Mae's Food Blog

Sunday, January 07, 2024

One Day of Birding

We are now at home, but thinking of our fabulous trip to Costa Rica, which ended yesterday. Our tour company is Field Guides. If you want a birding tour, I recommend them; website here:

https://fieldguides.com/

One Day of Birding: January 1, 2024

First light from the balcony outside our hotel room around 5:15 AM.

After breakfast, our bus drove us to a beautiful dirt road. We walked for several hours, looking for birds.
The bus followed us — so we went only down, not up!

To my surprise, one of the retaining walls along the way was painted with a neat mural.

We didn’t see the hotel up the hill that was announced by the mural.

All sorts of traffic along the road

Birds and cows

Swallows on a TV antenna.

Amusing that this hummingbird had nested on the electric wires!

More art

A traditionally painted farm cart on someone’s front porch.

After lunch

From a bridge across a stream, we saw an Amazon Kingfisher.

We walked along some farm fields and saw these beautiful lapwings.

The Red-Breasted Meadowlark is like the one in the US but so different in color!

…

Late in the afternoon, we stopped at a lake where there were some nice water birds.

As we rode the bus back to the hotel for dinner, the sun was setting.

Friday, January 05, 2024

Wednesday, January 03, 2024

Breakfast was at 4:15 AM so that we could drive to the Caribbean lowlands for more wildlife today. At a private preserve we ate lunch while watching a splendid set-up of bird feeders. We saw a number of particularly beautiful and interesting birds, and after lunch we were escorted to three different species of owls in the deep woods — as well as the unusual sighting of the Honduran White Bat. To reach the owls, we had to wade through deep and slippery mud — fortunately the owner of the preserve loans mud boots to his visitors. And the owls are in a very dark wooded area, so it’s hard to get a photo!