Costa Rica July 2021 - Day 8

 July 13, 2012  (Click to enlarge any photo)

(Teri) We woke up at 5:15 am to the sounds of birds singing.  It was already full light by then, which made it much easier to get out of bed. 

When we arrived at the photography deck, they were changing the perch. 

Taking down the old perch. 

Putting up a new perch.

I don’t know how often they changed the perch but the new one had more green leaves.  The long branch made for some excellent photos.

A new bunch of bananas was also hoisted up.

The perch was close enough to the deck that even my little camera was able to get some good shots.

Keel-billed Toucan

Breakfast was served.  Most of our meals started with fruit.

 

This was a typical breakfast.

Around 7:30 we were told that a cows head had been put out at the King Vulture blind and as soon as the vultures started showing up someone would take us to the blind.

We started seeing lots of Black Vultures flying past the photo deck and about 8:30 we were led to the blind.

The cow head was, thankfully, laid behind a log. 

The vultures walked very close to the blind we were in! 

King Vulture

Black Vulture

We watched about 30 Black Vultures and several adult King Vultures with 2 immature King Vultures for about 45 minutes before heading back to the lodge.

We walked around the grounds for a little while. 

We decided to sit on the deck in front of our room until lunch.

After lunch we picked out our rubber boots for the evening adventure.

At 6 pm we headed out with two guides and another couple.  We headed down a muddy trail to a covered area where a hummingbird feeder is kept out over-night.  It gets dark very early here (around 6 pm).  The hummingbird feeder was taken down and a flower was clamped to a hanger and injected with sugar water.  We were quickly surrounded by bats.  We were there about 45 minutes.  I think Mark took a couple thousand pictures!

Dinner tonight was a small steak in a mushroom/wine sauce with mashed potatoes, cooked squash and carrots and a vegetable soup.  It was all excellent. 

We didn’t get any rain today and it was very hot and muggy with no wind.  We had a good fan in our room so sleeping wasn’t uncomfortable.

7/13/2021 (Mark)  We were up really early (5:30 ish) and out on the photo platform before 6:00.  We walked down to the King Vulture Blind around 8:30. They had put a cows head out earlier in the morning, and a worker had been checking for the King Vultures. Once he saw them he came back to tell us, and we headed down with another couple. There was a small blind that was placed maybe 50’ back from the bait (which was hidden) and the ground was covered with Black Vultures and several King Vultures.

King Vulture with Black Vultures

Among the King Vultures were several mature adults and a couple of younger birds.

King Vulture juvenile with adult and Black Vultures

It is hard to imagine ever getting better looks at King Vultures in our lives. 

After about 45 minutes we made the short walk back to the lodge.

The rest of the day was spent doing bird photography from the deck, and sitting in front of the room relaxing.

Honeycreepers: Red-legged (male), Green (female), Shining (female) 

Orange-chinned Parakeet

That evening at about 6:00 us and the other couple walked a short distance to a covered seating area for bat photography. This area had a couple of hummingbird feeders hanging and bats were already using them when we arrived. They set up a big banana blossom and juiced it up with sugar water, then removed the feeders. The bats would swoop to the blossom and feed. 

Bat feeding on banana blossom

They had a flashlight training on the blossom but lighting was tricky, not the mention the speed of the bats. It turns out that these nectar-feeding bats have pretty amazing tongues that showed up in several images. 

Bat using long tongue to feed

I had the ISO on my camera turned all of the way up to 51200 and was able to get some decent images. They changed to a different flower and we did it all again. 

Bat feeding on flower

I shot a couple of thousand frames and would be surprised if more that 25 of them were worth having, but that was the only way to do it. Certainly the most challenging photography session of my life!!

The other man had a 7DII and was limited to 12800 ISO. He was frustrated and asked for more light, but they were hesitant to light the bats up too much. I'm not sure if he got any "keepers" or not. 

Next time: What other country lies between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea?  Nicaragua.

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Costa Rica July 2021 - Day 7 (Laguna de Lagarto Lodge)

 July 12, 2012 

(Teri)  Since it had rained all night and the grounds were wet, we decided to just relax in our room until time for our 10 am ride to Laguna de Lagarto Lodge.

Our driver told us the drive would be about 2 1/2 hours but that the last hour would be on a very bad road.  It was a kidney buster!  Even though he had borrowed the owners Mercedes SUV, the last few miles to the lodge were very rough.

We arrived at the lodge about 12:30. 

We knew our room was going to be pretty basic, and it was.

The room was nice and clean with one very small shelf on the wall.  A few more shelves or even hooks on the walls would have been useful.

After putting our suitcases in the room, we headed to the deck.  The dining area was very large. 

Even though we arrived at 12:30, for some reason they hadn’t planned on feeding us lunch.  When we explained that we had skipped breakfast and hadn’t had lunch, the cook made us a couple of sandwiches. 

It was raining when we arrived and ended up raining all day.  We stayed out on the deck until 5:30. With the rain, it was nice and cool.  There was plenty of room on the deck for Mark to use his tripod.

Dinner was at 6:30 and by then it was starting to get pretty buggy with moths and mosquitos.

Dinner was a hard squash soup that was very good, chicken, carrots and some kind of shredded vegetable that was excellent.

We got back to the room about 7 pm and discovered there were towels but no hand towels or wash cloths and no place to put clothes.

7/12/2021 (Mark) – We listened to the rain falling all night long and scrubbed our plan to get up early to bird our last morning at Arenal. Instead, we slept a bit late and enjoyed time sitting out on the terrace and catching up on journaling, reading, etc.  Neither of us was particularly hungry, so we skipped breakfast.

A bit before ten we took our bags up to the parking area, checked out, found our driver and were on our way to our last lodge, Laguna del Lagarto.  The driver told us that the last part of the drive would be very slow on a rough road, and he wasn’t kidding!  It took more than 45 minutes to cover the last 15 miles. It was really bad.

We knew that Laguna del Lagarto would be the most basic lodge that we would stay in on this trip, and that turned out to be true. There was no formal check-in, passports, etc. Just “who are you” and “here’s your key”. We were given the basic info about meal times and what we could do there. We were a little late for lunch but they made us a nice ham & cheese sandwich.

The room (#20) had two twin beds, a nightstand, and fan, and that was about it. No place to really put anything, not even a hook on the wall!  But it had a large, covered porch along the front with rocking chairs, a hammock, and a small table.

The highlight of this lodge was supposed to be their feeder/photography deck, and it didn’t disappoint. The feeder was a large bunch of bananas suspended on a tall pole, with a very nice perch branch running horizontally through the bananas. The photography deck was on the same level as the bananas, and no more than 25’ away. Luckily the deck was covered, as it was raining when we arrived and continued right up until dark! 

I finally got a chance to break out the tripod and flash setup that I’d been carrying throughout the trip.  We sat on the deck until it got dusky and enjoyed a wide variety of birds coming and going all afternoon.  There were a bunch of Shiny, Red-legged and Green Honeycreepers that were on the bananas almost constantly.

Green Honeycreeper - male

Shining Honeycreeper - male

Red-legged Honeycreeper - male

They left only when bigger birds like Montezuma Orependula, Collared Aracari, and Keel-billed Toucans showed up. 

Keel-billed Toucan

Montezuma Oropendula

We had a fly-by of two Scarlet Macaws, and a group of 4 Brown-hooded Parrots spent several minutes on the feeders.

Brown-hooded Parrot

In addition to the feeder “tree” there was a big pan of cracked corn on the lawn behind the deck. It first attracted an Agouti, but later a group of nine Great Curassow came into the area. Four males, four females, and a much smaller/younger juvenile. 

Great Curassow group with juvenile

Quite the sight to see these huge birds interacting with each other for about an hour. One of the workers also took us out to the parking lot to see a small group of spider monkeys feeding in a tree.

Spider Monkey

We came back to the room and sat out on the porch for a while, but there was a hatch of 1” long flying insects that were attracted to the porch light and kept landing on us. We decided to go into the room, and then soon headed off to the (open) dining patio to do the E-bird list and enjoy dinner. We had a few of the flying insects there as well, but they weren’t much of a bother.

Next time: Vultures, bats, and other flying things.

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Costa Rica July 2021 - Day 6

July 11, 2021 

(Teri)  Yea!  It’s my birthday!  I love birthdays!  Mark always makes them extra special. 

This morning our driver, Steven, picked us up at 6 am.  We had a 2 1/2-hour drive to Caño Negro.  We were supposed to leave at 8 am but got a message the night before to be ready at 6 due to weather.  On the way Steven stopped for some birding and we saw some great birds.

We passed by huge fields of aloe.

Sugar cane is also a major crop here.

A breakfast of different fruits was ready for us when we arrived.

After breakfast, our boat and driver were waiting for us. 

It seemed like a big boat for just the two of us, Steven, and our driver, but it was nice to be able to move around to get good looks at the birds. 

We returned to the dock at 11:30 for lunch.  

It was really good.

While eating lunch it started pouring down rain.

We were glad we got out 2 hours earlier than planned.  We would have been caught on the river in this downpour if we had left later.

I had seen a very large souvenir shop and Mark asked Steven if we could stop on the way back to Arenal for a few minutes.

The place was enormous but I was able to find some really nice souvenirs quickly.  The cashiers were quick to wrap everything up and we were back on the road.

We got back to Arenal about 2:30. We picked up a couple of diet cokes from the restaurant and went to our room to sit out and relax.

It was still raining at 6 pm when we had our dinner reservations.

I celebrated my birthday with Sea Bass.  Mark had it the night before so I knew it was going to be good. 

Mark had tenderloin.

7/11/2021 (Mark) – Happy 65^th Birthday, Teri!!  We had originally been told we would leave for Caño Negro at 8:00, but received a message the night before that it had been moved up to 6:00.  So we met our driver/guide, Steven, at 6:00. He was from the same company that we’d gone to Caño Negro with in 2017, but this time we’d requested a private trip to avoid all of the issues with picking up other folks, sick children, etc. 

The drive to Caño Negro took about 2 ½ hours, with the last 30 minutes on a small road that runs through flooded pastureland. We got good looks at Bare-throated Tiger-Heron, Northern Jacana, Black-bellied Whistling-Duck, Southern Lapwing, Crimson-fronted Parakeet and Caiman.

Remember - you can click on any picture to enlarge.

Crimson-fronted Parakeet

Northern Jacana

The weather was perfect when we arrived at the boat dock. They had fruit and juice set up for us, so we had a bite and then boarded our boat with Max, the driver and Steven. We first headed upriver to see the same orange Howler Monkey that we’d seen in 2017. Steven said that he was the only one, and had been run out of his previous troop by the dominant male and was now with another group. Kind of sad.

Mantled Howler Monkey - Orange morph

We then turned around and headed downriver. We saw tons of Ringed and Amazon kingfishers and Anhingas. Steven wasn’t a particularly good birder, but he and Max did a fine job of spotting birds, moneys, lizards, etc. 

Ringed Kingfisher

Amazon Kingfisher

We got great looks at Green Ibis and a pair of Sungrebes, both species lifers for us. 

Green Ibis

Sungrebe pair

Sungrebe male - Excellent toes...

Max maneuvered the boat through a very narrow channel into a lagoon, and we got out to see a couple of staked-out Great Potoos. We could never find those birds on our own, as they are so well camouflaged.

Great Potoo

We saw all three types of monkeys, Howler, Spider, and White-faced Capuchin. 

Mantled Howler Monkey

Mantled Howler Monkeys - Can you spot the male?

Geoffroy's Spider Monkey

Panamanian White-faced Capuchin

We were out on the water till about noon, and as we were returning we passed the “regularly scheduled” cruise from this company, and it had quite a few folks in the boat. As we sat down for lunch it started to absolutely pour, and we knew that we’d gotten really lucky with our early departure and missing the rain. Steven said that the other folks were unlikely to see anything with the hard rain.

We had an easy trip back to Fortuna, and I asked Steven if there was a nice souvenir shop that we could stop at. Teri had seen a big one on the way out, and sure enough Steven took us to it. We went inside and found several really nice Costa Rican items. This was clearly a shop for visitors, and they were incredibly efficient with wrapping and check-out. We were in and out in about 15 minutes!

Steven dropped us back at Arenal in the rain, and it continued to rain hard off and on through the night. We were really grateful to have gotten the bigger room with it’s large, covered terrace, and we were able to sit out comfortably in the pouring rain.

(Teri) We did have one damaged souvenir but Mark was able to glue it and the damage doesn’t even show.

Next time:  It’s time to move again - Laguna de Lagarto Lodge.

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