Animal Brigadoon

It's a magical place, Costa Rica, so colorful and lush, popping with life and flowers, birds and insects. It brings the winter-dulled senses back to life. Going there in dreary February is like drinking an elixir that wakes you and makes you feel that everything is possible again.

We were headed back to Don Alvaro's finca in February 2015 to show it to some lucky travelers, and to bring him a gift. Your gift. 

The groovy anis waved hello, looking fine by some roadside cannas.

We took a narrow, muddy back road cut-through and almost knocked a white hawk off its eye-level perch. That bird hadn't gotten the memo that white hawks are always a dot in a scope in a distant tree, many hundreds of yards from eager birders. It was completely happy to let us ogle it, get out of the bus, and commit it to our many respective digital recording devices. It had lizards on its mind.

Our guide Mario Cordoba had first brought me (and some of the present crew, repeat offenders on my second trip to Costa Rica) to Don Alvaro's place in 2013, and what I saw and felt there left a deep impression on my psyche.

It was an animal Brigadoon, where there was nothing to fear and everything to trust.

Where a fierce-seeming water buffalo is gentle as a lamb. Yes, he has a ring in his nose, but he's a doll.

Where a donkey named Conejo begs for pineapple, and gets it. I've never met a full-sized donkey you could throw your arms around and smooch on the nose, but Conejo is a great big lovebunny. 

From this most unusual open-air kitchen, attended by creatures great and small, we enjoyed the most delicious meal of our trip, and that's saying a lot.

Fresh pineapple juice? Comida typical, perfectly prepared and seasoned? Yes, please, more more more. We were in Food Animal Heaven.

Of course, I had to share. 

Don Alvaro's is the kind of farm where a great curassow just walks up to you and gently pecks your hand, giving a little moaning call as you tickle its curly crest. 

I like it there, and I'm not alone. 

We were here to take it all in, and to give something back, too. 

And it wasn't going to be peanuts.

I am indebted to my friends Jenny Bowman, Bonnie Bowen, Jenny Minton and Karen Johnson-Nieuwendijk for many of these photos. If I'm in 'em, I didn't take 'em. The mists of time have pulled a cover of forgetfulness over me and I was lax in recording whose photo was whose. They flooded in right after the trip and I was, uh, not paying attention. Please jump in and tell me!!

Feeder Madness: Arenal Observatory Lodge

People and birds alike figure out fast when the lodge employees replenish the fruit feeder out off the back balcony. Just in time for people breakfast comes bird breakfast.

Papaya and banana attracts, from top, a pair of black-cowled orioles, a blue-gray tanager, a buff-throated saltator, a golden-hooded tananger, a clay-colored thrush (formerly robin), and a palm tanager. A tropical bird sixpack.

Montezuma oropendolas love papaya and banana.

These utterly bizarre and beautiful giant orioles build long, purse-shaped nests that hang in colonies from tall trees. They have a sizzling, pulsing gargle that sounds like monkeys and electrical appliances underwater.

Size discrepancy in females and males (he's the bigun') is marked. 

But fruit offerings get more inventive. In order to keep the fruit away from coatis, Arenal Observatory Lodge has devised a sort of melon tree of natural branches in a three-pronged iron holder, baffled with a great big sheet metal cone.

It's raised and lowered by a rope pulley system. Here, the Lodge employee is removing eaten-out melon shells from the tree, which has been lowered to the ground. He simply tosses them into the forest, where tropical bacteria and fungi will melt them away within weeks.

He puts fresh melon quarters (in the box, lower right) on each spike.

Then, he raises the whole affair, including the baffle, back up with tremendous strength. Imagine how heavy that is! Several watermelons and the metal framework, over your head??

I'm sure I wouldn't be able to budge it.

But when it goes up, it blossoms in oropendolas.

Strange fruit indeed. They are replaced by a shift of brown jays.

There's one juvenile at upper left, and another dead center top, showing a yellow eye ring and bill and matching yellow legs. Interesting how they signal their youth. For a social bird, that's important. Please don't peck me. I'm in training.

A rather somber looking adult. I love brown jays, especially their percussive, exuberant calls, which sound like someone's holding them down and forcibly pounding the sound out of them. Pa-Pow!! Pow! Pow!!

Meanwhile, down on the platform, a great curassow is enjoying his papaya.

The coatis love the curassows because they're clumsy eaters, dropping everything off the platform.

The curassow, by embiggening himself, tries to clear the feeder.

He succeeds in intimidating two female oropendolas, but BossMan holds his ground. 

While we were groovin' on the feeder birds, Our Guide Mario caught an ornate hawk eagle powering by out of the corner of his eye. By the time he could shout it out and I could raise my lens, it was naught but a banded tail behind a black pine limb. Look closely, you'll see it. But honest, we saw it. Just not well. I put this in to pain poor Mario. Nothing a good guide hates like a near miss on a sexy bird.

That's OK. We have a tree full of gaudy birds right in front of us.  We're fine, here in the shadow of Arenal.

You know how they say there's no rest for the wicked? 

ZICK ALERT!! Mass Birders' Meeting, Bentley University, Waltham MA, Sat. March 7, 2015, I'm speaking at 11:40 AM on Personal Habitat: The Bird-friendly Backyard. I'll be signing books afterward, and will be there throughout the day. So will Phoebe and Corey and my editor Lisa and my dear friend Rob! Sorry for the late notice but I just finished my Costa Rican laundry and repacked my suitcase for snowy Massachusetts. Two days home, just in time for 13" of powder and a nice power outage. Waiting now to get the driveway plowed so I can board another plane tomorrow.

Here's a link to the event. 

I Sing the Sabrewing Electric

I've seen violet sabrewings in the highlands of Honduras and in a heliconia plantation in Guatemala. They've been a quest bird for me, this nearly sparrow-sized giant hummingbird, and I've been rewarded with brief glimpses and blurry photographs. 

I am delighted to say that I almost got my fill of violet sabrewings on our trip to Costa Rica in Feb/Mar 2014. 

How could I ever get my fill of a cobalt violet hummingbird?

This is a little photo salon of sabrewings, taken at a roadside restaurant in the Central Highlands. A simple cafe that features local cuisine in an open-air setting, where you have to dodge the quarreling hummingbirds buzzing all around you. My kind of diner.

This is a truly majestic hummingbird, well-named. 

He's gorgeous enough in the shade, but when the light hits him right, you just have to gasp.

He's a knight in violet mail. 

And those spanking white tailtips. 

It's one thing to photograph a bird plunked on a plastic feeder perch. Much more satisfying to follow them to their natural resting perches.

This wing structure flips me out. I'm counting ten primaries, and five, maybe six secondaries. But the structure is unlike anything I've drawn before. And how to capture that color? I'd love to try someday soon. Permanent rose, cobalt violet, ultramarine violet would surely be in the palette.

If females, which are gray below with a small violet gorget, ever visit feeders, I've never seen one. This puzzles and amazes me. Because now I've seen a lot of violet sabrewings, and I've yet to see a female. She'll be a quest bird for me now.

Ye gods! look at that tail pattern!

Ostentatiously beautiful from any angle, the violet sabrewing is another gift from above. I can only shake my head in wonder that such creatures exist. 

I remember watching the movie "Avatar," and being left puzzled that the animation team would take the time and trouble to create an alternate ecology, all these dreamt-up plants and organisms. It was beautiful, wonderful and awesome, but I kept thinking, "Isn't what's here wonderful enough? Do these people laboring away in a studio know that there are violet sabrewings out there? Have they seen them? How could people presume to create anything half as wonderful as this?

I would be satisfied just to try to do it justice in a painting, glad to know such a bird lives and flies where I can go see it, at a roadside cafe in Costa Rica. 

Costa Rica Birding with Zick!

So yeah. I went to Costa Rica. Just back, in fact, as of Thursday March 6.  I was gone for 12 days. Way to kick the stuffing out of an endless winter. I canned a bunch of winter birding blogposts before I left, because I care about you, my readers, and I wanted you to have something to gnaw on while I was gone. I’ll admit it—I was a hot mess before I left. Fed up to my eyeballs with this horrific winter. Seeing no end to it. Wanting out in the worst way. And yet on the scale of all possible human travails, winter weariness is as nothing. I knew that, but I couldn’t get out from under it.

I was all balled up, too, about the Costa Rica trip, because it would be the first time I’d ever had the responsibility of leading people on a 12-day birding trip in the tropics. I’m used to leading 5-hour birding trips. Where everybody sees their birds and goes back to camp and then we do it again the next morning, and maybe one more, and then it’s over. This would be being “on” all day long for 12 days, in front of 12 people. And I wasn’t sure I could do it. I knew I could show people a good time, but I didn’t know if I could have a good time doing it, maintain an acceptable level of nice for such a prolonged period. I’m an introvert, plain and simple, and it scared me. My comfort zone is at my drawing table, or in the woods alone or with one other person. I can turn it on if I need to, but oh, get me back to the studio, the woods, the hayfield so I can think. For this reason, I'd resisted all prior offers to lead trips, no matter how sexy the destination. But Holbrook Travel made it all seem doable, attractive, even, and I decided to take the plunge.

I had planned to publicize the trip on my blog and maybe Facebook, but I never got the chance, because it filled up so quickly. I took flyers to two of my Ohio talks last spring and bam! the trip was full. I apologize to all those who might have wanted to go, who never even heard about it. I guess it’s a good problem to have, not to have to beat the bushes for trip participants.

 I finally got packed and got my bags and me down there and met my supercool co-leader, Mario Cordoba, and felt the warm breeze and saw a million flowers all blooming madly and I knew it would be OK. More than OK. Great. Intense. The people all seemed nice and compatible and the birds were good in the hotel garden. I couldn’t sleep that first night, though, for worrying about whether I was up to it all. Oh Zick. Oh ye of little faith. Truth to tell, Mario did ALL the hard stuff. He knew what birds we'd see, what stops we'd make, and carried the scope and dealt with the lodges and set the schedule. I was just there for sparkle and help in getting people on birds, to do a couple of talks and just generally help move things along.

So the next morning I got up, bleary and fraught but trying to act reasonably normal, and we climbed in a bus and took off for Selva Verde, Holbrook Travel’s proprietary lodge. It’s in the Caribbean lowlands near Sarapiqui.

 The first thing I pointed out when we got out of the bus was a male green honeycreeper pulling a female’s tail. She was squawking something awful. He kept chasing her down and yanking on her tail. Somebody asked me if it was courtship. “I don’t think so. I think he’s just pulling her tail, that’s what I think.” And a couple of people laughed, and we were off.

 

As we made our way to our rooms a green and black poison arrow frog hopped into view, keeping with the Seafoam Green theme. And I freaked out, because this was my first-ever poison arrow frog. Right there at my feet. I wanted to kiss it, but didn’t, because I suddenly no longer wanted to die. I wanted to live, and look at birds for the next ten days with a bunch of good people who wanted to do the same.

A black river turtle smiled at us from a pool. He wanted a chunk of sammitch, I was pretty sure of that, and said as much. And someone pointed to a sign that said PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE TURTLES.  Ha! Turtles can be hard to read, but this one wasn’t. We laughed again. We would laugh a lot in the next 11 days. 

Nearby, a big bull green iguana draped hisself over a branch. 

And a giant female golden orb weaver (Nephila clavipes) had a chat with her minuscule reddish hopeful mate. Who was also hoping not to be wrapped up and eaten as a snack. Her abdomen was as long as my thumb.

Yes, it was all going to be OK. It was going to be great. It was going to be birding Costa Rica with Zick and Mario!! (whom I thank for keeping this all accurate, and so much more).