Costa Rica
My wife and I had a wonderful adventure in February 2020 to visit the amazing country of Costa Rica. Our main mission was to see the wide variety of unique birds and wildlife that live there. The birds in the top row are the Potoo (related to owls), Great Kiskadee and Keel-billed Toucan. The second row shows a hopping Collared Aracari and a Red-legged Honeycreeper with the bottom row showing a Gold-hooded Tanager, Barred Antshrike and a Blue-gray Tanager. So many birds I've never seen before.
The variety of hummingbirds in Costa Rica is amazing. The first sheet shows some taking a rest and the next shows hummingbirds in flight. I haven't had a chance to ID them all.
The monkeys were very entertaining to watch in Costa Rica. We saw White-faced Capuchin monkeys (top right/bottom) and Howler Monkeys. It was especially entertaining watching a mother Howler Monkey trying to hold back her young explorer (mid right) as you can see she's about to grab his tail to hold him back…he eventually pulled out of her grasp.
One animal I looked forward to seeing in Costa Rica was the Sloth (saw 2 and 3 toed). The first three photos are a juvenile male; the mid-right image is a male who climbed to the very top of a tall tree (bottom right) while we watched - only to find that he couldn't reach the branch on the next tree he had his eye on - poor spatial acuity; and bottom left is a baby laying on its mother's chest high in a tree. Sloths have an entire ecosystem on their body - there is a green algae that only grows on their fur and helps to camouflage them and a moth that eats the algae that only lives on sloths. There are 26 different organisms that depend on the sloth.
Some more of the wildlife we saw in Costa Rica (below right): A Scarlet Macaw, a Frigatebird in flight, a very large (6') Iguana, and an Agouti who was munching grass outside our patio. We hired a guide one night to take us on a jungle walk near Manuel Antonio NP with headlamps to look for tree frogs and found this red-eyed tree frog. We felt very lucky to find the tree frog at night with the help of a guide since we were there in the dry season.
During our boat trips in Costa Rica we saw 4 different types of kingfishers and 9 different herons. Shown here (L-R) are the American Pygmy Kingfisher, Amazon Kingfisher devouring a fish and Green Kingfisher. Some of the herons were the Boat-billed (center with the big eyes), Yellow-crowned Night-Heron, Fasciated Tiger-Heron and Green Heron. The diversity of birds and wildlife was almost overwhelming, but so encouraging to see in light of all the news about declining bird populations.
Some interesting creatures in Costa Rica. Leaf cutter ants (top left) are the only farmers other than people. They bring leaf pieces back to their nest and wait for a fungus to grow on the leaves which is what they actually eat. There are many interesting spiders - the golden orb spider and the Long horned orb-weaver among them - the latter had just caught a beetle. The black wasp's blue wings really stood out on the path we were hiking. The owl eye butterfly was cool, though not as spectacular as the blue morph (difficult to photograph). We saw quite a few long nose bats hanging on trees.
The beautiful landscape of Costa Rica is typified in the top image with a newly born colt and its parents (there was still blood on the mother's leg) and Mt Areal, an active volcano, is in the distance. The sunsets are from Monteverde (upper) and Manuel Antonio NP (lower). We visited a school on Valentine's Day and the students made us cards which we brought home with us (bottom left).
Some of the birds were just beyond description. My two favorites were the Turquoise-browed Motmot (top 2 images) and the Resplendent Quetzel. The male has these amazing, long tail feathers that stick out of the hole in the tree when he goes inside.
