Wednesday, March 6, 2013

No snow days in Costa Rica

Hummingbirds were probably my favorite thing to photograph in Costa Rica.  Savegre had a few feeders, but there was also a bottlebrush plant in full bloom close to the main lodge that I spent a decent amount of time standing next to.

Green Violet-ears remained common.
That was probably the best natural feeding hummer shot that I've taken, the next one is in sun but I had to do a bit of post-processing work on the exposure.

This is White-throated Mountain-gem.
Apparently the previous name was "Gray-tailed."

The female Mountain-gems had very Lucifer-like bright buffy-colored underparts.
The hummer in the foreground is Stripe-tailed Hummingbird, another bird that was clearly named originally based on a dead bird held belly up in the hand.  "Stripe-winged" would make a lot more sense to observers in life.

There were two small Selasphorus species.  Scintillant (here with Magnificent) is the 2nd (or 3rd?) smallest hummingbird in existance according to Steven.
Scintillant had an extensively rufous tail.


The very similar (though slightly larger) Volcano Hummingbird had much less.

Savegre certainly had the nicest weather while we were there.  Here all weather is dependent on the wind, in CR it is all dependent on which side of the mountain you're on and the elevation.  The central part of the country is shielded from moisture by the mountain ranges on the Caribbean and Pacific slope so these areas are generally clear.  The higher you go, obviously the cooler it is.  At Savegre it was mid 70's or low 80's during the day and 40's at night.  Our next stop was the Caribbean lowlands.  Being on the ocean side made for max humidity, the lowlands meant max temperature too.

1 comment:

Caleb Putnam said...

This is awesome Matt! I think Vervain Hummingbird of Jamaica is the 2nd smallest behind Bee Hummingbird, so I'd assume Scintillant Hummingbird must be at least third.