Our day started with Freddy, the co-owner of Tina’s Casitas, knocking on our door at 6 AM to get us up for our early-morning birding tour. We headed straight to the cloud forest where we started looking for the much-sought after resplendent quetzal. We were one of several groups with guides looking for Costa Rica’s most famous bird. We saw several of them, and their magnificence made me understand the birders’ frenzy. Freddy is a skilled birder, able to make many calls, track birds and set up his scope is a couple of seconds, through which you can take pictures.

Our next stop was hummingbird feeders where we saw six varieties flying in and out of the area. They were beautiful iridescent green, purple and reddish colors and you could see their long tongues flicking in and out of the sugar water feeders. We then went to a new area where we saw a sloth high up in the tree sleeping for part of its requisite 20 hour a day nap, digesting his leaves, which takes 14 days! We saw lots of other eye-popping birds, at least 20 species in total. Many of them we certainly wouldn’t have seen without Freddy’s keen eyes. We also found a strangler fig which encases another tree and kills it. In this one the original tree had completely rotted out so you could stand in the middle and look up at the maze of killer vines.

The forest was much drier than we anticipated a “cloud” forest to be. (March is the dry season.) There were impatiens growing wild, lots of “Birds of Paradise” plants and other impressive flowers.

We had yummy pizza for dinner and then went back to the park for a nighttime tour. After dark the hummingbird feeders become a feasting zone for bats that equally enjoy sugar water. There are many plants in the rainforest that rely on bats for pollination and seed dispersal and our guide said that you can that plants that are growing in a straight line are ones that have been dispersed by bats as they simultaneously fly and poop.

We were also fortunate enough to see several birds sleeping in the trees. They are very cute, curled up as fuzz balls in the trees with just one foot sticking out, grasping tightly to a branch. We saw one other mammal, a kinkajou from the raccoon family, crawling around in the branches of a tree. We also saw a direct development frog that skips the tadpole stage, hatching as a frog from the egg (something Cynthia wrote about in her senior thesis), as well as two large orange-kneed tarantulas.

Birds that we saw this day:

Violet sabrewing
Purple-throated mountain gem
Green-crowned brilliant
Magnificent hummingbird
Emerald toucanet
Blue-Crowned motmot
Resplendent quetzal
Brown-hooded parrot
Orange-bellied trogon
Black guan
Black-breasted wood quail
Ruddy pigeon
Spotted woodcreeper
Masked tityra
Social flycatcher
Dusky-capped flycatcher
Great tailed grackle
Brown jay
Black-faced solitaire
Slaty-backed nightingale thrush
Mountain robin
Sooty robin
Clay-colored robin
Tennessee warbler
Yellow-winged vireo
Bananaquit
Blue-crowned chlorophonia
Blue-gray tanager
Grosbeak of some kind