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.

Best Birding Boardwalk Ever!

From Hotel Las Glorias on Lake Yojoa, Honduras, it was but a short jaunt to Los Naranjos Archaelogical Site, an ancient Lenca Indian ruin that has been developed for ecotourism. A French non-governmental organization (NGO) built the bitchinest concrete piling and wood boardwalk I had ever seen. It wound for blocks and blocks through a flooded tropical forest, and it was absolutely popping with birds.

How inviting is that? You could walk silently on it without getting your feet wet or stepping on a viper. It was like being in a tropical bird museum.

A squirrel cuckoo peered silently around, looking for a big orthopteran breakfast.

Ah, squirrel cuckoos. What a gorgeous bird. Look at those rounded wings, that pheasant-like white-tipped tail. This bird is about the size of a magpie, a big honkin' you're-in-the-tropics-now bird.

When you think about it, the cuckoo family is a great one. Our black-billed and yellow-billed cuckoos are charming enough, with their weird mechanical songs, lizardlike motions and bizarre behavior. For instance, if you frighten a nest of baby cuckoos, they'll point their heads straight up with their eyes closed, like bitterns. They eat fuzzy caterpillars no other bird can manage, and periodically shed their inner stomach lining, felted with the urticating hairs, revealing a new one beneath. 

The cuckoo family includes roadrunners and other ground-cuckoos, crown jewels of tropical birding.

And everybody loves a squirrel cuckoo.

I dunno what this orchid is, but I sure liked seeing it growing freely along the boardwalk. 

Oh, hello  there, hooded warbler! I will see you back in Appalachia soon!

Chink! to you, too.

It was such a gas to see things like climbing begonias

Monstera philodendrons (they ought to look familiar, being fabulous 1950's era houseplants); cool spleenworts (that fern thing in the middle of the trunk), and North American migrants all jumbled together. A hooded warbler is about 1/100th the size of most of these leaves, so it messes with your mind a bit to see them foraging in this kind of vegetation.

Nesting Amazon parrots (these are probably red-lored Amazons) added their cacaphony to the chips and twits of migrants.

Robert Gallardo, our highly overqualified guide, called birds in with pishes and squeaks. Organizer of the first MesoAmerican Birding Festival, Robert had designed the birding itineraries and chosen the locales with great care, sending us all home delirious with enormous lists of birds. I saw 226 species, ten of them life birds. Mmmm. Thank you, Robert!

 I could easily have spent the entire day at Los Naranjos; the boardwalk was generous enough for a scope to be set up, and I had the feeling that each time I walked it, I'd see a completely different cohort of avian marvels. I like places like that, places where you can be silent and let birds come to you.

One of the many attractions of this site is the sungrebe, a reclusive little swimmer in its own weird family, the Heliornithidae. Brown with a black-and-white striped head, it darts silently through the thick underbrush, paddling around in the darkness. My photos are not good enough to inflict on you, but I got some nice, if fleeting, looks at a life bird here.

This lovely thing is a bare-throated tiger heron, a kind of short-legged, long-necked tropical heron. 

Cool flight profile, too, quite bitternlike; a neck propelled by a pair of wings.

No feathered birds of paradise in the New World, but they grow their own.

A gray, rainy day, with spots of sun reflecting in the vine-tangled waters.

Our walk came to an abrupt end where a massive tree had crashed through the boardwalk. No getting around that, but I trust it's been fixed by now.

I was thoroughly amazed at the engineering and construction of this massive birdwalk.

And I felt privileged to be here, drinking in the sounds, sights and smells.  Just as we left, my eye was drawn by a patch of shining white. I peered deep into the vegetation to see a drake Muscovy duck preening his viridian wing. This, the ancestor of those weirdest of barnyard ducks, the Muscovies, with their red face patch, warty caruncles and hissing voiceless voices. No matter how fat a domestic Muscovy may get, it can still fly, and fly they often do. This wild drake, slender, secret and shining: a sight to hold in my heart.