If you just want the photos, here’s the 2022 Flickr album.
In May 2020 we went to Costa Rica for 25 days. We rented a 4×4 and drove on narrow mountain roads with fresh rockfall on the road, where guardrails are rare, and the indicators show the few guardrails that existed had failed, we forded streams, ate at little roadside restaurants in the middle of nowhere where no one spoke English, sought out and found the resplendent quetzal, went hiking in the mangroves with high rubber boots to wade around, waded through mud trails to find a royal flycatcher, good several boat birding tours to see spent time at many elevations to see different species, our count of birds with a photo id coming into CR was 523, flying home it was 607 – 84 new bird species. We’ll be going over all that and more in blog posts.
In April of 2022 I’d been very busy for months, I’d been in a major work project moving a complicated banking compliance app into a new company. We booked vacation for a long hoped for trip to Costa Rica after that. The job was fully remote so we arranged that we would extend our time there by staying at places with good network and working for some of the time we were in CR, and we pushed our time out to 25 days with a plan to work many of the weekdays.
While all this was going on, out of the blue I got a call from a recruiter w/Apple about a very promising sounding job, interviews went well. After I got an offer we mentioned the vacation, offered to work remote out of CR, though in the end they didn’t want the new guy immediately taking the work laptop out of the country, so I had 25 days completely off.
We really want to visit a lot of Latin America, but we especially like Costa Rica, We’ve been to CR twice before:
We really liked every visit to Latin America so I’d been practicing daily Spanish
We bid the pets and kids goodbye and got a ride to the airport Hilton, that left us staged to i so we could Below are our bags packed and ready to drag to the plane to fly to Liberia, Costa Rica. In the weeks before this we’d bought jungle clothes and other performance gear, as well as a lot of mosquito repellent. We over-packed clothes, really, only wore about 20% of the clothes we brought, but it was impossible to know which 20% was the stuff we’d want. We’ll be going over cool tools and good things to pack in another post. Camera is the lower right front.
We bought a copy of The New Neotropical Companion which we’d been reading for a while before the flight. We got to read it for the full flight which was excellent. I still like paper books, and reading books on planes is great, noise canceling headphones with a nice long stretch of pure book is so good. We’ll have more to say on this book later.
With a new route from Austin to Liberia (which is both a country in Africa and a small city in northern Costa Rica with an international airport). The direct flight was only about 3.5 hours. It wasn’t long at all before we were heading down into Liberia.
We flew into Liberia, spent a night in Liberia near the airport and started in the Nicoya peninsula at San Juanillo beach. The view from our room really is stunning.
The room was nice, had good power, good network, though the shower whose interior was visible to anyone in the room was simply wrong.
The coast really is stunning.
We took a trip out to Ostional beach where the sea turtles nest. Last time we were there we saw a huge arrival of turtles nesting:
This year the last nesting was last month so no turtles, but still it is a lovely beach, and we saw a few interesting things including some unexpected leaf-cutter ant drones. I have a lot of ant photos on the phone.
There was a very sweet dog at the beach who followed me around and when I leaned over to get photos of a leaf cutter drone, the doggo went in for a cuddle and tried to lick my nose.
Sign on the Nosara coast. Up to this point we hadn’t seen any crocodiles, though we kept looking.
We saw tons of turquoise-browed motmots, absolutely stunning birds. They actually use their beak to strip off feather strands to make that paddle shape on their tail which they swish back and forth to draw out insects.
Lots of howler monkeys here too, I love to hear their calls during the day, though at dawn they’re a bit less of a treat. This is a howler mom with her baby that was in a tree just outside our room in San Juanillo.
This is variegated squirrel, a Central American species that will eat fruit, I was really surprised to see them eating bananas and papaya, but they’re a tropical squirrel so it does make sense that they’d adapt.
A collared aracari, a cousin of the toucan, taking flight. A pair of these were nesting near our room!
Last year we spent half a day in Corpus Christi looking for roseate spoonbills, they’re fascinating and very striking birds. We happened upon this one in Nosara, a very neat find. They use that beak, swinging it back and forth under the water to stir up crustaceans, mollusks, and things, similar to an avocet, and we got a nice look at this one doing this behavior which was very cool to see.
Inca doves have a range that extends up to Austin, but are much more common down here. The common name “Inca” makes no sense at all, since the Incan Empire was in Peru & surrounding areas of the Andes where none of these doves are found, but they’re still very pretty.
May is just at the start of the rainy season, so we saw a number of land crabs making their way across the roads towards the ocean. They live in burrows in the dry season, but the rain fills those burrows so they wander around. So far we’ve spotted four new crab species including this one, which is something of a personal triumph.
A curious white-throated magpie-jay dropped by our balcony to peek in the room for a sec. Not so many corvids down here, so these are always a treat to see.
We spotted this yellow-green vireo collecting nesting material while we were eating breakfast, new species for me. Looks a lot like a red-eyed vireo, tbh. In the first three days we’d seen four new bird species – this one, a yellow-headed caracara, a rose-throated becard, and the turquoise-browed motmot. We’ve been to CR twice before and been to this area before, so 4 new bird species is pretty good. We’ve also added three new Lepidoptera species, four new crab species, a number of new species of insects, and tide-pool dwellers.
Our first stay was for this period was a few days at Playa San Juanillo, very pretty. It’s not the birdiest place, but it’s very lovely on the coast.
The Nature Bloggist 