Tropical Screech Owl: Hotel Bougainvillea, San Jose, Costa Rica — On most trips to Costa Rica, we have to make a special effort to see an owl. When we stay at the Bougainvillea, there is a Costa Rican Pygmy Owl that has been seen near the back of the gardens, and we always look, but I have yet to see it. And later in the trip, we visit Cope in Galupiles, and he generally has at least one owl staked out. This year we walked up on two owls unexpectedly. This Tropical Screech Owl was hanging out with its mate in a dense grove of Bamboo in the Bougainvillea gardens on most of our folks first morning in Costa Rica, on what turned out to be a very rainy day. The female was so far back-in that photography was next to impossible, and I don’t have any sharp shots of her…but the male was close enough to the edge of the grove so I could find a line-of-sight for a few photos…using my low-light mode and multi-frame noise reduction. (The second unexpected owl was a Spectacled Owl we came up on on the grounds of Danta Corcovado on the Osa Peninsula. We would not have seen either one if not for the incredibly sharp eyes and extraordinary awareness of our guide Edwin 🙂 Sony Rx10iv at 600mm equivalent. Program mode with multi-frame noise reduction. Processed in Polarr and Apple Photos. Equivalent ISO 6400 @ f4 @ 1/60th.