit me that there is so much yet to be learned about migration. Is this gathering of black terns in Caldera Bay in late February a known thing? How would one find out? And to think they're headed for prairie potholes in the Great Plains and Canada. It's humbling. Every darn one of them was preening, their heads and bills busy and moving. 

I can't convey the cloud of black terns the seethed over Caldera Bay with this photo, taken Feb. 24, 2016. Just trust me on this...there were thousands of black terns here. What a rush! 

You never know all that's going on with birds. Not even a particle of it. That's why traveling along the migratory route of "our" birds and seeing them on their wintering grounds is such a rush for me. It's as if I'm getting a privileged glimpse into their private lives.

Dog and Bird Spotting at Hacienda Solimar, Costa Rica

I am happy to report that, after 8 days away, my laptop has been returned by the excellent gentlemen of Elan Technologies, fitted with a new top case, keyboard, trackpad, and battery. No more will its swollen and aging battery impede progress on all fronts. Back in the blogging saddle! I took this time to write thank-you notes, 27 of them, to people who helped me with Baby Birds. It was like doing Christmas cards, and hand-writing a different letter to each recipient. Being that nice for five days was exhausting. :) I want to thank you all for the vote of confidence on old-fashioned prose posts, though; my photo-free post "Becalmed" has done better than most of my glitzier photo posts. Huh.

On Day 4 of our Costa Rica expedition, we made a lunchtime stop at Hacienda Solimar, a working cattle ranch of epic propotions in the Guanacaste region of the northwest Pacific coast. On this enormous ranch, beautiful Brahma cattle are bred and raised, mostly for breeding stock.
They are definitely a cut above the usual, even to my untrained eye.  I'm guessing the red X's on these cows indicate they've been bred.

On this day, the cowboys were separating calves from moms, and there was a lot of bellering going on, and dust rising in the air.

They use horses for much of the cattle cutting, but there were also some fancy four-wheelers in the garage. I spotted a very cute doggie resting in the shade. She had the nicest smile!

And then, feeling a little self-conscious, she yawned, and displayed perhaps the longest tongue I've ever seen on a dog.  

Just down the road, a classic yaller dog trotted home, curled tail held high over his back.  A good yaller dog is not too far from a dingo, if you ask me. Survival instincts keen and sharp; a coat that blends into dry grass, a yaller dog is a hunter, vigilant and crafty. Perhaps the ancestral dog.

  Much as I love cattle and dogs, I had to admit we were here for birds, and Hacienda Solimar did not disappoint. A pair of rufous-naped wrens drinks from a coconut shell. Oh sweet scene, there in the dappled light.

And just down the driveway, a Pacific screech-owl pretends to nap. It's a real good bet that an owl who looks like he's sleeping is glaring at you from behind those heavy lids. And wishing hard that you'd bug off.

Good as the land birding is, the marshes of Solimar are stupendous. We were gobsmacked by throngs of black-bellied whistling ducks. Struggling to comprehend why there were so many, I kept asking Mario and Solimar guide Demetrio if they were  massing for migration, enjoying  a post-breeding break or what? No, they replied; they're always here in numbers. Well, that just didn't make sense to me.

The more I thought about it, the more it bugged me. The black-bellied whistling duck is a cavity nester. It's a big duck, almost goose-sized. That's a whopping cavity! And every one of these ducks was born in a cavity.

Where do they find all those huge cavities for their nests?? And what are they all doing here? How can there be enough food in these sloughs for all those ducks? Sometimes nature just befuddles me. 

And wading around with the whistling ducks and an amazed great blue heron was an enormous jabiru, nearly five feet tall. 

These endangered storks nest at Solimar, and we were privileged to see a nest, with three young, at a great distance, so as not to bother them. What a tree, what a nest, what amazing storks they are.

In flight, with those pure-white primaries beating, they're magnificent. I expected their wings to be trimmed in black.  Melanin strengthens feathers for the inevitable wear flight brings. That's why most white birds like terns, gulls, gannets, wood storks and snow geese have black-tipped primaries at least. Not the jabiru. Does it not make long-distance flights? How come no black? Always scratching my head. Especially in the Neotropics. 

This is a fun shot. If you click on it to embiggen it, you'll find that three of these things are not like the others. Three of these things are not the same. Can you name all the birds in the photo?

** Answer at the bottom of the post. **

I'm just going to say right now that for some reason my photos in this post, viewed at normal size, look like crap. And when you click on them and see the larger version, you see that they are largely not crap. This is something I've been noticing about Blogger lately. If you like a photo, by all means click on it and see it how it's supposed to look. For instance, you can vaguely tell that the large birds in the photo above are some kind of craney storkey thing. Click on the photo and boom! Wood storks!

We watched the flocks for signs of danger, for the high whistled calls of the ducks and sudden explosions and rises. For there were peregrines about!

And why not? Wherever there are huge flocks of shorebirds and waterfowl, the wandering peregrine will attend them.  These two sparred playfully, thrilling us to bits.

Look at that leg extension! Wow!!

It always gets me when birds fly upside down. It never gets old.

By now you're probably figuring out that birding in Costa Rica is just fun, fun, fun. Especially with the Science Chimp jumping around scratching her head and asking questions. Right, Mario? Heh.

**The flock consists of 19 wood storks, and from left a black vulture, a tiny high-soaring anhinga, and an osprey, heading the other way.