Montezuma’s, Chestnut-headed, and Crested Oropendolas: Costa Rica — Golden-pendulums…Oropendolas…there are three in Costa Rica, and between our two December 2021 trips at least 4 of us (if you include Edwin, our guide, who sees these birds all the time) saw all three. The two common lowland Oropendolas are easy to see as high as the foothills (up into the the Central valley for the Montezuma) of the Caribbean slope. In fact the largest of the three, the Montezuma’s is pretty hard to miss. It’s bubbling, gargling call is emblematic of the rain forest, and its nest colonies, with up to 50 huge hanging nests (again “pendulous” nests) in a single large tree dominate many a ridge and clearing. Oropendolas are giant Orioles and it is perhaps easier to see that when you look at the nests. They are daily visitors to the feeders at Selva Verde Lodge along the Sarapique River. You can see their nest tree just across the road and up the hill. The Chestnut-headed is a somewhat smaller bird, and less common, but locally abundant and easy to see if you are in the right places. They come to the feeders at Dave and Dave’s Costa Rican Nature Park in La Virgen, not far from Selva Verde, and at Donde Cope’s in Gaupiles. These shots are from Selva Verde and Dave and Dave’s. The Crested is much harder to see. It is a South-American bird that just barely makes it up over the Costa Rican border in the far south-western corner of the country. It is locally common around San Vito. We saw this bird from the deck at the dinning hall at Las Cruces Biological Station (Wilson Botanical Gardens), but most birders seek out the well know colony trees just outside San Vito, only a few miles from Panama. Sony Rx10iv. Montezuma’s at 424mm equivalent. The others at 600mm. (The Crested is heavily cropped and enlarged for something more like 3000mm equivalent.) Montezuma and Chestnut-headed, Program mode with multi-frame noise reduction. Equivalent ISO 6400 @ f4 and 1/320th (Monte) and 1/500th (Chestnut). The Crested is Program mode with my custom birds and wildlife modifications. ISO 100 @ f4 @ 1/500th.

Black Guan: Mirador y Soda Chinchona, Costa Rica — Big bird! The turkey sized Guans of Costa Rica and Central America are among the biggest birds of the region. The Black Guan, found at mid to high elevations is slightly smaller than the Crested Guan of (generally) lower elevations. And it is blacker. 🙂 The red eye and red legs and feet, and that touch of blue on the beak, are its only attempts at fancy dress. Though they are large, they can be hard to see, as they move through the forest, on the ground or, as I have seen them most frequently, up in the trees. As you can see, these photos were taken in the pouring rain of our first afternoon in Costa Rica. Sony Rx10iv at 470mm equivalent. Program mode with multi-frame noise reduction. Processed in Polarr and Apple Photos. Equivalent ISO 6400 @ f4 @ 1/125th.

Resplendent Quetzal: San Gerardo de Dota, Costa Rica — If you have been following my series on the Trogons of Costa Rica, you might have suspected where it was going, or at least where it would have to end up. Because, while there are lots of Trogons in Costa Rica, and each one is a stunning bird in its own right, there is only one Quetzal, and it is Resplendent! (There are four other Quetzals in South America, but only one in Costa Rica.) The Resplendent Quetzal is, after all is said and done, just another Trogon, the largest of the Trogons, but it is a Trogon in fancy dress…dress fit for a costume ball. Believe it or not, it is actually a brown bird…but its iridescence, caused mostly by tiny bubbles of oil and minerals in the feathers, refracts the light and sends it back as brilliant greens, blues, and golds, over one of the brightest reds imaginable. Then add the textures: the fine filaments of the head and crest, and the exquisitely sculpted overlapping plates of the bib, the fringe-like feathers along the wings raised like a vest, the rich velvet texture of the red chest, the pure white of the proper tail feathers, and the long silly plumes of the tail coverts, blue or green as they wave in the wind…and you get…well you get a Quetzal…and there are few birds in the world, and certainly in the Americas, that come even close to it. It’s restricted range…humid high elevation forest (cloud forest)…its dependence on fruiting trees of the Avocado family…and its need for standing dead trees for nesting cavities, mean that it never was an abundant bird, and that it is near threatened by habitat loss today. It’s relative rarity…the need to travel to specific (and often difficult to reach) locations in Central America to see it…makes it one of the most sought after birds, among both birders and the general public, in the Americas. Probably six of very ten people who see it, see in and around San Gerardo de Dota, in the Sevegre River Valley on the Pacific slope of the Talamanca Mountains in Costa Rica. I have seen it in Honduras, and it is, of course, the national bird of Guatemala, sacred in Mayan cultures all through the region, but like most, my best sightings have happened when an wild avocado tree is fruiting along the road, or on an accessible hill side above or below the road, within ear-shot of the tumbling waters of the river. I have visited San Gerardo for over 10 years now, and I have yet to see the bird in what I would call good light. Soon after the sun hits the bottom of the valley the birds move up higher and further from the road where they are much more difficult to find, let alone see. Next year, while I will go back to the San Gerardo de Dota, I plan to add another location in Costa Rica to see if the birds will sit in good light for me. 🙂 I will say that this year’s third encounter with the Quetzals was the best light I have had so far, and the most cooperative bird. Quetzals do spend a lot of time “posing”. They swallow the small hard fruits of the wild avocado whole, and then have to sit a while to digest the outer flesh, before spitting out the pit. They have favored perches for digestion, and where we saw this bird, the land owners have provided just such a perch out in the open where the bird now sits on occasion, as it did the morning we visited. Still, the images required special processing to get the most out of them. I used Pixomator Photo for basic adjustments and to crop and enlarge to fill the frame with the birds, and then cut out the bird using the magic cut-out tool in Pixomatic…denoised the background in Pixomator again, and composited the two images in Pixomatic. This allowed me to maintain full detail in the bird’s plumage, while making the overall image much less noisy. Sony Rx10iv at 600mm equivalent. Program mode with multi-frame noise reduction. Equivalent ISO 1600 to 2000 @ f4 @ 1/500th. the magic cut-out tool in Pixomatic…denoised the background in Pixomator again, and composited the two images in Pixomatic. This allowed me to maintain full detail in the bird’s plumage, while making the overall image much less noisy. Sony Rx10iv at 600mm equivalent. Program mode with multi-frame noise reduction. Equivalent ISO 1600 to 2000 @ f4 @ 1/500th.

Collared Trogon: San Gerardo de Dota, Costa Rica — Since we seem to be doing the Trogons of Costa Rica, this is not a great photo of the Collard Trogon, but it is the only one I have from December’s trips. We were chasing a Quetzel and found this fellow hanging out where we expected his more resplendent cousin. The sun was just peeking over the mountains and spilling down into the depths of the Savegre valley. It had not gotten this deep yet. Sony Rx10iv at 600mm equivalent. Program mode with multi-frame noise reduction. Processed (heavily cropped, enlarged, noise reduced, and adjusted) in Pixomator Photo and finished off in Apple Photos. Equivalent ISO 4000 @ f4 @ 1/500th.

Baird’s Trogon: Danta Corcovado Lodge, Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica — Continuing our tour of Costa Rica’s trogons, we found this female Baird’s Trogon while looking at both a male Slaty-tailed Trogon and a young Spectacled Owl buried in the same patch of understory, only a few yards from each other. Too much excitement! The Baird’s female is very like the female Slaty-tailed but with much more pattern on the tail and with the grey hood coming lower on the chest. Sony Rx10iv at 600mm equivalent. Program mode with multi-frame noise reduction. Processed in Pixomator Photo and Apple Photos. Equivalent ISO 3200 @ f4 @ 1/500th. Not an easy shot with the foreground obstructions. 🙂

Slaty-tailed Trogon: I can keep the Trogon parade going another day here. This is male and female Slaty-tailed Trogon. I was going to say they were not likely mates, since the the photos were taken on different days in different places, male on one day, and female on another, but in thinking about it this morning I realized that, though we got to the spot in two very different ways, both were taken along the same stretch of the Puerto Viejo River. On the first day we were on a boat on the river itself and photographed the male Trogon as it flew back and forth over the river. On the second day, when we encountered the female, we were hiking at La Selva Biological Station, one of the prime birding destinations in the Sarapiqui valley (or the world for that matter), but we were, in fact, only 50 yards from the suspension bridge over the Puerto Viejo, and probably only a couple of hundred yards from the spot where we photographed the male a few days before…so they could indeed be mates. Sony Rx10iv at 600mm equivalent. Program mode with my custom birds and wildlife modifications and the last one with multi-frame noise reduction. Processed in Pixomator Photo and Apple Photos. ISO 1600 @ f4 @ 1/500th, ISO 1250 @ f4 @ 1/500th, ISO 640 @ f4 @ 1/500th, equivalent ISO 6400 @ f4 @ 1/250th.