Costa Rica Birds - Post 2

This is a Rufous-Tailed Jacamar, a relatively small bird slightly larger than a hummingbird. We spotted it while being guided around the grounds of the Pierella Ecological Garden. Our guide explained that these birds eat butterflies. He then went into the nearby butterfly house and found a dying Blue Morpho. Moving to perhaps 20 feet from the Jacamar, our guide threw the butterfly in the air. Like a flash, the jacamar flew down from its perch and snatched the butterfly.

Here is a photo of the Rufous-Tailed Jacamar with the Blue Morpho it had just caught.

As we continued to walk around, we saw this incredibly fluffy White-Collared Manakin - unbelievable cuteness in a very small package. It reminds me a bit of the yellow marshmallow peeps that frequently show up around our house at Easter time.

This striking bird is a Blue-Gray Tanager, one of 9 tanager species that I ultimately photographed on the trip. In my last blog post, I included photographs of both male and female Scarlet-Rumped Tanagers as well as a Dusky-Faced Tanager.

Here is a Black-Cheeked Woodpecker, one of 5 species of woodpeckers I photographed on the trip. This species looks somewhat similar to a Downy Woodpecker I might see in our back yard. However, this next woodpecker is quite different.

This Chestnut-Colored Woodpecker is not just my favorite woodpecker of the trip, but is my favorite of all of the woodpeckers I have seen since I started photographing birds. I love its vibrant colors.

This is a Gray-Headed Chachalaca. At perhaps 20” in length, it is a good size bird, reminding me a bit of a slightly more agile, thinner, and smaller version of the turkeys that meander through our yard.

We finished our time in the tropical rainforest the next day at place called Donde Cope. There we saw a variety of birds around the small river running through the property. Above are a pair of Russet-Naped Wood Rails dining on a crab.

In sharp contrast to the large Russet-Naped Wood Rails, this American Pygmy Kingfisher is very small, similar in size to a warbler and perhaps half the size of the Belted Kingfishers that I can find here in Massachusetts.

These are a pair of Orange-Chinned Parakeets. They spent perhaps 15 minutes on this branch bopping up and down and parading around each other. Clearly, they are very social birds.

We also saw a number of hummingbirds here. However, rather than including photos of them in this post, my next post will cover the eight different hummingbird species I photographed while in Costa Rica.

I am hoping to be productive and get the humming bird post as well as a mountain rainforest post done in the next couple of days. I would like to complete my Costa Rica posts before I head out west in the middle of next week for two cycling trips. The first trip will be cycling from Bend OR to Boise ID over 9 days. The second will be a 5 day trip in the Badlands and Black Hills of South Dakota. On both cycling trips, I plan on posting daily blog entries as I have on past trips, subject of course to reasonable internet availability.