Red-eyed Tree Frogs!

It's the iconic rainforest critter, on every cereal box, every kids' book, every poster on every schoolroom wall. The red-eyed tree frog Agalychnis callidryas has it all--color, pizazz. Thanks to all this exposure, it's possibly the most charismatic and recognizable of all frogs. But I'd never seen one. Never even hoped to see one. Imagine my delight when our guide Mario Cordoba told me that a little cement pond at Selva Verde, Holbrook Travel's lodge in Sarapiqui in the Caribbean lowlands, was full of them. Calling, mating. Oh my gosh. This has to be the jazziest frog of all.

Darkness fell and Mario fixed his flashlight on a frog for me. I almost swallered my tongue, as we say here in Appalachia. Oh my gosh!! I couldn't believe I was seeing this.

But how to photograph them in the black night without a flash? Well, you prefocus, crank the ISO up, and twiddle your dials until you get something nice. You try not to keep the light on the frog for more than a few seconds. You don't want to disrupt their business. These photos are all hand-held--given the low light I probably should have run a few blocks to my room to get my monopod to steady the camera, but ehh. The frogs were there and so was Mario and so was I. Carpe diem.

This little guy's calling, his throat pooched out. He may also vibrate the stem or leaf he's perched on to attract a female. What's shakin', baby?

He has a friend.

Such intensely decorated creatures, with that electric blue on thighs and neon orange on their feet...but their colors show only at night!

I was really happy with this pose. Right off a poster.

Ready for a surprise? Here's a red-eyed tree frog, sleeping during the day. Mario had to tell me it was the same species when I found it. Frogs are so darn cool. How do you switch those colors off like that?

Chromatophores, that's how--special skin cells that can show or hide brilliant color in an instant. Last night: dressed for the gala. Now he looks like a dead leaf. 

Also calling: Rain frogs. Sweet little things in their own right. What a treat to see such creatures calling, doing their froggy things. What a privilege.

This second night's try at photographing them worked out even better. Mario coached me on exposure, and through trial and error we found that shutting the F-stop down a click or two and boosting the ISO a bit allowed the frogs' colors to glow. The trick is not to wash them out with too much light. That's better for the frogs, too. 

We want them to keep doing things like this. If you click on this photo, you may see the really cool Venetian blind pattern on the male's nictitating eye membrane. The female will eventually lay a cluster of eggs on a leaf overhanging water. These will hatch about a week later, the tadpoles falling into the pool, where they complete their metamorphosis. Tiny juveniles often hang out in the water wells of aerial bromeliads, preying on small insects. 

I think this is my favorite of the shots. I maneuvered around to get it all in the same frame.  What looks like the full moon rising is actually a light fixture in the open-air bar behind the little pool. No, I'm not crouched in the rainforest risking a bite by a fer-de-lance. I'm hanging out with Mario, talking light and frogs, by a little water garden at a jungle lodge, loving every minute of it. Holbrook Travel built it, and the tree frogs came.

Costa Rica well deserves its reputation as an ultimate ecotourism destination. Everywhere we went, we felt at home with our binoculars, cameras and spotting scope. Tiny home-cooking restaurants in the mountains are festooned with hummingbird feeders and buzzed by incredibly arrayed birds (just you wait!!) Tanagers flit to bananas and rice laid out for them. It's so different from the vast majority of American restaurants, where the whole focus seems to be to get you inside and wall you off from nature. (When you go to a Bob Evans, I'm the one who raised the blinds and opened the shutters and left them that way). The Alajuelo airport itself is given over to images of toucans and quetzals. Costa Rica knows where its riches lie. 

all photos taken with my Canon 7D with 70-300 IS L telephoto lens

and the expert tutelage of guide Mario Cordoba

Sunbittern Morning

That first morning at Selva Verde, Mario took us out to look for the sunbittern. It was not a long walk--you could hear it singing from the dining room at beautiful Selva Verde in the Caribbean lowlands. This is Mario Cordoba, bird guide extraordinaire, hunting for the sunbittern. I figured you'd need a visual by now.

 Now, who ever gets to see a sunbittern? But Fate smiled on us and soon enough Mario heard its haunting whistle from the river bank. It's a high, slurred, loud whistle, nothing like you'd expect from this grebey, herony looking character. We're used to croaks and grunts from grebes and herons, but this bird is clearly neither. And its song is a magic clarion call in the morning mist. 

Mario gathered us up and we crept quietly toward the sound. Here was this gorgeous little thing, neither bittern nor grebe, heron nor rail, but a sunbittern, in its own family no less, calling away. We peeked through the greenery and there he was, the sun coming through his bill. Singing. Ohhh. I'd never seen a bird anything like this. I'd always wanted to see a sunbittern.

I hunkered down and kept my telephoto lens on the bird. I wanted so badly to get a shot of it in flight, because this bird has unforgettable wings. When it finally took off, I was blocked by vegetation. But I saw a flash of orange, gray, black. Ohh I hated to miss that shot.

The sunbittern poked around in the shallows amidst the river rocks for the better part of two hours, catching little fish and invertebrates and gulping them down.

The snowy spangles on its wings gave just a hint of what splendor lay in their folded length. But we would never see it.

By chance, when I returned from Costa Rica, my Facebook friend Peter Jones had just returned from there, too. And he posted a photo he'd managed to get, of a sunbathing sunbittern. Which he has given me permission to share with you. Make sure you're sitting down...

photo by Peter Jones

It's got the wings of a painted lady. It's an avian butterfly. The sunbittern uses these amazing wings in mating displays and threat displays. The spots on the inner primaries might even represent eyes in a great colorful face when the bird tips forward and presents its wings frontally.  And looking at this incredible shot, I resolved to return, and follow the sunbittern until I saw this. And maybe even got a shot of it. I can dream, right?

Finally it was time for breakfast and we made our way back to the restaurant, an elevated, sort of open-air affair where you can sit on a balcony and watch birds and howler monkeys. 

I was listening for the insect-like, persistent chirping call of the blue jeans frog (another poison dart frog) and managed to zero in on this little fella under a leaf. Oh Oh Oh Oh. So tiny, so precious, so well attired. With his throat puffed in song. That's two beautiful creatures I've seen in song before breakfast. It was going to be a wonderful day. 

While dining, I felt around for my iPhone and realized I had dropped it. No mystery where it might be...I had contorted myself into a million shapes shooting the sunbittern from a high spot on the rocky river bank. I ran full-tilt back to find it, tripping on a conveniently placed root in the trail and flumping smack down on my right side. I twisted in space to land on that side, and let my body take the impact for my camera. 

Which flew up and hit me hard near my left knee, leaving a spectacular purple bruise that remains to this day. But the camera was OK. And so was I. I'm so glad I can still fall that hard and come up fine. I realize it will not always be thus. Must remember to slow down. My mom never got the hang of slowing down. Expect I won't either.

I got up, continued on to where I'd dropped my iPhone, and after a brief search found it nestled down amongst the rocks about eight feet below where I'd been perched. Woo. That's a bad fall onto boulders. Wonder if it still works? 

Ivan, (pronounced EE-vohn) who works at the lodge, saw me starting to scramble down the rolly tumbly rock bank and offered to go down there for me. The first boulder he stepped on got loose and bounced twice, right next to my phone. Um, let's not do that again. So he angled off to the side, scrambled down and picked up the (unharmed) phone. Whew! I was so happy.

I completely get why Costa Rica and its warm and lovely people lure so many Americans down to make it their forever home. It's all there, in Ivan's smile, in the morning song of the sunbittern.

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).