Along a River Green

For St. Patrick's day, I'm going to take you down a lovely green Costa Rican river. One of the most relaxing and fun things we did was our afternoon cruise on the Rio Sarapiqui. Just sit back and look for birds. We could do that! 

On the way we saw banana plantation workers lined up at the bank to get their money. Mario said they are waiting to cash their checks. They want to see the money, he said. 

Perhaps to spend some at 

El Palacio.

To buy some breadfruit--something I'd love to try someday.

Breadfruit trees are amazing, with huge lobed leaves and a rounded form. I understand it's edible at all stages, but fairly soft when ripe. It's roasted, boiled, or fried, and used in place of potatoes, so it's starchy. Not sweet.

I would like to taste it someday.

Soon we made it to the boat, and our cruise started. There was a foot belonging to someone napping at the dock. Seemed like the thing to do to document that.

 Our pilot was Esteban.

I'd seen so many anhingas in Florida in January I felt I was seeing an old friend.

Another familiar outline--this a Neotropic cormorant, a more gracile relative of the double-crested we know so well. 

But this young bare-throated tiger heron was a nice surprise. So well hidden and fierce! Tiger herons get their name from the striking barred plumage of the immatures. They generally don quieter pinstripes for adulthood.

A bay wren popped out for a glimmering second. What a beautiful color. So many tropical passerines are that rich, rusty red brown, but the bay wren is the prettiest brown of all.

More studies in brown and green...a pair of broad-billed motmots were hanging out near a bank where they may have been excavating a nest. They dig enormous holes with bills and their tiny feet, kicking the dirt out, kingfisher-style.

Glorious birds, with surprising turquoise on their throats. 

They looked like they had little bow ties on. Motmots are Coraciiformes, related to kingfishers.

 The little racquet-tips on their tails are fetching. The barbules around the tail tips are weak and the motmots preen them away to reveal the racquets. It's not given to us to know their function. Maybe chust for nice.

Speaking of nice: Long-nosed bats on a riverside tree. Love them! And these were the only species of bat we were lucky enough to see this year.

They utterly vanish if you don't know to look for them on their exposed daytime roosts. There are at least seven in the lower photo.

Massive root systems, clinging to an undercut bank.

A lone spectacled caiman. I remembered when I was a kid and some of my friends had tiny stunted baby caimans in tanks. We all thought they only got about a foot long. We were actually bonsai training them with poor nutrition and husbandry. I saw an 11-foot black caiman in Guyana. 

Some guys, fishing. I love shooting wildlife on the river. 

 An Amazon kingfisher was fishing, too

 alongside his smaller, rounder cousin, a green kingfisher. I love the oily viridian of their backs.

Another boat much like ours passed

and I wondered if they'd been lucky enough to spot a female slaty-tailed trogon, my favorite plumage of my favorite trogon.

I don't know who dipped a charcoal-gray bird in red paint, but I'm glad they did. Trogons are probably the most fun bird to draw from life because they sit so patiently, slowly turning their heads, looking at everything as if they're seeing it for the first time. They seem a bit dopey, but they're actually foraging, examining the leaves around them with keen eyes. When they sally out in a flurry of red, yellow, orange, blue, or green, snatch a huge katydid and return to the perch to bash it into pulp, you know they aren't just daydreaming up their on their branches. It's never good to assume anything about birds until you get to know them.

Sungrebe on the Sarapiqui!!

We're still floating down the Rio Sarapiqui on a dreamy warm morning.

 Floating through La Selva Biological Reserve, taking in this male Amazon kingfisher, with bonus Tillandsia.

This crested guan, looking down at us.

And this young emerald basilisk, like an extra from the Star Wars bar scene. What a helmet he's got! It's a new basilisk for me.

They're called Jesus Christ Lizards because young ones run bipedally right across the water's surface! Later they get too heavy to pull that off, but it's killer to watch them light out, little pipestem arms flung out to the side, long toes ticking on the water's surface, skittering across the stream like tiny crazy monkeys. Imagine being light and fast enough to run on water.

We can only stand on the edge, fishing.

Gray-necked wood-rail is such a crowd-pleaser--fearless and smooth, its plumage like watercolor satin. Keeping with the theme set by the Amazon kingfisher who showed up in south Texas, this is a close relative of the bird (rufous necked wood-rail) that  turned up in an amateur video at Bosque del Apache NWR in New Mexico. Matt Daw was just minding his own business,  making a video of a fishing least bittern, when...You have to see this video for the funniest bird photobomb ever. 

Birding's like that. It's a box of chocolates, with an occasional jack-in-the-box.

Speaking of weird, this green iguana met with misfortune, lost its tail, and grew two new ones. Oops. 

Mangrove swallows watched our every move, accompanying the boat and even sitting on the bow.

some rather large spectacled caimans were hauled out here and there.

They just appear. You don't so much see them as sense them.

Believe it or not, the bird species below has shown up at Bosque del Apache, too. Who knows how it got there. Likely flew...but why? The sungrebe is a usually secretive denizen of rivers and backwaters. We were incredibly lucky to happen upon a female (males have white cheeks, so she's the prize!) just doodling along the bank. Despite their name, sungrebes don't dive. All their foraging is done on the surface of the water, picking at floating insects and foraging along the shore.

There ensued a photo frenzy between Mario and me. We couldn't stop clicking at this rare, often sought, seldom seen but cooperative little bird.

She was so beautiful, steaming along against the current.

One challenge of photographing her turned out to be the fact that her head moved ceaselessly, like that of a city pigeon. With every stroke of her tiger-striped lobed feet, her head jerked forward. So I got hundreds of photos in which her body is razor-sharp, but her head's a blur.

In the low light, I had to click at the precise moment that her head was still to get a sharp photo. 

I loved the ever-changing compositions offered by snags and leaves, shore and shadows.

It was then that the group collectively realized they were in the grip of an obsessive bird photographer.

But it's a SUNGREBE!!  Not just any bird. The only New World member of the finfoot family, Heliornithidiae. There are only two others. Not only that, but in researching this post I stumbled across grllscientists's excellent blog, in which she cites The Handbook of Birds of the World in an utterly bizarre observation. Get THIS.

M. Alvarez del Toro, who observed a nesting pair in Mexico, discovered that the male has a shallow pocket under each wing into which the two young can fit. The pocket is formed by a pleat of skin, and made more secure by the feathers on the side of the body just below. The heads of the chicks could be seen from below as the bird flew. Alvarez del Toro collected the bird in order to examine it and confirm the unlikely discovery. Subsequently, he found it confirmed also by a report published by Prince Maximilian of Wied 138 years earlier but apparently ignored, forgotten or not believed.

This adaptation is unique among birds: in no other species is there any mechanism whereby altricial young can be transported. Of course, the precocial young of some swans and grebes may hitch rides on their swimming parents' backs, and a male jaçana can transport his chicks about holding them between his wings and body, but neither of these cases applies when the adults are in flight....

The transport system of the Sungrebe raises numerous further questions. How do the chicks get into the pocket? Are they put in by the male? Does he feed them in there? Do they stay inside, or get in and out? Why does the female not have similar pockets?

(Bertrand, B. C. R. (1996). "Family Heliornithidae (Finfoots)" in del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A., & Sargatal, J., eds. Handbook of the Birds of the World: Hoatzin to Auks. Vol. 3. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona, ISBN 84-87334-20-2 [Amazon UK;Amazon US]).

Another question inspired by the citation: What did he do with the poor orphaned sungrebe chicks once he collected their dad? OK, that was a cheap shot. He had to collect it to confirm what would otherwise be an apocryphal observation. I'm glad to live in the digital age, where I can collect birds, bats, insects and butterflies with a harmless click of the shutter. And store them on a hard drive instead of big mothbally cabinets. And they can go on raising their young and picking insects off the water surface.

I kept collecting images. Here is her outstretched wing. Looking for a pocket under it... I could easily have done this all day, but eventually we chugged along past her.

A couple of residents, enjoying some fresh river air. It was time to leave the beautiful Rio Sarapiqui. On to another adventure.

Sarapiqui River Morning

A morning trip on the Rio Sarapiqui into La Selva Biological Reserve was just the tonic we needed.

And it was off to a good start, with a colony of long-nosed bats clinging to the underside of the dock!

Right off the bat, I'm happy. These little characters roost in fairly conspicuous places, often in charming vee patterns. I've seen them in Guyana, clinging in staggered lines to vertical palm trunks near the water. Right out in the open, but looking like marks on the bark. The outflung wings are characteristic--quite a different roosting position than most bats. I marvel that they can cling perfectly upside down on concrete. It makes me wonder if there is some suction capability in their feet, in addition to sharp claws. Everything about bats amazes me.

A closer look reveals mouselike faces and a fabulous fiddle-shaped pattern on their backs.

I don't know why some bats are so ornate, but I'm thankful for it. Sorry for the lousy photo--it was the best I could do in the dark and distance.

Sunlight flooded the river, and there was an endless parade of life forms to admire. 

Drinking from Mom, while she's drinking. This reminded me of the days nursing my kids when I'd fill up a quart jug of water and have it drunk down by the time they were done. I felt like some kind of vending machine, turning all that water and food into milk. That's a pretty incredible thing to ask one's body to do, and it fascinated me, getting in touch with my mammalian heritage.

Green iguanas perched high in the trees, always a jolt of surprise to see a lizard in a tree...

or scurrying along the bank. This is a lovely youngun'. They get a bit less gaily marked as they age.

A noble-looking black river turtle watched us slide by.

This female anhinga turned jerkily as we passed, giving us every possible angle for our cameras and making us all giggle.

Here. How about this side? Like this angle?

A green heron stalked the shallows. Whether I see it in a West Virginia backwater or a Costa Rican river, it always delights me with its subtle combination of rust, maroon and oiled verdigris.

The same goes for the wintering spotted sandpipers, constant companions on the Muskingum and the Sarapiqui alike. Who knows. This bird may come back to nest in Ohio.

But this one won't--a long-tailed tyrant! Now those, we don't have. That's a mighty fancy flycatcher, perching out in the open on a river snag, waiting for a hapless insect to fly by.

And here's the bird that caused such a stir at last November's Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival--the Amazon kingfisher. My friend Jeff Bouton, a rep for Leica, found it, and all hell broke loose in the birding community. This one seems unaware that, if it only flew a couple thousand miles north, it could be a star. Egad, what a face. Give it some skin-stretched wings, and you've got a bitchin' pterodactyl.