Mindo, Ecuador Bird Watching Adventure

A kingfisher in Mindo, Ecuador

The ground is colder than the air. There are long pauses between cricket hisses and frog groans. The cloud forest is waking up.

The van is late leaving and our group will have to hike fast if we are going to catch a glimpse of the elusive Andean cock-of-the-rock.

We find the way to the lookout shelter in the dark using phone lights and the red-eye polarizers on our cameras.

The pre-dawn path to the birding shelter has us knee deep in mud!

Julia Patino, our guide, teases us, “Didn’t anyone tell you to bring your torches?”

For a half-hour we trudge through mud and then we wait.

The Andean cock-of-the-rock is shy, rarely perched “in the open.” If we are lucky we will see a hint of bright red plumage.

Patino initiates some bird calls, then names the birds that respond. This technique is called pishing.  Her calls are remarkably effective.

She sets up a sight for us, predicting where the birds will land and how they will move or react next.

Over the course of three hours, we see parrots, toucans, and a broad variety of taningers. We see velvet coronets, and rufous motmots, and a golden headed quetzal.

And we see our Andean cock-of-the-rock. Three of them, in fact!

Birding is big business in Ecuador. In the tourist town of Mindo alone there are three full time birding operations featuring multiple guides with gaggles of letters behind their names.

Julia is independent and has been working in the region for over a decade. She knows all the sweet spots:  not just in the sanctuaries, but on random hillsides and highways.

Our group sitting down after birding to relax and share impressions.

When we break for an early lunch, I’ve improved my life list by nearly 30 species. 

Now that’s what I call a Big Day!

Caño Negro Adventure

(Caño Negro photos courtesy Steve Kettman.)

Near the northern border, Caño Negro Reserve consists of over 100 square kilometers.

Unlike a national park, locals and farmers are permitted to live and work within it’s limits provided they maintain a specific buffer around their property. The dynamic saves the govermnent in national park staffing, keeps the region wild, and keeps locals in the money.

While the waters of the Caño Negro Lake are at historic lows, rare and endangered wildlife continue to populate the area.

My Abercam pal Steve and I took a Caño Negro cruise with Canoa Aventura tour company and fellow travelers from Switzerland, England and British Colombia, Canada.

It was a day filled with satisfying sightings.

At the beginning our Rio Frio cruise, I spotted a reptile on my Costa Rica wish list, the basilisk lizard. Locally known by the nickname “Jesu Christi” for their ability to walk on water by quickly moving their hind legs, the basilisk’s English name also cites mythology. Medieval folklore held that the basilisk was a creature the body of a serpent and the head of a bird. It was believed to be so ugly it would turn it’s observers into stone.

Our entire group hoped to see all three kinds of Costa Rican monkey. Our guide, Pablo, careful not to dash our hopes, joked that he hoped to see a jaguar, a relative impossibility.

But shortly afterward, we spotted a group of howler monkeys, including an albino juvenile. Pablo noted that albino monkeys are more common as human encroachment on habitat forces many monkeys to mate within their own bloodlines.

Steve immediately spotted a group of white-faced capuchin feeding on palm fruits on the opposite shore. The capuchins made attack faces and noises at their neighbors to the south.

Just when we thought the excitement was over, an enormous crowd of spider monkeys burst through the folliage, following one another single file through the trees. We saw many mothers with babies on their backs. Within ten minutes all three species had presented themselves boldly.

Near the entrance to Caño Negro, a pile of brown rocks near the red clay shoreline turned out to be several dozen caiman, eyes above and noses below the water. We later saw one munch a large tilapia.

Iguana perched on feathery trees high above the water. When they are attacked they drop into the river to avoid becoming lunch. The Ticos refer to them as “Chicken of the Tree,” but have largely stopped consuming iguana in their diet.

Birdwatching was rich with variety. Three kinds of kingfisher, two kinds of egret, and several kinds of heron. We saw many northern jacana and hinga birds, an ibis, a wood stork, and a large bat falcon.

In another eagle eye moment, I spied a grey hooded kite, about twice the size of a parrot, but roughly the same shape. This carnivorous kite is actually a dark powder blue with alternating black and white feathers on it’s inner wings.

The last group we saw were a flock of rosette spoonbills. They resemble flamingos in their coloring but have unusual blue bills and a ordinary standing posture.

Afterward we ate a leisurely lunch at the Caiman Restaurant, a well balanced feast included with the tour.

In the weeks to come I hope to pass through Caño Negro again on my way to a day trip in Granada, Nicaragua.

Costa Rica Animal Adventures

(image courtesy: Dirk Van der Made, wiki commons)

Today I took some time out to review a book of Costa Rican wildlife. There were lots of photographs, much better than I could take. I had no difficulty identifying the creatures I had seen.

The most notable and noisy species was the howler monkey.

I hiked Tuesday along a dry river bed full of stones on the property neighboring Abercam.

The river bed made the hike easier as few plants could push through the stones and the ground in the "green season" is heavy with moisture. I passed guava and lychee trees barren of fruit and then came across "signs of animal life" (poop) that didn't come from one of the neighborhood's free grazing cows.

I walked toward the sound of rushing water and heard rustling at the tops of some mangrove-like trees with curly dangling vines.

Soon, a male howler monkey made his loud warning call.

The first part of the call sounded to me like air rushing into a huge hoarse vaccuum or a frat boy with a 20 inch mouth belching into a megaphone.

The second part is a rythymic exhaling version of the first part that sounds a little more like what you'd associate with a monkey.

I could see the howlers clearly, though they were above me by about 20 ft.

The howlers make a third noise which I heard at a distance as I passed them in route to a twin waterfall - a more cordial howl to one another.

Birds that frequent the Abercam property include Costa Rica's national bird, the clay robin, chestnut mandible toucans, montezumas, yellow bellies, and hummingbirds.

The clay robins are as familiar here as red brested robins are in the United States. They are a powdery rust color all over and fight aggressively with one another.

Of course, I expected toucans to look like the bird on a box of breakfast cereal. All toucans do share expressive eyes, a similar mandible shape. and a like size.

The ones flying about Abercam have white, red, yellow, and black markings with brown and yellow bills.Their eyes are a light green.

Ironically, they're not big on "froot". They prefer eggs, small rodents, and young squirrels. Today, I caught a pair eyeing a male squirrel making a lovenest in a tall tree: future lunch!

They make two calls. One is a clicking sound that immitates the gecco.

By far, the most impressive vocalizer is the montezuma or pendulum bird. It's call is seven notes long.

The call flutters up a chromatic scale by half-steps. Two half-steps, pause, repeating the second note and another half-step, pause. This pattern repeats two more times until the bird holds the top note and slurs down all the way back to the first.

The montezuma also creates nests that hang like long baskets from trees. It's roughly the size of a hawk, and has a trim of bright yellow feathers on it's long black tail.

The yellow bellies, have, well, yellow bellies. They cackle and tumble over one another in midair like the parrots of Telegraph Hill.

The broad variety of hummingbirds here impressed me.

Most all of them have the same irridescent green somewhere on their bodies, like the red breasted hummingbirds in my backyard in San Francisco. But there are some with violet ears, some that are all green, and a peculiar species with a hooked bill designed for sipping liquid from inside the clawlike flowers of haliconia.

The species of butterflies are also amazing. The biggest ones I've seen are about the size of my hand and as fleet as bats.

In English, we distinguish between butterflies and moths based on whether we feel the creature is colorful or ugly. In Spanish, size is a the determining factor between mariposas and pollios.

I have not yet seen Costa Rica's national butterfly, the blue winged morphos, but I have seen a "postman" butterfly, a large yellow species, and a species with a long body that resembled a wasp with monarch-like wings in four sections.

I was initially concerned by the presence of two large wasps nests near the pool, but I soon learned this species of wasp principally eats mosquitos. Instead of buzzing around your soda and sandwhiches they cluster near their nests listlessly waiting for their prey.

Unlike these surprising wasps, not all the Costa Rica creatures are changing my mind about what constitues a pest.

Tonight, I got up for a glass of water and came back to a squarish orb spider about as big as my palm dragging a dust bunny across my headboard.

I stayed up for a while writing across the room. I made my bed and the spider regrouped, cowering beside my pillow.

The standoff finally ended when I threatened to trap it. First I tried to trap it under a bowl, but the spider jumped. Two feet high and three feet out!

I was startled, but I laughed too. For someone who has a dangerous level of fearlessness this spider was freaking me out.

I swaped the bowl out for a steam cover.

Then I figured, if I came at the spider from above and behind, it would stay low and move in the direction of the front door.

I guided it as far as the kitchen, trapped it, and set it free on the front porch to eat beatles another day.

Earlier this week, I found an unpleasantly fat tick. I saved it in a bag in case I came down with something.

Oddly, I was nauseaous, had a mean headache, and even some shortness of breath. But none of my symptoms corresponded with the tick diseases I'd read about in my guide books.

I'm guessing the overplus of prophylactics the SF travel health clinic introduced to my bloodstream have taken the wind out of any tick germs I got.

No scorpions or snakes so far.

Wayne says the scorpions at this altitude in Costa Rica can fit in a spoon and give a sting no worse than a bee. Still not anxious to experience that bite!

Snakes are detered from the property by the presence of over 300 minature bamboo plants around the perimeter. According to Tim, snakes get tangled in the dense sticks and turn back.

Everywhere I go, leaf-cutter ants are stripping some tree of its green.

They are fun to watch. Little bits of leaf marching single file over the forrest floor. Cute!

And people love the story of leaf-cutters. These ants survive by eating a unique fungus they create in their nests from moldering plant material.

Did I mention their queens live up to eight years! That's five years more than drag queen Pollo del Mar will reign as longest Miss Trannyshack.

However, the leaf-cutters are a nuissance to a well-manicured property. Geraldo, the gardener here, follows them and burns out their nests.

The ants seem to be worst on Wednesday.

That's Geraldo's full day off. The leaf-cutters seem to know.