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).

How Goes the Greenhouse?

I promised I'd let you know how things go in the greenhouse, as it recovers ever so slowly from the devastation of the November 23, 2013 freeze. This photo's pretty symbolic. In the foreground, a budding Christmas cactus. I bought it in bloom in December, when I desperately needed flowers. It obligingly dropped them all, and all its buds. Oh, thank you. But then after sulking for a couple of months, it made  more buds, and these have carried through beautifully. Flowers.

 In the middle, a little rose-pink Abutilon I ordered from Logee's that makes me very happy. And in the rear, the huge vigorous leaves of a theater-curtain red geranium that was killed to the soil by the freeze, but somehow sent up a shoot. Yep, this photo says a lot about what's gone on in the greenhouse since the event I refer to as the Apocalypse.

Pulling back a bit, here they are in context. And there's the scarlet tanager-red stellar geranium that I was sure I'd lost to the freeze. It came back. The blue lobelias volunteered from seed, after the freeze, in the pot of what was once my huge tangerine orange hibiscus. Now represented by one shoot, on the right margin of this photo. But that shoot has some tiny buds on it.

Fireworks!! Color and life and beauty, once again. So hard-won, so longed-for.

The gardenia my sweet reader "Diana" sent, blooming in ones and twos, perfuming the whole place. We've been fighting red spider mite, and we're winning. The top bud opened today. Sooo intoxicating.

As is my dear Jasminum sambac, "Maid of Orleans," who lived through the freeze, sprouting from dead-looking sticks. Ahhhhhh. She's far better than before.

Chetty takes it all in, sniffing the perfumed air. He likes to help me clean the place, sweeping and scrubbing, and rearrange the plants.

I can't believe that this tiny Ruby Red grapefruit tree is doing what it's doing. Because it set too many (about a dozen), it aborted a handful of fruits,  but the four that stayed on are growing by leaps and bounds. Wow!! I imagine it laden with full-sized grapefruit and smile.  And it burst into bloom again, and made some new leaves! I think it likes me. It smells so sweet. I love this tree!

The big lumpy 25-year-old Mammilaria, perking along. I love this hardy old plant, too. 21 degrees ain't nothing to him. Been there, done that. The desert is a tough place. Your greenhouse is a walk in the park, freezes and all.

I was gone for 12 days and this marvelous flame-crested creature, here listening to a favorite tune from "Mulan" on her Macbook Air while she soaks up the sun, watered all my plants and twiddled the heater dials as conditions required. Not only that, but she enlisted sweet Liam to help her bring every last one of them inside before the temperatures dipped below zero again. "I was sick of worrying about what might happen if the gas went off or I couldn't keep them warm enough. So we brought them all inside." 

You can't buy or even wish for kids like that. You have to make them, raise them so they love all the same things you do. It's partly luck, partly magic, all miracle. We're blessed. 

The seedlings thrived under her care: tomatoes, tomatillos, cucamelons, peppers, and Swiss chard.

The tomatillos burst into bloom!! Well, who wouldn't, with Phoebe loving on you?

The greenhouse is back. And I feel each bud bursting into bloom inside me. The sun's heat races through my veins. 

Come on, Spring. Do it.