Date: December 2017
Location: Cahuita, Costa Rica
Camera Settings: ISO 100 – F/10 – 1/125
This little bird was flying low over fields of overgrown crops in Cahuita. I knew from its beak that it was a seedeater of some kind but originally confused it with a type of tanager. Black and yellow colours are so common in Central America that it’s hard to distinguish species sometimes unless you get a look at the bird perched in side profile – just like this.
Date: May 2018
Location: Monteverde, Costa Rica
Camera Settings: ISO 800 – F/6.3 – 1/200
In the damp cloud forests of Monteverde endemic species of humming birds are ten-a-penny. Although they’re very tricky to spot unless you hover by the visitor centre where they come to land on special nectar feeders. I’d love to say that photographing them in manmade surrounds takes a little of the magic away but these birds are such petite, unusual oil slicks of beauty that they really do look stunning anywhere.
Date: December 2017
Location: Cahuita, Costa Rica
Camera Settings: IS0 200 – F/5.6 – 1/40
A huge toucan just metres from the hiking path in Cahuita National Park. As close as I was going to come to the perfect ‘money shot’. The rustles in the trees were so loud at first that we assumed it was a howler or capuchin monkey but then came the flash of red and the yellow bill. Unmistakable.
Date: December 2017
Location: Cahuita, Costa Rica
Camera Settings: ISO 100 – F/7.1 – 1/80.
Every time I looked up in Costa Rica I saw some kind of wildlife in the canopy. Although its yellow and grey resident birds were slightly harder to spot. Movement or a flash of their yellow bellies gave them away. This king bird was perched at the edge of a field in Cahuita, a town on the Carribean Coast, blending in perfectly with its surroundings.
Date: December 2017
Location: Cahuita, Costa Rica
Camera Settings: ISO 400 – F/7.1 – 1/160.
This heron was one of my first sightings on Cahuita’s National Park Trail on the east coast of Costa Rica. The surroundings look wild but in fact it was perched only a few hundred metres from the town’s bars and restaurants, just behind the warden’s shack. A regular phenomenon in the country that I came to know as ‘Costa Rica Birding’.
The Casual Birder 