Birding at the Beach in Costa Rica

It has been a nice and relaxing couple of weeks since i got back from the misery of Qatar. I went to the beach in the Caribbean and i saw some amazing birds and birding activity. Where we stay in just outside of a smnall town called Cahuita, and it is full of huge trees along the coast and i didnt realise that it is a major roosting site for the local vultures. Well you think a few vultures are nothing to shout about but the numbers of vultures was incredible. They would statrt arriving at around 4pm as it starts getting dark around 5.30pm and so the early ones would get their favourite spot obviously, including some large trees at the back of our hotel, called the Jaguar hotel. (Very cheap $25 a night, cold showers though)
They would arrive maybe 5 or 10 at a time but as it got later the numbers grew into hundreds at a time and i saw one flight of maybe 400 birds, one night i roughly counted around 1,400 vultures flying into here and that is a very large number of big birds. I spent a few hours every day checking out the birds and saw a new species for me nearly every day. I found a pair of small hawks called Double Tooth Hawks, very pretty birds they were just sitting about in the tall trees at the back of the hotel getting ready for the days hunting, i got out of bed really early one day maybe 5.30am. There was one bird i hunted the whole trip but couldn't find it only hear it. It had a wonderful warbling tune that went up and down in an almost sad lament. I was told by the hotel manager it was called a Bright Rumped Atilla, what a name. On the way back from the beach we stopped at a little cafe up in the mountians called Gorginas, not that the name matters but it is a typical little transport cafe, crazy self built architecture and insane toilets but they all have huge windows overlooking the mountains and at this point they are about 8000-10,000 foot high so pretty high, the reason we stopped here is they have a hummingbird observatory and you can eat your lunch while watching them have their typical territorial fights about who occupies the best looking feeding bottle, the nectar bottles were only 2 or 3 feet away from out plates and the birds were the most fantastic looking things i have seen for a long while. the most impressive looking one was the Fiery-Throated Hummingbird that when the light caught the colours right its chest burst into flames with a metallic red lustre along with a blue outline and all of these birds had a amazing metallic green body, The others were the magnificant hummingbird which does get into the lower USA states during the summer , there was also the Green Violet-ear, yes it has a violet ear patch that it can flap in display, very strange to see and the tiny Volcano Hummingbird which at about 2.5 grammes is probably the smallest hummingbird in the world. I will check the internet for that fact, according to wikipedia, the smallest is the Cuban Bee hummingbird at 1.8 grammes, isnt that insane, we all live and learn, isnt life wonderful sometimes,

Volcano Hummingbird



Fiery-Throated Hummingbird