Dazzling birds of Costa Rica beguile visitors
Dazzling birds of Costa Rica beguile visitors
Thursday, February 22, 2007
James F. McCartyPlain Dealer Reporter
I spent some quality time with a few old friends last week.
The golden-winged warblers and great crested flycatchers were there. So were the cedar waxwings, Baltimore orioles and ospreys.
But I had to travel a long way to see them. Two friends from Northeast Ohio and I spent 10 days on a birding tour of Costa Rica - an Eden of the Western Hemisphere and the winter home of many of our familiar North American songbirds.
I'm pleased to report that Costa Rica is a gracious host for birds and birders alike, and its residents, known as Ticos, appreciate the migratory visitors as much as the indigenous species.
Blessed with a bounty of diverse wildlife habitats, Costa Rica, more than any other Central American nation, has had the vision to conserve its ecological treasures in an expansive system of national parks, biological preserves and privately held protected lands. About 800 bird species live in this country, which is the size of West Virginia.
What a joy it was to visit a tropical rain forest where Wilson's warblers and Philadelphia vireos flitted about in cecropia trees alongside Costa Rican species such as golden-headed and spangle-cheeked tanagers, and where summer tanagers and rose-breasted grosbeaks shared a ripe banana with compadres such as the chestnut-capped brush-finch and slaty-backed nightingale-thrush.
This was my third trip to Costa Rica, and fourth to Central America, so the sensory overload of seeing so many brilliantly plumaged birds was alleviated somewhat. But none of those previous journeys compared to this one for a simple reason: Paco Madrigal.
It would be hard to imagine a better birding guide and ambassador for his country. He grew up on the edge of the rain forest near the La Selva Biological Reserve on the Caribbean slope, where he acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of birds and their habits.
Every day, he amazed us with his ability to identify strange songs, to pick out birds camouflaged in tangled vines, and to whistle antbird calls, luring in these secretive and seldom seen skulkers of the dark forest floor.
With his skills, a mournful cry from the shadows of the Carara Biological Reserve turned into a little tinamou creeping through the leaf litter in search of insects. A persistent scream from above the forest canopy was revealed to be a semiplumbeous hawk. Scattered popping noises all around us at the Selva Verde Lodge were shown to be the wing beats of courting manakins.
And those weren't the most exotic species in Costa Rica.
The golden-browed chlorophonia was an eye-popping combination of lime green and lemon yellow that looked like a sherbet sundae with a cherry on top as it ate bright-red figs.
The aquamarine blues, vivid greens and scarlets of honeycreepers and dacnis made their plumages look as if they were illuminated by neon.
No spotlights could brighten a dark and misty Cloud Forest like a resplendent quetzal, trogon, motmot, barbet, toucan or cotinga perched on a moss-covered branch.
We love the flute symphonies of our wood thrush in Northeast Ohio. But that was before hearing the song of the black-faced solitaire, a deep-woods relative whose voice sounded like microphone feedback mixed with the hum produced by a finger rubbing the wet rim of a glass.
Our blue jays are colorful but hardly compare to the white-throated magpie-jays of Costa Rica, with tails as long as a peacock's.
The songs of our Carolina wrens are as perky a melody as you'll hear in North America. But wait until you hear Costa Rica's nightingale wren, whose song sounds as if it were composed by Mozart.
We see one species of woodcreeper in North America. Costa Rica has 15, some up to a foot long. And that doesn't include 20 similar species of spinetails, barbtails, treerunners, foliage-gleaners and leaftossers.
We have one resident hummingbird in the Eastern United States. Costa Rica has 51 species, ranging in size from a bumblebee to almost as large as a robin, with a rainbow of glittering plumages.
The debate continues over the existence of the ivory-billed woodpecker in North America. But its cousins, the pale-billed and lineated woodpeckers, are abundant in the forests of Costa Rica.
As odd-sounding birds go, few rival the three-wattled bellbird, a forest-canopy denizen that sounds more like an electric ring than a chime. And as we learned last week, they are more often heard than seen.
But not many of our target birds eluded our binoculars. We left Costa Rica dazzled by the memories of 380 species of birds and a newfound appreciation for the motto that embodies the Tico lifestyle, pura vida. Translated, it means "pure life."
For more information about birding in Costa Rica and Paco Madrigal, go to his Web site, www.cotingatours.com.
Sightings
the recent freeze of Lake Erie, the waterfowl and gull watching really has picked up at the traditional hot-water release sites. At Cleveland's East 72nd Street, birders are seeing good numbers of Iceland, glaucous, Thayer's and lesser black-backed gulls, plus canvasback, common goldeneye and greater scaup ducks.
A long-tailed duck, along with glaucous and little gulls, was seen from the pier at the Avon Lake power plant.
A common redpoll made a brief stop at John Pogacnik's Lake County feeders with a flock of goldfinches.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
jmccarty@plaind.com, 216-999-4153
http://www.cleveland.com/living/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/living/117205077544360.xml&coll=2&thispage=1
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home