Tag Archives: Wildlife

Day 9 – Bijagua to Fortuna

Monday 27 February 2023 – All we had to do today was to get ourselves from Bijagua to our next stop, La Finca Lodge near La Fortuna, a two-hour drive roughly back towards San José in the centre of the country.

We achieved this without problems but not without distractions, mainly in the form of new birds to see on the feeders at Casitas Tenorio before we left.

Collared Aracari (member of Toucan family)

Collared Aracari close up

Not sure – LBJ (little brown job)

White-throated Magpie Jay

(Those with a keen eye will notice that the nice folk at Easily, who host my website, have managed to sort out the problem that made it impossible for me to upload photos and videos, which cramps one’s style as a blog writer somewhat.)

Jane also managed to get a great video of the Montezuma Oropendola’s extraordinary call, which is accompanied by a unique display.

A coati got in on the action, too.

and Nana, the manager, fed the pizza that we couldn’t finish to the B&B’s dogs, Whisky and Dingo.

We were on the point of leaving when Nana’s husband pointed out a very unusual critter on one of the table ornaments.

He opined that it was an ogre-faced spider, but a swift Google search disabused us of that notion. We showed this picture to a chap who was described to us as a professional naturalist who initially had no idea what it was. Eventually, he thought it might be a leaf-mimic katydid. Whatever, it’s a weird beast.

We took our leave of Casitas Tenorio, which had been a very well-organised and pleasant place to stay and started the drive over to La Finca Lodge. The roads were basically fine, with good surfaces, which made the whole thing more relaxing. The countryside was very pleasant, and Jane grabbed some shots of it as we went by.

One thing we noticed as we drove along, that marks Costa Rica out to us from pretty much anywhere else we’ve visited is something that I hadn’t explicitly clocked until Scott, the American chap on our tour last night, pointed it out.

The place is immaculate.

There is no litter. None.

Coming from the UK, where paths and roads are littered with burger boxes, nitro gas canisters and Red Bull cans, I find this extraordinary. The buildings may on occasion be ramshackle, but the place is spotless.

I wish the UK could find this sense of civic pride.

Our plan had been to visit, and indeed have lunch at, the Observatory Lodge in the park of the Arenal Volcano, which is one of Costa Rica’s better-known features. It was dormant until 1968, when it erupted dramatically and unexpectedly, destroying the small town of Tabacón. Arenal’s eruption from 1968 to 2010 is the tenth longest duration volcanic eruption on Earth since 1750. Since 2010, though, it has been dormant, which makes visiting the area slightly less daunting.

What was daunting, however, was the surface of the road that Waze suggested was the route to the lodge, which was something of a detour from the direct route to La Finca. It was rough, boulder-strewn and cratered. We managed to do about half a kilometre before deciding that life was too short to endure any more. So we turned round and resumed our journey to La Finca. As we approached, we saw the countryside dotted with vividly-coloured trees.

We subsequently found out that this is called Corteza Amarilla, and we were exceedingly lucky to see its display, as it flowers like this for just one week every year.

Waze took us towards La Finca with unerring accuracy but its directions left us halted outside a large and rather forbidding-looking metal gate. We weren’t sure (a) whether it was an entrance to La Finca or (b) what to do about getting in if it was. At that point, a car coming in the opposite direction stopped and its driver wound down his window, so I did the same. He asked, in really quite good English, if he could help and we said we were looking for La Finca. He confirmed it was, and did some magic which opened the gate for us. We have no idea who he was or how come he could work this magic, but we were very grateful anyway.

We drove in and were greeted very cordially at their reception and shown to our room, which was called Gecko. It was a very nice, large room

with, to Jane’s delight, a hammock on the veranda. She lost no time in getting acquainted with it whilst I ~~had a well-earned kip~~ started backing up, selecting and processing photos for this blog. Whilst she was resting out there, she had a small visitor, a humming bird of some description.

Come 6 o’clock we headed over to La Finca’s restaurant, where we had a very decent evening meal. We also met Esteban, the founder and owner of the place, a charismatic, knowledgeable and slightly roguish man. As part of our Pura Aventura itinerary, we could choose between various options for the following day – a float along the river spotting wildlife, hiking around a park with many waterfalls, a visit to the Arenal Observatory Lodge, a trip to see the Hanging Bridges of La Fortuna, and so on. Esteban was clearly very clued-up about the benefits of each and helped us make our selection. We decided on the Arenal trip and an afternoon on the hanging bridges. The Arenal Observatory Lodge is in the volcano’s national park and features various trails and significant opportunity to see – you guessed it – wildlife. This meant an early start the next day to give us the best chance to spot it, in the company of a very knowledgeable guide (the chap we puzzled with our katydid photo).

We agreed that the time to start was (sigh) 0730, so we headed back to our Gecko room after dinner with an intention to get an early night, which was only slightly spoiled by my staying up rather too long creating some of the deathless prose that you will already have read. You have, haven’t you? Good.

So, tune in tomorrow to see (a) whether we got up in time on the morrow and ( b) whether we had a good day. Spoiler alert: we did.

Day (and Night) 8 – Still in Bijagua

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Sunday 26 February 2023 – The lack of an appallingly early start to the day backfired on us slightly. According to the B&B information in the room, breakfast was served until 0930. But when we turned up at the lodge at 0915 it became clear that the service had only been until 0900. Nonetheless, Michele, the assistant manager, sweet talked the cook into rustling up a bit of scrambled egg and toast for us, which was very forbearing of them, and so we had a decent breakfast after all.

After that, we actually had a free morning, so I had plenty of time to sit down and update these pages, which sounds fine, but in fact there was a continual distraction as new birds came to the feeders nearby – the buff-throated saltator, for example

and the yellow-throated euphonia.

and so the morning passed peacefully enough until it was time for our first scheduled activity of the day – a cookery class. Now, those of you who know me will be well aware that I am to cooking as David Cameron is to Brexit. But I went along and tried to join in as best I could. Actually, it was an engaging three hours in the company of the Casitas manager, Nana, and her daughter Camilla, spent at the house of Vicki and Marcelino. Vicki is an expert cook of many years’ experience, a pillar of the local community, who is well established as someone who gives demonstrations of cooking traditional Costa Rican dishes. It being Sunday lunchtime, Marcelino honoured the local tradition by watching the football whilst we congregated in the kitchen and were directed by Vicki in the preparation of various materials.

Left to right above – Vicki, Camilla, Jane (stirring it as usual), Nana.

Vicki and Marcelino’s house is of a very traditional kind and they were happy for me to take photos of their very nicely turned-out dwelling – Lounge, kitchen and garden spaces.

It was interesting to note that the room walls don’t actually rise to meet the ceiling, so the house is more of a partitioned space than a dwelling with separate rooms. There is a mix of traditional and modern appliances – an old wood-fired stove next to an electric cooker (and a large LED TV so Marcelino could watch the footie).

Anyone who knows me will also understand my attitude to sharing photos of food, so I won’t be doing any of that on these pages, thank you very much. But it was interesting to see someone with Vicki’s skill at work, and one or two things – such as searing banana leaves in which to wrap tamales – were techniques that I’d never come across before.

The group (yes, including me) prepared tamales, empanadas and tortillas. Yes, we ate some of them as well. Jane practised her Spanish, and Nana translated for Vicki and Camilla and also told us about some of the traditions of life and cooking in that region of Costa Rica – for there are aspects of food preparation that are unique to the area, just as there are aspects that separate those of Costa Rica and Nicaragua and the other central American countries. It was a pleasant, if dietetically challenging, way of passing three hours, and Jane and I left feeling very full indeed.

We just about had time for a cup of tea before another ripple of excitement passed through the B&B, because another sloth had been spotted! So we hastened down to the lodge to take a look and to try for some more photos.

It was a three-toed sloth. For all the sloth’s reputation for sluggishness, this one moved quite swiftly. Every time we thought we’d got a decent angle of view, all we had to do was look away for a second and all of a sudden it had moved to a different place. Eventually it moved to where we could no longer see it, but it was nice to have encountered another one.

Then it was time to go out for the other planned activity for the day – a night visit to the Tapir Valley Nature Reserve. So off we went along the now-familiar stretch of road to the reserve, where a small number of people were gathered for their evening and night walk around the trails. Abner, our guide from yesterday, was there, as was another guide, called David, who looked after Jane and me and an American couple called Lisa and Scott. As before, we were equipped with boots, and, this time also, torches to light our way.

It was clear that David was very passionate about the mission of the reserve as he spent quite a lot of time explaining some of the background to what the reserve is trying to achieve. He also set our expectations by pointing out that it was dry season (i.e. not raining much), and so there would be fewer animals around to see. We did find a few, though: a coati, snuffling around for bugs;

a nightjar, just sitting on the path and not minding a bunch of people shining torches at it;

a couple of red-eyed tree frogs;

what David called a Sergeant Bird, actually Cherrie’s Tanager, hiding away in the reeds;

and miscellaneous other frogs,

so not really a bonanza of wildlife spotting, not that it was something that was under anyone’s control. To me it was miraculous what David was able to spot. I was more worried about tripping up and falling face first into a pile of tapir shit, frankly.

On that topic, David was able to demonstrate the seed-spreading effect of the tapir, by showing us a pile of faeces out of which several trees were starting to grow.

as well as samples of the fruit of the tree that they share that special relationship with, the Parmentiera Valerii (commonly name the Jicaro Danto tree). Thanks are due to Jane, who has spent quite a lot of time chasing down the exact name of this tree.

These samples were at the reception area of the reserve to which we’d returned after over three hours’ tramping (and often squelching) around the reserve. We were about to take our leave when David got a call on his radio from Donald, the founder of the reserve, to say that he’d located a couple of tapirs, and they were quite close by. So we rushed out to find them. it was a female (a daughter of Mamita of the previous day) and an as yet un-named male, and they were presumed to be courting. I even managed to get a couple of pictures of one of them (the male I think)

and you can tell that it had just caught wind of us. But it didn’t seem perturbed by our presence, and after a while we left the two of them to get on with their nocturnal foraging, and headed back to the reception to take our leave from David and the reserve.

So, once again we’d been lucky enough to catch sight of the tapirs, which made the evening’s exercise a very satisfactory activity.

Today was our last day in Bijagua; tomorrow we head a couple of hours south, for two nights at La Fortuna and, doubtless, further adventures, quite probably involving wildlife, so I hope you come back to find out what was in store for us.

Day 7 (morning) – Tapir Valley Nature Reserve

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Saturday 25 February 2023 – Travelling offers experiences that are rich, rewarding and fulfilling.

Getting up at 0345 is not among them.

However, a deal is a deal, we’d agreed that a morning hike was Just The Thing as part of our Bijagua experience, and anyway we’d paid for it. So an 0345 alarm call was necessary in order for us to present ourselves at the entrance to the Tapir Valley Nature Reserve at 0520 having attended to our toilette and eaten the rudimentary breakfast that the Casitas management had thoughtfully provided for us the day before. But first we had to try to get some sleep. Apart from anything else it sounded like a major storm blew all night, with heavy winds and lashing rain on the corrugated iron roof of our Casita. Despite the racket and at least one outside light mysteriously turning itself on and equally mysteriously off again during the night, we managed to get under way in reasonable order.

Finding the Tapir Valley Nature Reserve turned out to be slightly less than straightforward. You might think that such a thing would be advertised or signposted from the road.

It isn’t.

We relied on instructions from Pura Aventura, which directed us to look for green gates on the right hand side, and Waze to give us a clue as to exactly where they were. We arrived there pretty much bang on at 0520 and

nothing.

Just darkness and padlocked green gates. We had a few “Bay of Fundy” moments, wondering if something, somewhere had gone pear-shaped in the arrangements before, to our relief, a chap on a motorcycle turned up with the means of opening the padlocked gates.

The motorcyclist turned out to be Abner, who was to be our guide for the morning hike.

(He, by the way, was the expert who identified for us the Groove-billed Ani that we saw yesterday.) He equipped us with wellies – something the nature reserve insists on because it mitigates the spread of unwelcome parasites into the ecosystem of the Nature Reserve. Said ecosystem also pretty muddy in places, so this also saves on your own footwear.

The Tapir Valley Nature Reserve is a private nature reserve, covering some 114 hectares of primary and secondary rainforest, and is dedicated to ecosystem development. A group of concerned citizens purchased the land over ten years ago with the vision of protecting valuable rainforest habitat for many animals, including the endangered Baird’s Tapir.

The prime purpose of our hike was birdwatching (early morning being the best time to see them). We explained to Abner that we weren’t avid birdwatchers but we weren’t averse to looking for large colourful ones (as opposed to the LBJs – little brown jobs – that send twitchers into paroxysms of ecstasy). So seeing that Li’l Abner was toting a scope didn’t at first set my mind at rest, since I was after stuff you could photograph, not something that needed a scope to see. In the event, the scope wasn’t needed, except that a couple of times it enabled Abner to identify a bird before pointing it out to us. He was kind enough to use the scope to get a photo for me on my mobile phone

which was kind of him, but didn’t really produce the results I would want. That bird, by the way is a Montezuma Oropendula, and I did get a good photo of it later, in case you were worried. It has the most extraordinary call.

Steve Walker · Montezuma Oropendula

I should be clear at this point that the morning was what the Irish might call “soft”

which doesn’t ease the process of spotting birds. Nor does the birds’ rather annoying habit of being largely difficult to distinguish from the abundant foliage of this basically forested area.

That’s a Crested Guan, by the way. Also, many of them can only be seen at a great distance. For example, there is a toucan in this picture. Really, there is.

Look carefully and you can make out a Kill Bill Toucan.

OK, OK, it’s really called a Keel-billed Toucan, but where’s the fun in that?

So Abner’s ability to spot and identify birds under these circumstances was rather handy. You can therefore imagine that I was a bit worried that I was going to come away with very few worthwhile photos. However, the good folk at the Nature Reserve had a trick or two up their sleeve. There are a couple of comfortable bird watching platforms set up

with bird feeding stations located nearby.

which give great opportunities for close up viewing – and, importantly for me, photographing – the various species of birds which come to feed:

Yellow-throated Toucan;

Montezuma Oropendula;

Black-cheeked Woodpecker;

and Costa Rica’s national bird, the Clay-coloured Thrush

The good folks at the Nature Reserve had also provided us with some refreshment, which gave Abner a break whilst we clicked and videoed away.

Some extra entertainment was available in the shape of a coatimundi (also called just a coati in this part of the world) fossicking around the bird feeding stations for any scraps that might be available.

;

As we left this station, the weather had cheered up a bit and the wetland area of the Nature Reserve looked really rather attractive.

We visited another birdwatching platform and I was able to take some photos of flowers where a humming bird had been just instants before. And as we walked around the reserve, we also saw an Eyelash Palm Pitviper.

It really is there, tightly wrapped in a ball, and fast asleep.

We would never have spotted it, but Abner knew it was there. And we saw a pair of Great Curassows.

All of this was wonderful, and it was great to have had the chance to see these birds and capture some nice photos. But I’ve told the story of the morning a bit out of sequence to keep for you the best, most surprising and loveliest moment of the day, which actually happened quite early on.

At one point, Abner stopped in his tracks in surprise at this scene.

What, you may ask, is so surprising?

There’s a tapir in it. Oh, yes there is.

You might think “so what – you’re in the Tapir Valley Reserve”, but actually we were really, really lucky, since tapirs are nocturnal. We were able to get closer and closer and finally got some great video. To see one in the daytime is extremely unusual.

To see two, however, was special – a mother with her 8-month-old calf. Tapirs are a species that relatively little is known about. They are ancient, having migrated into South America during the Pleistocene epoch from North America after the formation of the Isthmus of Panama as part of the Great American Interchange. Their nearest genetic relations are, unintuitively, the horse and the rhino. The reserve is important in its ability to gather information about the lifecycle and habits of this remarkable creature. You can see that Mamita is wearing a collar; this is a GPS tag so that her movements can be followed and mapped out with a view to gain deeper insight.

One of the activities the Reserve is carrying out is research into the relationship between the tapirs and a tree, Parmentiera Valerii. The tapir is one of the only animals which can eat the tough cucumber-like fruit of this tree and thence distribute its seeds through defecation. The trails around the nature reserve are frequently dotted with piles of tapir faeces, to the extent that one really has to watch one’s step.

Abner gave us one final treat, which was to see the strange nests of the Montezuma Oropendula. This bird gets part of its name from the fact that its nests are suspended below the branches of trees, and en route back to our B&B after the great morning at the reserve, Abner showed us a tree with the nests.

Here they are in close-up.

So ended a remarkable morning. Once again we’d been really lucky and seen something unusual. But our day wasn’t over yet – come back to the next entry to see what we did with the afternoon!