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.

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).