Hummingbirds in the mist

This may border on sacrilege, but I think that Resplendent Quetzal is only the 2nd coolest bird at Paraiso Quetzal.  Their hummingbird feeders attract the first, at some times of the year clouds of them, this time only one (most are sitting on nest).  The bird? Fiery-throated Hummingbird.

 In a lot of lighting situations they look all dark, blackish.  But they have a pretty full rainbow iridescence if you catch them just right...

 

Last year there were probably a hundred Fiery-throateds, but fortunately the one remaining bird was fairly pugnacious and chased away as many of the Magnificents and Green Violet-ears as it could.  The female Magnificents' enormous bill gave it some pause though

("Hmmmm.  Yours is bigger than mine")

The Magnificent hummingbirds were also pretty impressive in the right light.

The Magnificents more than others frequently would collect a decent amount of pollen and sometimes even look yellowish.

 

Same with this Violet-ear.

If you really want to blow through shutter exposures try shooting flying hummingbirds.

The indirect lighting in the mistiness made it easier to keep the exposures even and not have some sections of the bird blown out and others too dark, but made it harder to shoot moving birds.  A little bit of sun helped increase the shutter speed on the Magnificent.  It was back a lot slower for the Fiery-throat though.

Quetzals in a cow pasture

One of the reasons I wanted to go back to Costa Rica was to get a better Quetzal pic, last year's was distant and in the shade.  When we got to Paraiso Quetzal we were told that a National Geo film crew had seen 30 of them that morning.  I'm not sure I believe that, but, we had pretty good hopes that we'd find one.  We were led down a winding two-track with a fair amount of up-and-down elevation change ending not in a scenic mountain grove, not in a picturesque grove with a mountain stream, but to a cow pasture.  A cow pasture with fruiting avocado trees.

One of the guides fairly quickly spotted a tucked in female across the field and waved us another 200 yards or so.  There was a male present as well.

A "tail"less mail (the long feathers are actually uppertail coverts) flew past and this bird flew out pretty quickly as well.

The group honestly would have been satisfied, but our guides were pretty confident they could find more (and after shushing us, ok, a couple times) we headed a few trees farther, and found a perched female and then her male as well.

We had a walk-away view.

One last view of the avocado fruits that were drawing them.

Another Ochraceous Pewee

Both years our first highland stop has been at Paraiso de Quetzal, a lodge with a set of cabanas and a restaurant with a famous hummingbird feeder set-up.  There area also trails from which a person can encounter most of the highland endemics found only on Eastern Costa Rica and Western Panama.  It's one of my favorite places to bird, and it did not disappoint this year either.

Black-billed Nightengale-thrushes are common highland birds.  Note the (for once appropriately named) bill, the similar ruddy-capped (coming soon to a post near you) had a bicolored bill

A Tufted Flycatcher teed up on an overhead power line as we walked out to a field where quetzals had been feeding earlier in the morning.

Our guide Vernon was fairly excited about the near side-to-side comparison with a very hard-to-find highland endemic that flew in 20 yards farther down the line, an Ochraceous Pewee

The Ochraceous is heavier-bodied, heavier-headed, slightly less crested, and less warmly colored than the similar Tufted Fly.  Last  year our guides worked and worked for an Ochraceous on the Los Robles trail that they could hear calling up in the canopy before we finally got scope looks, this year it came straight to us.

The Costa Rican version of Hairy Woodpecker was also very ochraceous (and with a lot less white in the wings).  My understanding is that they have a continuous clinal transition, but skipping south 2000 miles made a big difference in appearance.

Each of the volcanoes in Costa Rica has Volcano Hummingbirds with a slightly different throat color.  In the Talamanca highlands it's a dull lavender.  When they were all split this one was called "Heliotrope-throated."

Finally a lifer, a Yellow-billed Cacique, a loose cousin to orioles but one that skulks in the underbrush

Don't ask me to pronounce it though.

Oh and the quetzals?  They might be deserving of their own post...

Bougainvillea butterflies

I think this will be the only post from this trip without birds, but the butterflies were pretty photogenic too.  I saw a few odes but I don't think I took any pics.  The leps were hard enough to figure out ID's on.

Zebra Longwings were common throughout our stay.

We saw a few Rusty-tipped Pages

I thought I'd be able to figure out this one but couldn't find it on my initial google searches.

I didn't even try these two

Even worse, here's straight up flower pics

I ought to try to photoshop in some hummingbirds.

Finally the sunset our first night

First Lifer of the trip

I worked a lot harder this year trying to learn some of the songs for this trip, concentrating on the wrens and some of the highland birds that I was more familiar with (there's also fewer birds in the highlands making it considerably less daunting).

On the first afternoon some snippets of wren song caught our ears, sure enough, a pair of Rufous-naped wrens were working a viny wall (wrens in CR seem to love to hang out in dense vine tangles).  They popped up after a bit.

This species turned out to be quite common in the Pacific lowlands as well, being conspicuous and social at first light.

Here's a view of the rufous nape...

There were a lot of birds in the gardens; Squirrel Cuckoo is always a fun bird given their enormous size, about 50% longer than ours.

Speaking of enormous size, here's a Variegated Squirrel; I think our local tree rats might be jealous.

It wasn't until dusk that we happened upon a little blind end in the labyrinthine gardens that had some seed spread on some raised concrete.  There was a White-eared Ground-sparrow, the 2nd I've ever seen.

I tried to find the seed again the next morning at the end of breakfast to watch for Prevost's but couldn't find my way back.  Apparently the Prevost's have been much less regular since a change in planting practices at an adjacent coffee plantation.

PURA VIDA II

After having thoroughly enjoyed a week in Costa Rica last winter I couldn't resist going back.  After being a part of a large Sarett tour last year I arranged an 8 person tour through Costa Rica Gateway.  We had a great time.

It was a bit of an adventure getting there; the night before we were to leave I-94 was closed to the east of me.  The entirely of South Bend, including the airport, was shut down to the South of me.  Luckily O'Hare lay to the west and I drove there not long after the kids went to bed in negative temperatures.  I ended up dozing in the airport for several hours.  The upshot was that the early flights allowed arrival in the very early afternoon, which meant one thing.  Birds.

As with last year we started in the Hotel Bougainvillea, a beautifully landscaped motel that provides an introduction to some of the common birds, starting with the National bird of Costa Rica (wait for it ... yes brought to you by the same creative minds that came up with Michigan's state bird when a unique revenue-producing alternative was so so easy), the Clay-colored Robin (or Thrush as is apparently more politically correct)

Not Quetzal or Scarlet Macaw, or even a Motmot?  A dingy relatively uniformly brown bird.  It made no sense other than that our guide Vernon mentioned that they typically become very vocal when it's time to plant crops so they're apparently recognized by the workers.  And why wouldn't you choose your official bird to be one that heralds work?

Two very common flycatchers were present, Tropical Kingbird, which didn't have much in the way of relatives,

as well as Great Kiskadee (whose cousins the Boat-billed and Social Flycatchers both were present in the garden, along with 3 or 4 more over the course of the trip)

Almost all of the hummingbirds present (with the exception of a young Ruby-throated) were Rufous-tailed.  It was too easy to just look at the tail or body shape and snap-call them Rufous-taileds here; from the front Scaly-breasted, Steely-vented, to some extent Charming, and to a lesser extent Goldentail, look quite similar.  More study early in the trip of this common species would have made ID of the less common species later much easier.

White-winged Dove was common about the city, though they petered out at least in the areas we went to

Hoffman's Woodpecker is the representative zebra-backed woodpecker.  We found a pair attending a cavity.  The female has just the yellow nape but lacks the color to the cap or lore.

Not all the birds on the grass were Clay-colored Thrushes though, at least a couple times they were Blue-crowned Motmots that had flown down from their perch after some bug or another.  Last year this was the last bird of the trip for me, this year looping into the other half of the country we saw them basically every day we weren't in the highlands.

 

 I should be updating much more regularly now that I have a boatload of material...

 

 

 

 

 



 



 





10 years ago today ...

... give or take.

Prior to having kids Ginger and I used to go up to the UP once or twice a winter.  It didn't take too many times to see the gyrfalcons that used to hang out along the St Mary's river (though I never managed a decent pic), but we made a lot of trips before we finally found a Great Gray.  This one (the only one I've ever seen) was on the south end of either Sugar or Neebish Island.

This was in the digi-scoping days, and with a pretty early camera (the original file is about 1100 pixels high, my 7D is about 5000 at its widest dimension, so about 4% as many pixels as the current files).

Ginger named the bird Clyde.  You may or may not be able to guess what I suggested as its name if it was a girl (think the Seinfeld where Jerry forgot his GF's name).