Hummingbirds of Toro Amarillo

Rolling through the Central Highlands of Costa Rica in our Magic Bus, we saw some cool stuff. This adult fasciated tiger heron (had a bare-throated tiger heron in the last post) was waiting in a mountain stream for something hapless to float by. 

We were headed for a special mountain restaurant at a beautiful waterfall called El Toro Amarillo. 

The Brugmansias were spectacular, albeit, by virtue of their great size and long corollas, more attractive to nectivorous bats than hummingbirds. 

Spectacular. As was the restaurant seating area.

Proprietor Will speaks with John and Betty.

The very first bird I laid eyes on was strangely familiar. But it illustrated a tenet of birding--that if you see something familiar in an exotic place, it can look very unfamiliar. I was staring at this bird, struggling to identify it when Mario stepped over and said softly, "Look familiar?"

I turned to him in confusion. I'd never seen this molt stage of a ruby-throated hummingbird! You'd think, having raised four males from babies, I miiiight have some idea...

I moved on to the endemics and residents. They were easier than our ONE SPECIES of hummingbird east of the Mississippi. Yes, I am making fun of myself.

Here at the Yellow Bull, green-crowned brilliants joust and jabber

with the diminutive endemic coppery-headed emerald

and the impressive green hermit, a lunker with a fabulous decurved bill and bizarre pthalo green back. That's bounce light on his shiny bill, by the way; it's reddish but not that red in real life.

Oh you little mosasaur. I love you.

This montane squirrel (also an endemic) enjoyed some leftover pineapple.

And the hummingbirds just got better and better. I do love a good white-bellied mountain gem.

The violet sabrewings on this trip were elusive. Durned hard to catch.

If you want to know what they look like in good light, go to my post "I Sing the Sabrewing Electric."

where you will see more of THIS. I kept assuring folks we'd get great shots of this species...it never happened in 2015. I was rolling in them in 2014. Every year, every place is different.

 The bird I'd never seen that I was really after was the green thorntail. You can't really tell how cool it is from this shot...

and then you get a back view, and you're all...what is that stuff on your tail??

So you follow this minuscule creature around a magic flower garden until you finally luck into the shot of your lifetime. No bigger than your pinky, clothed in emerald mail, all fancy in the butt end.

 Green thorntail, seen at last. Fairies, they fly, still and forever.

Hummingbird Cafe

It's incredible how maintaining a number of hummingbird feeders in suitable montane habitat can electrify a roadside cafe. 

We stopped at several such spots in our travels in Costa Rica on our trip in February and March.

Unassuming little cafes serving typical local food, and abuzz with hummingbirds.

We only actually ate at one of the cafe's. Usually, we only had time to stop and ogle the birds. We'd leave a donation to help the proprietors. It was really quite an elegant system.

These photos were taken at Mirador Cinchona, famous for its hard to find hummingbirds.

Like this female green-crowned brilliant. As much as I love the male, those rows of scaly dots on the

female's throat and underside KILL me.

I love this little gal with her tendril. 

So natty in her polka-dot pajamas.

The tiny coppery-headed emerald was very difficult to get, as it zipped in very quickly, flashing its white-patched copper tail, and back out before I could focus. But I followed it to the perch where it was resting. Absolutely exquisite. Even if it has a confusing name, because the tail's a whole lot copperier than the head. I loved its tiny slightly decurved bill. When there's a cloud of hummingbirds buzzing, you can find this bird by its tiny size and the flashing white on the sides of its tail.

Here you can see a bit of the white in its tail, which is really impressive as it flares the tail in flight. Coppery-headed emerald is a Costa Rican endemic, meaning it's found nowhere else in the world. All hail Mirador Cinchona!! May your feeders stay full and never get moldy! May happy birders flock to your veranda and leave many dollars! May your emeralds multiply and be fruitful!

Though the field marks are superficially similar, the coppery headed emerald is not to be confused with the much larger and more abundant rufous-tailed hummingbird, which we saw in almost all habitats across Costa Rica.

Common it may be, but a good look at it reveals an exquisite bird.

This was the first time I realized this Amazilia had an aquamarine gorget. Whoo. One of my tenets as a birdwatcher is never to scorn the common birds. I've been known to go into raptures over a great tailed grackle, right Mario?

Speaking of common birds, here's a common bush tanager waiting to visit the feeders. It's a bird that travels in mixed-species flocks, all foraging together for fruit and insects, whatever they may find. 

Violet sabrewings were the stars of the show, but they've had their own blogpost already. So we'll just put one in for eye candy. Mmmm. Still wondering why I never saw a female. 

I was determined to get some decent photos of a teeny-tiny white-bellied mountaingem who was hiding deep in a shrub beneath one of the feeders. To do this I had to hunker down under one of the cafe's tables and point my lens down through the underbrush.

He had the most ridiculous combo of colors on his head and throat, and they changed with each turn of his head. 

Holy cow. That violet! That shimmering emerald, that turquoise!!

Loved that birdie. Well worth the contortions and groaning to get down and deal with it, to get those photos. This was the only white-bellied mountaingem we saw on the whole trip. For several participants, who didn't get to see all those colors, the camera captured it. I loved being able to show people who might not have wanted to crawl under a table all the breathtaking things I was seeing.

More green-crowned brilliants...this one the male. They always make me think of dragons. They're long, lean and mean-looking.

I have a penchant for the females, though. They could win a cute face contest, if there were one for hummingbirds.

 I would like to hold a hummingbird pageant. We could have a flying skills showcase, a swimsuit competition.  And then there's the Cute Face competition. I'd put money on Miss Green-crowned Brilliant.

At the Big Bird feeder, a silver-throated tanager feasted on papaya.

And was joined by a blue-gray tanager. We feasted our eyes on them. What natty birds!! Tough being upstaged by hummingbirds.

As we left, we passed a tiny Tica, holding her bottle and waving. She got an AWWWW from the entire bus.

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. 

Birds of Cerro Azul Meambar

 Oh, that cooperative collared trogon. What a beauty he was. The first painting I saw that made me want to be a bird painter, that made me think I could really do it, was by my friend Alex when I was a freshman in college. It was of a collared trogon. So, while appreciating the bird, I blasted back in memory to that moment, seeing the way he'd laid a shadow across its tail, and realizing I could probably do that, too.

A lot has rolled out from that little epiphany.

There were some mighty fine smaller birds at Cerro Azul, too, and we had nice sunshine and drier air to enjoy them. Here's a golden-hooded tanager, Tangara larvata. 

Let's have another look at that little beauty.

He was eating some tiny green fruits, balancing on the hair-fine twigs.

One of the big attractions of Cerro Azul Meambar is its hummingbird feeding station. Feeders are rigged up under the eaves of the visitor center. And we parked ourselves there and feasted our eyes.

Byron snaps a long-billed starthroat at close range.

White-bellied emeralds were confiding and common.

Much as I loved banging away at the feeder hummingbirds, I yearned to capture images of them in natural surroundings. So I wandered off to a patch of verbena and was well-rewarded by a cooperative rufous-tailed hummingbird.

Ahh. There's the shot I was after--feeding at real flowers!

A devilishly quick and difficult bird to capture is the long-tailed hermit, with its spectacular streamers. When it flies by, your brain just can't figure out what you've just seen, with these white dingies streaming out behind it and that scimitar bill before. It really wouldn't need the bandit mask.

But the jewel of Cerro Azul Meambar, the one they all come for, is the spectacular Violet Sabrewing. It comes thrumming into the feeders like a chimney swift, and by some miracle of iridescence it is purple in all lights and at all angles, not that frustrating blackish that so many hummingbirds seem to show.

This is a huge montane hummer, something like 6-7" long. Its wings make a correspondingly impressive low hum, so you know when it's around, and your heart just leaps.

I maneuvered around until I had the violet sabrewing against a soft green background; I wasn't wild about the babypoo yellow of the building as a backdrop for that glittering jewelbird.

Thank you, Violet Sabrewing.

Not far from the visitor's center, we ambled over to see the deluxe guest cottages under construction at Cerro Azul Meambar National Park. They were lovely, and the new lights outside attracted the most fabulous orthopterans and moths, a phenomenon that had not escaped this turquoise-browed motmot. He was cleaning up after the night's luminary siren had called innumerable large insects to bash themselves against the wall.

Mmm, katydid.

 glug glug glug

Works every time. Ahhhh.

The next day, on the way down, I grabbed one of my favorite shots from the trip through the bus window. Catch the ears on that little boy.