Carara National Park (part 1)
April 28th, 2014

On Monday, we went on our second tour with Johan Chaves: a full day in Carara National Park, one of the best birding destinations in the country. Vividly colored trogons and toucans, parrots and hummingbirds captured our eye, although comparatively few of these came within reach of my 300mm lens. This guy certainly did though:


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I want to make an aside here, for something I found amusing. I sometimes take my non-birder friends and family out on walks. Some of them are casual nature lovers, or if not, I can coax them in that direction. What they notice mostly is the tame, bold, inquisitive birds, and what they admire mostly is the colorful birds. They notice the adorable chickadees coming to their hands for sunflower seed. They notice the cardinals and blue jays perching in plain view, and the iridescent green of the mallards. I'm usually looking at other things, and if they can even pick out what it is I'm looking at, they might wonder what on earth is so interesting about it.

As a hard-core birder, you see so many cardinals and blue jays and chickadees that you become blase. You start focusing on the elusive birds, the wild ones, the hidden ones, above all, the rare ones. The more you bird, the more "interesting because it's rare" becomes a thing, and "boring because it's common" becomes something you fight against. (Or I fight against it, anyway. Because it's not true. They're all interesting.)

But when a temperate-zone birder visits the tropics for the first time, it's an exercise in role reversal. Now you're the one oohing and aahing over the flashy common birds, while your tour guide, who has seen them all a thousand times before, rolls his eyes discreetly. While you're going ape over toucans and macaws, he's going ape over some drab, nondescript fellow with a drab, nondescript name like Thrushlike Schiffornis or Stub-Tailed Spadebill.

You get it, because you're a birder. You empathize with his fascination with the rarity. You take a good look at the drab rare bird. But then you turn back to the Scarlet Macaws and ooh and aah some more.







Scarlet Macaws are a highlight in any trip to Carara, one of the few places in Costa Rica where these magnificent parrots--flying rainbows, some call them--are still a common sight. Every morning they come to the park to feed. Every evening their colors streak across the sky as they migrate in pairs and flocks to their roosting grounds in the mangroves. Despite their vivid colors, you usually hear them before you see them. Their squawks carry for miles.

There were many more highlights. Orange-Collared Manakins (pictured at top) were high up on the list. Manakins are lekking birds: the brilliantly-colored males gather at special sites and put on shows for the females, who come, watch, mate if they're sufficiently impressed, and then leave to build nests and raise young alone. Every species of manakin has its own unique dance routine. Johan happened to know of a lek site. Unfortunately no females were around to spur the males on to their full performance (which involves leaping to and fro while snapping their wings like some avian version of click beetles. Have a look.) However, using a recording to convince the lek regulars that a strange male had come along, Johan was able to call one out into close view.


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(Continued in next post)

Costa Rica Raptors ←

→ Carara National Park (part 2)