After taking a break from Hainer showing us life birds, we decided to bird the entrance road all the way back to the main road, as directed by "The Dude" in his top knotch blog, Costa Rica Living and Birding. Although this is not really the deep forest that much of La Selva offers, it was very birdy nonetheless, even mid-afternoon. After we birded the road and had our second round of puttering around the cafeteria and drinking coffee, a vulture kettle appeared low over the treetops that contained a couple of birds I was dying to see on the trip...King Vultures.
King Vulture is one of those birds I've always known about, but are so exotic and blatantly facemelting that it was hard to reconcile that I was finally seeing them. They threw out the traditional, semi-shitty way I view vultures and made me have to completely rethink the entire family.
The birds made multiple low passes over us, leaving us with the cliche "soul-satisfying" views that birders are always going on and on about. Look at that face!
While we would go on to see King Vultures at several other locations, none of those looks approached anything like what these La Selva birds gave us.
We identified this as a Rufous Mourner at the time, which I still think it is...
...although the larger Rufous Piha looks almost identical. Still a very cool and cooperative bird, with hilariously small feet.
Rufous-tailed Jacamar, another amazing tropical bird. I really had a chance to crush this species better but it was so damn humid that I literally could not see through my glasses for quite a while (let alone my camera), no matter how many times I tried to wipe them down. There were 3 jacamars all hanging out next to the road, calling and flycatching, and I just could not get my shit together. Sigh. I like this picture at least.
Chestnut-sided Warblers are everywhere in Costa Rica, including puddles in roads.
A Crested Guan impresses the tourists next to the cafeteria. I did not expect them to be so tame...I may or may not have sharted with glee at this point.
Paltry Tyrannulet is another ultra-abundant Costa Rican bird. They are ubiquitous, and superficially similar to an astounding number of other birds. Note the cicada on the left, and the white egg sack thing on the branch.
Mmmmmm....delicous egg sack thing.
And life goes on for the Paltry Tyrannulet.
We saw plenty of Ruddy Ground-Doves. Their abundance does not hide their good looks. All photos today were from La Selva Biological Station.