At any rate, on our final evening we arrived at our San Jose hotel with about 40 minutes of daylight left. Reportedly Steely-vented Hummingbird could be found there as well as Ferruginous Pygmy-owl. I was hoping for one last crack at Blue-crowned Motmot which I'd missed at Hotel Bougainvillea. Probably half the group joined Mike, Rhoda, and I as we tried to wring a few last birds out of the trip, checking bamboo stands for screech-owls, anything vaguely flowering for hummingbirds, etc. Rhoda found the motmot in the last light.
It would disappear then reappear on a different branch, generally with a bug each time.
It swished its tail a lot more actively than did the other species we saw on the trip.
The final totals? Out of 335 species recorded by Steven as seen or heard on the six days of birding I counted 310, a little over 300 of which I saw. Close to 200 were lifers; there were also about 40 more neo-tropic species that I'd seen before in Belize but never in North America. Out of 29 species of hummingbird I saw 27 and photographed 24. We saw 5 trogons (including Quetzal), 4 motmots, 4 toucans, 5 owls, over 20 tanagers, a wood-quail, Lovely Cotinga, Bellbirds, and the BABY bird. I took around 7000 pics, about 2% made the blog. I don't know when I'll go back, but go back I will; there's a lot of middle elevation and Pacific slope habitats we never reached. I'm still spending a lot more time looking through the Costa Rica book than I do Sibley.
1 comment:
Gotta love Costa Rica. I hope to go back soon, but have other bucket list places to hit in the mean time.
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