The Osa peninsula is a very special area, even within a very special country. The variety of wildlife is spectacular and as with so any places you don't need to go far to see it. Just walking about in the hotel and sitting on our balcony gave some rich rewards.
One of the specialities of the area are the scarlet macaws - our lodge, Lapa Rios was named after them. They were often seen flying over the forest and early morning visited the trees in the hotel grounds for breakfast.
They were often joined by their other gaudy counterparts, the black-mandibled toucan.
Whereas the macaws were always very loud and screeched their way around the lodge, the toucans were more of a stealth bomber. You didn't realise they had arrived till you looked up and saw them tossing back the seeds into their giant beaks. Then they would slip away again to disappear into the canopy.
Just sitting on our balcony was pretty productive. This great black-hawk was a regular drifting over the forest between us and the sea.
Vultures were barely worth a second look most of the time as they were so common everywhere on the island. They did have friends soaring with them when the thermals were right and this time it was a party of brown pelicans, again a common bird around the coast.
This very distinctive short-tailed hawk is apparently common however it was the only one I managed to positively identify on the trip. The head pattern made it stand out as a very different bird from the other hawks around.
We also got a lot of parrots and parakeets flying past but often at a reasonable distance. The commonest were these red-lored parrots. By this point is the trip I was starting to recognise some of the key differences between the groups, and the short, stubby tail is a good way of separating this from the crimson-fronted parakeet.
Here are a pair of them perched on the forest edge.
The scrubby undergrowth of the hotel grounds was alive with birds even though a lot more were heard than seen and even fewer photographed. I did mange to capture a few though.
This black-hooded antshrike really gave me the run around. It stayed in deep cover most of the time and was really fast when moving in the open. The dots on its wings are the give-away feature along with its hooked bill.
This is another lurker - a spot-crowned euphoria, at least I'm fairly sure it is! The orange belly and rump seem pretty characteristic for this and its in the right range!
This is the rather easy to identify male of the species. Even this is hard but its most similar confusion species has no range overlap with it!! You can jut about make out the spots on its crown.
This one with the very dangerous-looking bill is a cocoa wood creeper. Again, a bird you heard an awful lot, calling from in deep cover, but was a lot harder to see. Like our treecreepers they always seemed to be on the other side of the branch to you!!
Finally, this rather handsome beast is another endemic to CR, the riverside wren. It was the most vocal of all of them but fortunately was lured out of cover with a judicious deployment of the Iphone playback. Naughty but I only did to once.
We only did one trip out of the grounds to see birds, although we did it twice - dawn and dusk - to a field only a quarter of a mile away. The guide was very good and put us onto lots of good stuff, most of which were regulars for him and other tour groups who were wandering around the rather ordinary-looking field. A very good example of how if you were independently guiding you would miss asa much stuff.
For instance, this pair of spectacled owls who lived in the bamboo grove in the field.
A clear favourite with the tour groups but not guaranteed. We saw them in the evening but not the morning. A nice surprise was a hummingbird on its nest, in this case a green-breasted mango. The nest was tiny but was stuck out in the open on a branch of a tree.
It did come off the nest occasionally to make a foray around the tree, presumably picking insects off the bark.
This tiny bird is a common tody-flycatcher,
and this its rather over-sized nest! Another case of the guide having his bankers in place for the group!
He got quite excited about this bird, the rather gloriously named southern beardless-tyrannulet. It posed quite nicely on a barbed-wire fence in the evening sun for us.
In this part of the world you get loads of flycatchers, a lot of which look very similar. Some are a bit easier to identify though, as with this gray-capped flycatcher, told from its similar relations by its gray cap!
One morning we went out for a short walk to the nearby beach. It was only about 15 minutes but you could still get a car to take you if you wanted!!!
It was pretty much deserted, perhaps 5 or 6 other people well spread out along the sand. Manly our company was of the wildlife-kind.
Pelicans were fishing just offshore
and a piratic flycatcher was nesting in a hollow tree right next to where we were sitting.
It did seem to be having trouble with the local golden-naked woodpecker, another endemic to CR. The fights were very noisy but quite inconclusive.
We also enjoyed the local crabs scuttling about on the beach and popping in and out of their sandy burrows.
It was very good for monkeys around here as well, both spider and howlers. The latter were very noisy near our room one morning.
The spider monkeys were altogether more delicate and gentle, especially the mothers with their youngsters.
The third species, white-faced capuchins, were also present but were the most elusive.
Like everywhere, a place we could happily have spent longer in.
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