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Everywhere I go in Costa Rica there are many beautiful flowers! Playa Cativo on Golfo Dulce near Golfito is no exception. Here is a collection of my flower photos from Cativo without comments. One single photo for the emailed post and then a gallery of favorites . . .
There are a lot of both land and water birds at this rainforest beach lodge, and even though it didn’t give my highest count of birds, it is good! My favorite was the Red-capped Manakin which has been very difficult to photograph in other places and was easy here! 🙂
Though no “lifers” (first-time seen birds), it should no longer be expected for someone who has already photographed over 358 species of birds in Costa Rica. 🙂 Below are photos of 25 different birds of 23 species. Two of these species have male and female so different they look like different birds, thus a photo of each! 🙂 I saw more birds than this but have no useable photos of the others.
After my previous trip (Chachagua Rainforest Hotel) I did a separate post on each bird and decided not to do that this time. Enjoy the one photo of each species now and later I will have multiple shots of each in my trip gallery.
Continue reading “BIRDS of Playa Cativo”
Yes – My first name was misspelled, but when done meticulously with flower petals, you won’t hear me complain! 🙂
And . . .
Continue reading “Happy Birthday Mr. Charleie”
I’ve seen this bird in only 2 other places (Maquenque Ecolodge & Corcovado National Park) and they were skittish and difficult to photograph, while here they were all around my cabin and in just 2 days I’ve had many opportunities to photograph several of them, like a big Manakin family or village! 🙂 I did not see any of them do their courtship dance, this time, the Michael Jackson moon walk shuffle across a limb, like I saw in Corcovado NP, but there were plenty in the trees to photograph.
Read about the Red-capped Manakin at that eBird link or see more of my photos of them in my Red-capped Manakin Gallery. It’s another cool bird found only in Central America! 🙂 Here’s a slide show of 6 of my shots . . .
Continue reading “Red-capped Manakins”
Dark, damp, misting rain with no sunset as such but a trace of color as I eat my dinner at Playa Cativo overlooking the Gulf of Dulce on the Pacific coast of southern Costa Rica, while north of us Hurricane Bonnie is rushing across northern Costa Rica and Nicaragua and the handful of us here are thankful it didn’t veer south! 🙂
I saw and did a lot the first afternoon, but too tired to curate more photos now, so this rainforest report begins with a dark sky that will surely brighten as the week goes by. If not raining, I go on my birding hike at 5:30 in the morning and I got a head start with two pretty good photos today in the low light of a Great Curassow and a Scarlet-rumped Tanager.
And Of course I already like this place! 🙂 Later I’ll tell you about my beachside cabin and share photos from this nature-rich forest.
¡Pura Vida!
The Blue-gray Tanager (eBird link) is a common bird here that is found only in Central and South America. I love it when one comes to my garden as he did here back in May here in one of my Nance Trees. See some of the many photos I’ve made of this bird all over Costa Rica in my Blue-gray Tanager Gallery.
¡Pura Vida!
This most common hummingbird in Costa Rica and the only species I’ve seen in my yard for 2 or 3 years now and this one is infrequent or the only one. I’ve not seen two together this year. I’m not sure what is happening with the humming birds, but I’m not seeing as many now, even though the visited reserves seem to have more, it is less than in earlier years.
And this particular one in my garden is extremely shy, staying in the shadows which makes it difficult to photograph and flying away as soon as he/she seems to be aware of me. This one was alone in my Nance tree the other morning at breakfast and later the others or the same one in different locations. The only species of hummingbird in my garden now.
This pretty little bird does not get a lot of attention and is often mistaken for an immature or small Kiskadee or Boat-billed Flycatcher. This particular Social Flycatcher (eBird link) landed on this rusty old ornamental fencing around a lake platform and made an interesting image to me. 🙂 And of course I have a Social Flycatcher Gallery with photos from all over Costa Rica.
¡Pura Vida!
TRIP GALLERY: May 2022, Chachagua Rainforest Hotel
This one on the Caribbean Slope used to be called Passerini’s Tanager with the Pacific Slope’s called Cherrie’s Tanager, but now they are all called Scarlet-rumped Tanager (eBird link), yet eBird and others still use “Passerini’s” and “Cherrie’s” in parentheses after the new together name, especially with the females which are distinctly different. And you will see below that I have two photos of females with one either a Cherrie’s or a darker morph of the Passerini’s. Confusing? Yes! 🙂 And of course the new species name only describes the male which is, by the way, identical on both slopes! 🙂
Thus IN MY BIRD GALLERIES, I still have two galleries but added the new name in front of each:
One of the things different on the Night Hike at Chachagua Rainforest Hotel was that we saw more sleeping birds than I’ve seen on any other night hike all over Costa Rica. Our guide said this one was a Tropical Kingbird (eBird link) which looks like a baby or a little smaller than usual to me, but this one could be an immature or they just scrunched up tight for warmth and sleeping. 🙂 And the whiter stomach could have been the camera flash, made with a cell phone camera plus people’s flashlights. So I’m sticking with the ID our guide gave us. 🙂
And for comparison, here’s two more Tropical Kingbirds photographed in the daytime . . .
Continue reading “Sleeping Kingbird”