There’s a big red rump hidden on this Scarlet-rumped Cacique
Birding Dominical: The Medium-Sized Birds
I was on a roll for a bit with the Costa Rica posts. Then a new law school semester started. And Republicans managed to snatch defeat from the hands of victory and lose control of the Senate. This was immediately followed by a bunch of crazy white folks invading the house of Congress while it was in session, trying to stop the certification of a fair election, chanting that the Vice President be hanged and murdering a police officer in the process. Days later, despicable-human-in-chief Donald Trump was impeached a second time. More importantly, he lost the ability to tweet, and an obnoxious ringing in many of our ears suddenly quit. During those remarkable 9 days (yes, all of that happened in the last 9 days), over 27,000 Americans died of COVID. In a perfectly on-brand response, Trump officials announced they were releasing vaccine doses from a stockpile reserve that didn’t exist.
2021 was supposed to be better than 2020. Ugh. All the nonsense and tragedy is more reason to daydream about tropical birds. Because what everyone needs right now is some amazing tropical birds. I’ve already covered the small birds and the big birds I saw at our amazing villa near Dominical, Costa Rica. In this post, I’ve got pictures of the medium-sized birds that moved through the property.
Streaked Flycatcher
I could bird all day, in swampy heat and falling rain and slippery mud, if there was a chance to see trogons and motmots. Trogons are like sedentary robins. Despite their size and colors, they tend to stay still in the forest for long periods of time, making them surprisingly difficult to spot. I managed to find two kinds of trogons on the property: Gartered Trogon and the deliciously-gray Slaty-tailed Trogon pictured below.
Slaty-tailed Trogon
Lesson’s Motmot
Like trogons, motmots are really good at not being seen despite their size and coloring. But one motmot habit makes them easier to spot than trogons. They have a tendency to wag their long tail feathers back-and-forth. That’s how I spotted the Lesson’s Motmot pictured above. It was perched deep inside a tree, and I would have walked right past without noticing it if it’s tail wasn’t moving like a pendulum. Check out the link for a video of a motmot wagging its tail.
There are a whole collection of birds in Costa Rica that are named after the ants they love to eat. There are antwrens, antbirds, and antshrikes. They mainly move through the understory, making them tough birds for good clean looks. I was able to identify a Dusky Antbird, a Chestnut-backed Antbird, and the Black-hooded Antshrike pictured above. The Black-hooded Antshrike was kind of enough to perch just above eye-level in bushes right alongside the trail I was walking. And while I found several trails of leaf-cutter ants on the property, I never found a big swarm of ant-eating birds.
Another new kind of bird I found in Costa Rica were the woodcreepers. They’re like woodpeckers, moving vertically up trunks. But instead of pecking holes in the trunks of trees, they eat insects off the trunks. Most of them are brown, and it’s hard to get clear looks at the heads, bills, and breasts that are the keys to distinguishing them. I saw 5 kinds of woodcreepers on the property: Long-tailed Woodcreeper (small size helps ID), Wedge-billed Woodcreeper (small size and small bill), Cocoa Woodcreeper (long straight bill), Black-striped Woodcreeper (large, bold streaking on upper back), and Streak-heeded Woodcreeper (medium-size, light streaks on head). Many of the views were binocular-only, through 30 feet of dense trees.
Lineated Woodpecker
Cocoa Woodcreeper
Long-tailed Woodcreeper
Squirrel Cuckoo
Let us not ignore the big red crest of the Lineated Woodpecker, or the amazing tail of the Squirrel Cuckoo. The abundance of amazingness of the birds is, even now, years after I lived it, hard to believe.
Black-hooded Tityra
Masked Tityra
Plain Xenops
Golden-naped Woodpecker
This post could be never-ending, there were so many birds. I managed to photograph a Plain Xenops (above), which is like a woodcreeper but without the long, stiff tail feathers used to work its way along the trunk. Both Black-hooded and Masked Tityra were regular visitors to the trees just off the porch. Parrots and parakeets of many colors were regulars as well, sometimes in flocks of 200 hundred.
I don’t know about you, but I feel better because of this post. Thank you, Costa Rica.
