Collared aracari toucans caught in a face-off in Costa Rica.
Photographing toucans in Costa Rica is much like photographing birds that may come to a bird feeder at your home. One difference in Costa Rica is the bird feeders can be tall as a telephone pole. The bird feeder at our lodge required two large stalks of bananas daily to entice the toucans, parrots and other colorful birds common to Costa Rica to pose for photographers.
The Toucan Lodge
Each morning the Laguna del Lagarto Eco-Lodge Lodge Website where we were staying would hoist a stalk of bananas up to the top of a post that was the size of a telephone pole. A foot to 18 inches below this stalk of bananas was a limb taken from the jungle for the birds to perch on while eating. Multiple types of toucans and parrots would appear. When they were gone many small, colorful birds would have their turn. The big toucans and the small birds never mixed.
The jungle was far behind this bird feeder so the jungle background was very nicely blurred in our photos. Here is a behind the scenes photo. Regardless of the frequent rains, we were mostly well protected from the downpours…. during this dry season in Costa Rica.
In this one photo you are looking at at least $50,000 in photo gear. Crazy bird photographers….
In case any readers are interested in such a lodge, here are two links to lodgers we stayed:
Toucans and Large Birds at the Feeder
A keel-billed toucan likely thinks nothing of the daily rains. They have never experienced anything different.
As you can see it was raining in many of these photos. It would rain for hours in the morning and often hours in the afternoon. Apparently, what made this the dry season were the breaks between the morning and afternoon rains.
Serious nature photographers know the names of all the birds they photograph. I had to look them up and may have made some mistakes. It does help when providing captions below the photos, rather than saying toucan, bigger toucan, really colorful toucan. It was quite an experience to see these beautiful birds flying about.
With motor drives built into our cameras, a nature photographer can capture 20 frames a second. The motor drive allowed me to catch this Montezuma Oropendola at the end of his shaking fit. A motor drive sounds like a fine thing until you get home and have to sort through 10,000+ images.
To avoid the dreaded criticism of simply “a bird on a stick” I tried to get my bird photos of the birds doing something. This often resulted in blurry photos…. which I decided was just fine. This is the same Montezuma Oropendola as above, just in the midst of the water shaking fit.
I was told that when you photograph a bird straight on, they often look angry. I would say that is true. It is also not the ideal position for a true nature photographer and also very poor as a means of identification. Here, you cannot tell his beak is about 9 inches long. They have more ideal poses in mind.
A keel-billed toucan looking straight on. You can see why it is not a good pose for identification purposes. The same bird is shown below.
Keel-billed toucan side view, showing an amazingly beautiful beak.
These yellow throated toucans are truly a beautiful bird, up close and personal.
Pair of Brown Hooded Parrots.
Colorful Birds of Costa Rica
At our local camera club the landscape photographers will often jokingly belittle simple photos of a “bird on a stick.” In the hierarchy of nature photography, it is considered better to have your birds doing something. Attacking, eating, singing, so that is what I was after. Some sort of movement or action. In my opinion, the blurry birds are fine and help depict movement or some level of activity.
Female Baltimore Orioles… Really? I flew 8,000 miles and drove for days to see birds from Baltimore?
It is my understanding the green honeycreeper is the blue colored bird…. not the green birds. That would be too easy. Hmmm. Turns out they are all honey creepers. The green ones are females.
These are Gene Kelly birds….. ‘Singing in the Rain’ birds
Blue birds a plenty…
I’m not sure how many photos of blurry birds one needs to see… So we will call it quits.
Bats of Costa Rica
Once again it was pouring down rain the night it was my turn to photograph the bats. The major drawback to photographing the bats in the rain is there are many distracting rain streaks that needed to be removed from each photograph. Those lucky enough to photograph the following night had no rain to contend with. The set-up is somewhat similar to the humming birds in my previous post. We have some local flowers and load them with nectar. Word is put out to the bat colony and many bats appear. Once again the photographers are under a shelter, firing off a flash whenever we see some black streak in the night. We are not looking through our camera viewfinder, just standing back with a ‘camera clicker’ in our hands, firing off a shot every time we see a bat fly to the flower. If you do this a couple hundred times, you will be lucky and photograph some bats with their tongues sticking out trying to get the nectar.
The short tailed fruit bat somehow knows there is nectar inside these flowers and can hardly wait to get at it. Several bats a minute would visit our flowers set-ups. These flowers are put out for several days prior to the crazy photographers arriving to train the bats. Yep, trained bats.
More nectar awaits.
Behind the scenes of the bat photography session is equally unattractive as the hummingbirds. We are under a much needed shelter and have flashes set up to illuminate the flying bats and flowers.
The flower and some flashes can be seen in the center of the photo above.
White Honduran Tent Bats
While trekking in the woods looking for owls, we came to rest in a spot while the guides went out on their own searching for the owls. A member of our group spotted the chewed upon giant banana leaf and knew to inspect it for tent bats underneath. We happened to stop at this overnight home for a family of white Honduran tent bats.
They chew on the top rib of support of the giant leaf. This collapses the leaf structure into a tent like fashion, providing better protection for the day.
Ten Honduran tree bats huddled together under a banana leaf like tree. This is a view while I’m kneeling and looking straight up.
This is the same leaf the Honduran bats are sleeping under. They chew the top stem of the leaf so it collapses around them more closely.
King Vulture
In addition to the very pretty and colorful birds of the rain forest, we visited the king vultures. These too are baited with the leftovers from some prior tourist’s meal. There were a few squabbles, but surprisingly few fights between the vultures.
Apparently the adults have the very white eyes and the juveniles are dark eyes. The adults always look quite startled or surprised.
What? You do not eat pork? Always eat the eye before moving on to the snout, I always say…
“Kids…. They say the darnedest things…” The juveniles have dark eyes and the adults have the white eyes.
Trying to get a bit artsy with this vulture perched in the rain
The Resplendent Quetzal
From the ugliest vulture to the most beautiful bird. The resplendent Quetzal was the last photo I took while in Costa Rica. The tour seemed to save the best for last. Many birders consider this the most beautiful bird in the world. These are not birds you lure into a feeding area as we had done previously. Photographers need to go to the trees in a cloud forest where this birds feed and then wait… and wait… and wait and get nothing. So then you come out again the next day and do more of the same. This time in the rain. Upon the first glimpse of this bird and you take hundreds of very poor photos of the bird in the dark shadows, blocked by twigs, as you do not know if you will see another. The most sought after photo of this bird would likely be with a small avocado looking fruit in its mouth. I got none of those prized photos, but got enough so we can see what a beautiful bird the Quetzal is.
These birds hang out in a cloud forest, not a rain forest. The difference between the two is one of elevation.
Resplendent Quetzal
The Aztecs called this bird the ‘feathered snake god’ as it looks like a flying snake due to its very long tail.
Our second day out was either free or at a big discount as the hotel felt sorry for us as we had not seen many Quetzels the prior day. “Oh, you should have been here last week. That group got LOTS of great photos….”
A Most UNWELCOME Sign
We saw these signs in numerous South American countries lodging rooms…… I don’t care. I’m not doing it… Here is the website of this Quetzal Lodge. The food was very good, but limited in variety. After three nights we were ready for something else.
National Bird of Costa Rica
The biodiversity in this vibrant country is beyond comparison. Costa Rica’s extraordinary profusion of life includes a colorful tapestry of avian diversity. This is largely due to many micro-climates from the seas to rain forests to cloud forests. With such diversity to select from, one would imagine there must be a very high bar to be selected as the national bird of this biodiverse champion of the world. Might it be a resplendent peacock? Nope, it appears to be a giant, overgrown sparrow, but commonly known as the clay colored robin. To dress this name up a bit, it was changed to the clay colored thrush. The expert ornithologists failed to recognize the boring part of the bird was not that it was a robin but that it was clay colored.
The resplendent clay colored robin/thrush. The national bird of Costa Rica.
Don’t worry bird lovers, this bird is not endangered as it is listed in such tables as “least concern.” It generally lives around populations and is said to have a “modest and pleasant personality.” The primary reason it is the national bird is residents are very familiar with the bird, seeing it often and it has a melodious song in the springtime. Below is a link to four different recordings of the clay colored thrush. For some added excitement, click quickly on all four recordings and they will play simultaneously. It will be like Lou, Larry and Bonnie having a whole flock of these birds in their kitchen. CLICK Link below:
SONG of the Clay Colored Thrush
Good Night from Costa Rica
So I leave the remote mountain top towns in the cloud forests of Cost Rica, searching for adequate, modern plumbing.
The light green in the sloth’s fur on his arm is moss. They move so slowly, moss grows on them.
But be sure to hang around as I’ll eventually be posting Antarctica and Bolivia. But first some technical posts on how to make lenses for macro photography.
More to come…
the coloring on the birds is spectacular, as are the captures of the other creatures. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you Lou, sorry there was such a long break.
Harold your adventures are wonderful but your commentary is what I come back for over and over!
And I am happy you do come back over and over.
Oh Harold, Dave and I have missed you! Your photos are exquisite and I love all the captions and wry remarks. Such a fun read. We’ve been to Costa Rica but more on the tourist trail. We saw a few toucans and lots of scarlet macaws, but from all from afar. Your photos show the details on the toucan bills we could never see. Thanks and looking forward to your next post.
Bonnie & David
I thought about you two when I sent so long to do another post. I’m afraid there will be another long break. I still need to work on Antarctica, Bolivia and Iceland. But in the mean time I’m going to Europe for six weeks. Also I am winding down travel and will be concentrating on Macro Photography going forward. We all need to slow down at some point.
The colors are just amazing!! Absolutely stunning!
“In this one photo you are looking at at least $50,000 in photo gear. Crazy bird photographers” and only the woman knows how to properly hold a long lens 🙂
The King Vulture is my favorite !
Thank you for sharing with a crazy bird photographer 🙂
Thank you Ken, I know you do not approve of baiting birds for photographs, but that was what they did at every stop on this workshop.