Hotel Bougainvillea March 10-12
Costa Rica is often the first destination for birders that want to see South American birds. With over 900 bird species reported in this very small country it is easy to see why it is a popular destination for birders. Many week long birding tours see a few hundred species and 21 day tours can see 500-600! Tours allow you not to worry about anything but they are also very expensive. I was hoping to spend half of what a tour for both of us would cost. After 3 years of chasing numbers with the Big Years I was not interested in quantity, and rushing from place to place in an effort to see as many birds as possible. I wanted quality birding. I wanted to immerse ourselves in the country, in the birding. So instead of just booking a tour I made up one for us, loosely based off a 21 day tour but staying longer at lodges and missing some areas of the country. I booked the best known birding lodges for 2-3 days each knowing that we would have guides to help us and then I found birding spots to stop at on travel days between the lodges. I wanted things to be relaxed, so there would be time for birding walks each morning, breakfast at the lodge and then a 2.5-4 hours drive to the next destination with a birding stop or two along the way. That sounded heavenly compared to our Big Year birding with 10-12 hours drives between places.
Car rentals were not easy to figure out – many comments on Costa Rica Travel FB sites warned me of the extra insurance that is often not mentioned in the first booking and you find the price doubles when you pick up your vehicle because of this mandatory Costa Rican insurance. Jerry had booked something and we found out that the cheap price would indeed double on pickup due to the insurance not mentioned and so we canceled and looked for something else.
I found a car from Costa Rica 4×4 Car Rentals with profits going to the Wet Nose Dog Rescue. We are not dog people as many of you know but we are always keen to give back to the local community when we travel rather than the big corporations. Who am I kidding? It was way cheaper! That is the real reason! The cars, however, are 10-20 years old which made me a bit nervous (a lot nervous actually) having never owned a car older than 7 years. But, I figured worse case we could always find another car if something happened. Look at me, being all Pura Vida! before the trip even!
Once things were all booked we focused on familiarizing ourselves with as many of the birds as we could. We spent many evenings going through the illustrated checklist for Costa Rica on ebird and looking at photos, listening to calls and then trying to remember names the next day. Slowly, we became a bit more familiar with a number of the birds we hoped to see.
And suddenly, it was time to pack our bags and head to Toronto…
Our Air Canada flight landed at 10:45 pm in San Jose. We cleared immigration and customs in minutes, the advantage to arriving late at night. I had read stories on FB about people taking 3 hours to get through immigration!! We met Adrian with our car, an 11 year old Toyota Rav 4×4 right outside the airport and signed documents, paid and were on our way to the hotel 20 minutes away. The ride was quick but with no street signs we just turned when Waze told us to and for the most part the streets were empty of people and cars making it a pretty easy drive.
We heard our first two birds of the trip when we checked in just after midnight. Ferruginous Pygmy Owl and Common Pauraque were calling on the hotel grounds but neither of those birds were lifers having seen and heard them in Texas years ago. We fell asleep quickly but I woke up at 4:30 to the strange calls of a bird and just had to put Merlin on to find out it was our first lifer, a Clay-coloured Thrush, which is also Costa Rica’s national bird. Not one of the fantastically coloured birds but this rather drab looking bird with a fantastic, powerful song.
We tried to go back to sleep for a bit and were up again and dressed by 5:30 to head out into the garden that was full of bird sound. It was overwhelming to see and hear birds we had not seen before. I used Merlin to give us the heads up about what was possibly singing and we used that to search out and confirm our identifications. We were surprised by how many we did recognize from all our memory work before the trip. We met a couple from Guelph and we worked on some ID’s together and then passed each other numerous times over the next couple of hours.
Hotel Bougainvillea is a known hot spot for birders and often the chosen destination to start any Costa Rica trip. It has 10 acres of gardens and water features that host a few hundred species of birds. They are not all there all the time obviously but we hoped to use this time to get familiar with the common species. After leaving the drabness of Ontario in March the gardens were a feast for our eyes!
We quickly had lifer Red-billed Pigeon, Social Flycatcher, Melodious Blackbird, Rufous-backed Wren, Crimson-fronted Parakeet, White-fronted Amazon, Hoffmann’s Woodpecker, Cabanis’s Wren, Rufous-tailed Hummingbird and Gray-headed Chachalaca. The bird I had really hoped to see was a Mottled Owl that roosts in the huge bamboo near the pool but despite usually being seen, it was not found that first day. We heard a very sweet song in one corner of the garden, Merlin ID’d it as a Rufous-browed Peppershrike. We listened and kept listening trying to zero in on where the bird was, Heather and Greg from Guelph joined us. Eventually Heather saw it in a different tree but the rest of us did not get on it as it quickly disappeared. We added it to our lifer list because we had actively heard it singing for a significant amount of time and I hope that we will get a chance to see it.
By 7:15 we were starving, our dinner on the plane was hummus and crackers so we were ready to fuel up but it was super hard to leave the birds and take the time to eat. The buffet was included in our stay and gave us our first taste of the famous Costa Rican Gallo Pinto, which is basically rice and beans mixed with onion, peppers and cilantro. The breakfast was yummy and we chowed down quickly and then dressed down as it had gotten quite warm and headed back to the gardens.
We had missed seeing a Lesson’s Motmot the first session and we ended up having the experience of the day with one after. I had spotted the first one on a shaded path right above Jerry’s head but the second one was out in the open and this one showed us the wonderful “swinging” of its tail before flying off the branch directly at us and landing on the grass near our feet for the briefest of seconds, (long enough to pick up an insect) and flying back to another branch. I was in awe of the brilliant turquoise colour. Just stunning.
Things were starting to slow down, there were less calls and song as the temperature soared to 27C. By 11:30 we decided to take a break. We wanted to grab some beer and snacks from the supermarket a 10 minute walk away so we did that in the hottest part of the day. After a refreshing cold beer and some chips we took a much needed nap.
We headed back out around 3:30 but things didn’t pick up until 4:30-5:00. We added a couple of lifers, Lineated Woodpecker and White-tailed Kite. We did find 2 more Lesson’s Motmots in the front garden that gave us great views and video. Dusk was coming and night happens swiftly here so we went to shower and dress for dinner.
We were up again just after 4am not being able to sleep more and caught up with more pics and the blog notes before heading downstairs for 5:30. The Mottled Owl we missed yesterday was the bird I most wanted. We headed for the bamboo stand right away and the maintenance staff came out to help us look and quickly found the owl right by the path and in clear view. It was still quite dark but Jerry managed to lighten things on his camera and my phone camera did a decent job considering the low light.
The next agenda item was to see the Peppershrike we heard yesterday but could not find. We heard it sing within minutes but again could not find it before it flew away and sang again from the adjacent property.
We added a few more lifers, Boat-billed Flycatcher and Orange-chinned Parakeet and had better views of some of the other birds. A really good morning and by 7:30 we headed in to have breakfast excited to head out to our next destination.
I am glad we decided to stay at Hotel Bougainvillea, it was a nice beginning to our trip, the grounds and gardens always hold new surprises each day. It is a gated hotel with security on the street 24/7. The rooms were comfy, the food was delicious and the staff very friendly. Jerry lost a camera battery on the grounds and a British birder picked it up and gave it to the front desk so when we asked on the off- chance it had been found the staff were happy to hand it back to him. It is popular and can be pricey if you have to take a more expensive room, as we did, so I can understand why people might hesitate to stay and in our case we paid for a “night” that we were only there from midnight on. I would probably skip this on a return trip and find something cheaper and closer to the airport before heading to other destinations. But it was a great introduction to some of the birds. We opted to stay at the much cheaper Holiday Inn right beside the airport the night before our flight back.
Hotel Bougainvillea – We saw 43 species of birds with 24 of them Lifers