Top Ten Birds of Costa Rica: #1 Scarlet Macaw

The Scarlet Macaw Ara macao was an easy choice to crown my Top Ten Birds of Costa Rica. Large and extravagently coloured, their appearance on first sight is so striking as to challenge your perceptions of a wild bird - a real wake-up moment. Perhaps it's because we are so used to seeing Scarlet Macaws in captivity, or perched on some fictional pirate's shoulder, that it comes as a jolt to see them to see them flying around and interacting with each other like, well, any other bird. And let me say at the outset that they are neither bashful nor retiring when doing that. If they are in the vicinity then you will know about it.

Although widely distributed across the Amazon basin, Venezuela and Colombia, Scarlet Macaws have a more patchy presence in Central America. They are classed as being of 'least concern' in global conservation terms, but their numbers are declining nevertheless and the IUCN suggests that they are possibly extinct within areas of their former range in Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaraugua and Honduras. The last of these is potentially embarrassing, as they are the national bird. Capture for the pet trade remains a serious threat, as well as the more common problems of habitat loss and degradation. Within Costa Rica, my well-thumbed bird guide (Garrigues & Dean) highlights only three small areas of the country where they are likely to be found, all on the Pacific coast.

This was a worry. If the range of the species is so restricted, would we manage to track them down? But our guide Pat O'Donnell was quietly confident. And with good reason: they proved almost ridiculously easy to find. As I later discovered, Costa Rica is one of the best places in the Neotropics for Scarlet Macaw sightings - as the map of global records highlights (see GBIF).

Scarlet Macaw habitat - Beach Almond trees at Tarcoles

The small seaside village of Tarcoles lies almost mid-way along the main road down Costa Rica's Pacific coast. The nearby Tarcoles River signals the boundary between two of the country's major habitat zones, the dry north Pacific lowlands and the more humid lands to the south. The road bridge over the river is also the best place in the country to spot American Crocodiles, but that's one for another blog post. Driving south across the river, Pat turned off the main road and headed for the beach (Playa de Tarcoles). We pulled up on a rough gravelled parking area (photo above) flanked by a grove of Beach Almonds Terminalia catappa. This tree is a non-native species from India. It might not be an actual almond, but it is hugely favoured by Scarlet Macaws.  

We could hear their raucous calls as soon as we stepped out of the vehicle. A couple of birds flew north in a flash of colour, but the sounds were still coming so we set off to investigate. And there on the outside of the deep green foliage of a neraby tree I had my first proper sighting:

First sighting of a Scarlet Macaw - Tarcoles, Costa Rica

For such a colourful bird, Scarlet Macaws can blend into the canopy of a Beach Almond tree surprisingly well. There turned out to be two birds in this tree, and they both kept moving. Getting a good view of them both needed some patience ...

Scarlet Macaws blending in

... which finally paid off:

The two birds appeared to be a pair. At first sight, there is little obvious difference between male and female Scarlet Macaws, but these two stuck close together, paying each other plenty of attention in between detours to seek out the tree's fruits. There was much mutal preening - and more. It was difficult to tell whether they were trying to mate or having a fight - but then that's long standing relationships for you I guess.

Scarlet Macaws getting friendly

I found myself wondering why Scarlet Macaws are so insanely colourful; even within the notably gaudy parrot family the colour mix and brilliance of their plumage looks excessive. There are some useful pointers in a 2020 paper by Luisana Carballo and colleagues (see references below: link to paper here). This suggests that larger parrots living in warmer enviornments are the most colourful (Scarlet Macaws certainly tick both of those boxes), and that mutal mate choice and and social selection may be more powerful evolutionary factors than maintaining crypsis (i.e. camouflage). Getting the right mate is particularly important in long-lived species that sustain a pair bond over many years, especially when resources are scarce, such as the larger cavities that these big birds need to nest in. Bright colours may be seen to signal a stronger and fitter individual, and as both males and females are both being choosy, both sexes are therefore vibrantly coloured. Or that's the theory, at any rate.

But it sounds like it's on the right lines. As shown in some of my photos, just because Scarlet Macaws are brightly coloured, it doesn't follow that they are always conspicuous. The red, yellow and blue combination can act to break up the macaw's overall shape (an idea called "disruptive colouration"), possibly confusing potential predators when several are in flight together. And perhaps counter-intuitively this colour pattern can also make the birds harder to make out within the canopy of an evergreen forest tree, which is a mix of light, shade and various colours as these photos show.

And as always, the science merely adds to the wonder of meeting one of the world's top birds - a true wildlife highlight on which to end this short blog series. (Although there will be more from Costa Rica to come, I think.)

References

BirdLife International (2022). Ara macao. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2022: e.T22685563A163778999. [online] https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2022-2.RLTS.T22685563A163778999.en. 

Carballo, L., Delhey, K., Valcu, M. and Kempenaers, B. (2020). Body size and climate as predictors of plumage colouration and sexual dichromatism in parrots. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 33(11), pp.1543-1557.

Top Ten Birds of Costa Rica: #2 Snowcap

With its rich burgundy plumage topped by a shocking white crown, the Snowcap male is one of the most instantly recognisable hummingbirds of the Neotropics. So recognisable, in fact, that our guide Pat O'Donnell's description of himself when we first met at San Jose airport was: "look for the guy with the Snowcap t-shirt". We found him with no difficulty. 

Even within such a showy family as the hummingbirds, the Snowcap Microchera albocoronata stands out. No other hummer has the combination of a white cap and a body colour that varies from gold to bronze to burgundy to something best described as "beetroot" depending on how the light is shining on it. This is all down to the iridescent plumage of course, which itself is a function of the shape and position of pigment cells within the detailed stucture of the feathers. 

The result is - literally - breathtaking, producing in my case an involuntary gasp of excitement. We were returning from a morning's walk along the trails at Pocosol Biological Station, which had produced such delights as a Checker-throated Antwren and a close view of a Bicolored Antbird, and had just passed the accommodation building when Pat gestured urgently towards a small line of Porterweed bushes. There on the top, positively glistening in the morning sunshine, was my first Snowcap. And it was just as well that the bird is so easy to identify. Within a couple of seconds it had gone, chased away by the jealous and attentive Rufous-tailed Hummingbird that had laid claim to this precious source of nectar. Rufous-tailed hummers are bullies! 

Unfortunately, the sighting had been so brief that my birding companion Richard missed it. To make matters worse, the Snowcap failed to reappear despite much searching. As all birders will know, it is intensely frustrating when you have failed to spot a bird that the others have seen, and when that bird is as sensational as a Snowcap it can all get a bit awkward. Despite putting a brave face on it, Richard was clearly put out. And while I could be excused a bit of smugness about being in the right place at the right time to "tick" the bird, what I really wanted was a more leisurely encounter, and, ideally, the opportunity to take a few photographs. But Pat decided to rise to the challenge. Finding another Snowcap became a top priority. 

The Snowcap is a hummingbird of the Caribbean slopes, ranging from Honduras in the north to Panama in the south. Like many Costa Rican species it is fussy about altitude. At around 720 metres above sea level, Pocosol is near the upper limit of its range, while it is rarely located below 300 metres, although this may be because so much of Costa Rica's lowland rainforest has been destroyed. Fortunately Pat has

literally written the book about where to watch birds in Costa Rica (link here), plus a useful blog about Costa Rica's best Snowcap-finding locations, so there could be few better people to steer us towards another one.

We succeeded a couple of days later at Centro Manu, a small family reserve lower down the Caribbean slope near Guapiles. It didn't look hopeful at first: we arrived in a torrential downpour and had to take shelter in reception building.

A wet afternoon at Centro Manu reserve

When the rain eased off, we decided to explore the reserve's small network of trails. These were very wet indeed - wellies were essential - and the forest was quiet. It seemed as if the arrival of rain in the later afternoon had prompted the local birdlife to simply shut up shop early for the night. All quite dispiriting. But on returning to reception, Pat was not so easily discouraged. "We'll just try the hummingbird garden while there's still light," he announced. The rain was still lightly spotting as we headed down the track, with - it must be said - low expectations.

Centro Manu - the hummingbird garden

The hummingbird garden (above) turned out to be a forest clearing containing a variety of small flowering shrubs. There didn't seem to be much activity, but we stationed ourselves at a suitable vantage-point and waited. And a hummingbird duly arrived, albeit a Rufous-tailed hummer which began to patrol the bushes in a typically defensive manner. This didn't bode well.

Rufous-tailed Hummingbird (from Pocosol) - a bit of a bully!

A couple of Montezuma's Oropendolas flapped overhead, and a Blue-chested Hummingbird made a brief appearance high in a nearby tree. This was good, but still not what we were really after.

And then, as in all of the best stories, we hit success. Weirdly, two male Snowcaps arrived almost simulataneously. One popped up high in the tree where we'd seen the Blue-chested; I called out "Snowcap!", while simultanteously Richard said the same thing. I assumed at first that we were both looking at the same bird, but then discovered that he had spotted one down on the Porterweed bushes. This second bird then perched very obligingly on a bush at the opposite side of the clearing, and I was able to advance some distance towards it brandishing my Canon, which I'd put on a suitably high ISO setting. I didn't want to disturb the bird by getting too close, but even from where I was standing, its colours seemed to light up the gloomy evening.

Snowcap - Centro Manu reserve

Fittingly, it was the final bird of the day. We drove away from Centro Manu into the gathering darkness and made our way back to our base for the night at La Quinta de Sarapiqui. It was our last full day on Costa Rica's Caribbean slope, but further adventures awaited over the mountains on the Pacific coast.

And it is there that we shall meet my final choice for the Top Ten Birds of Costa Rica. 

  

Top Ten Birds of Costa Rica: #3 Resplendent Quetzal

For many, the Resplendent Quetzal Pharomachrus mocinno is the poster bird for Costa Rican eco-tourism, the undoubted number one. Clad in vivid, metallic green plumage with an unfeasibly long tail dangling below, the male quetzal is high on the tick list of tourists and birders alike. And it's a more dramatic bird than my dodgy photograph (above) might suggest, although the sight of this luminous male glimpsed through a gap in the foliage was an exciting moment. 

While Costa Rica may be the best place to see one, the Resplendent Quetzal occurs along the spine of Central America from the south of Mexico to western Panama. In Guatemala it has given its name to the national currency, the story being that in the days of Mayan civilisation its tail feathers were used as money. The quetzal is a bird of high elevation rainforests, generally found above 900m (3,000 feet). It can turn up in suitable forests all along Costa Rica's central mountain chain, including the well-known Monteverde reserve, but is perhaps best searched for in the south of the country - and where else but the Parque Nacional Los Quetzales?

Or nearby, at any rate. Our first quetzal encounter was in the neighbouring Dota Valley, an area that I introduced in my Collared Redstart blog (link here). We were walking on a trail across the valley from Miriam's Quetzals restaurant (a hopeful sign!), when our guide Pat O'Donnell (link to his website here) heard a quetzal calling - a sound with more than a hint of car alarm in it. Pat responded with an impressively accurate response and the bird moved slightly closer, allowing us to get a distant glimpse through the intervening leaves. I snapped a few record photographs before it flew: and with some misgivings, I've included one of these below. Bear in mind that this was the best of a bad bunch. It serves as a salutary reminder that birding in tropical forests can be difficult, and good views of birds can never be guaranteed. It makes it all the sweeter when it happens, of course.

Spot the quetzal! Terrible record photo of our first sighting.

Although we were pleased to see one, our first quetzal encounter was a bit underwhelming. That's the problem with building up expectations. However, there was better to come. While birding along the unsurfaced road that drops steeply down to Providencia (see the Collared Redstart blog), and within the national park this time, we heard several quetzals calling. As was usually the case, it was Pat who located the bird - another male - perched high in an oak tree on a slope below the road. The trees here were festooned with epiphytes (plants growing on other plants), with lichens, ferns and bromeliads adding to the vegetative clutter of the canopy. But we found a gap through the dense wall of foliage and here's a view (below) showing a bit more of the bird.

Resplendent Quetzal - PN Los Quetzales, Costa Rica

This picture gives a better idea of the length of the tail, although strictly it is the upper tail coverts that are elongated. What is less obvious is the bird's red belly, which provides a shocking contrast to the dominant green. To my eyes the head has a slightly reptilian look to it, perhaps belying the bird's ancestry, a trait that unites all five quetzal species. (This is especially evident in the Golden-headed Quetzal from South America, photographed in Ecuador back in 2014 (below), which lacks the crest that softens the outline of its Central American cousin.)

Golden-headed Quetzal - Angel Paz reserve, Ecuador (2014)

Quetzals are trogons, albeit unusual ones. Unlike motmots and toucans, which are confined to the Neotropics, the trogon family has a pan-tropical distribution. Although they have comparatively weak flight and poor dispersal abilities, trogos also pop up in Africa, the Americas and the Indo-Malay tropics, but not Australia. Quetzals, however, are uniquely restricted to the Neotropics. 

Research has been done on trogon phylogeny (essentially their family tree) based on DNA evidence, which suggests an American - and specifically Central American - origin to the family (Moyle, 2005; Dacosta and Klicka, 2008). This would require these somewhat non-mobile birds to have crossed the Atlantic at some point, possibly through North America and over a land bridge: a‘high latitude dispersal event’ as Moore puts it. Which begs the question as to whether suitable conditions have ever existed to enable this movement. Could some weird trans-Atlantic rafting have happened instead? It seems unlikely, but such journeys have probably occurred for some plant and reptile species. 

Despite its fame, the Resplendent Quetzal is a conservation concern, being classed as 'near threatened' by the IUCN. The main threat, as with so many species, is habitat loss, although this is less of a problem in Costa Rica's protected forests. Direct exploitation for its fabulous plumes may be decreasing, but a new concern has arisen from the range expansion of Keel-billed Toucans. The toucans compete for nest holes and can even prey on the nests of quetzals. Resolving the competing demands of two charismatic species can be a real headache for conservation land managers!

Keel-billed Toucan - competing with the Resplendent Quetzal for nest sites

Right - two more birds to go. What could possibly beat the Resplendent Quetzal? Wait and see.

References:

BirdLife International. 2023. Pharomachrus mocinno. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2023: e.T22682727A221577625. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2023-1.RLTS.T22682727A221577625.en.

DaCosta, J.M. and Klicka, J. (2008). ‘The Great American Interchange in birds: a phylogenetic perspective with the genus Trogon.’  Molecular Ecology, 17(5), pp.1328-1343.

Moyle, R.G. (2005). ‘Phylogeny and biogeographical history of Trogoniformes, a pantropical bird order.’  Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 84(4), pp.725-738.

  

Top Ten Birds of Costa Rica: #4 White-collared Manakin

Manakins are some of the most characterful birds of the Neotropics, so to exclude them from my Top Ten list would be unforgivable. There are a few Costa Rican species to choose from, but I'm going for the White-collared Manakin Manacus candei, which is a real charmer. These small, fruit-eating birds (there's a photo of one grappling with a seed below) are found in lower level tropical forests below 900 metres (3,000 feet) altitude. Within Costa Rica, they are restricted to the lowlands and foothills on the Caribbean side of the central mountain chain, being "replaced" in the southern Pacific lowlands by the Orange-collared Manakin. The two species were previously grouped together, despite clear differences in the male plumage (the clue's in their names!). However, while the Orange-collared Manakin is endemic to Costa Rica and western Panama, its White-collared cousin has a more extensive distribution, and is found up the Central American isthmus as far as Mexico. 

White-collared Manakin getting to grips with a rainforest seed or fruit.

All of the photos in this blog post are of a male bird. Within the family as a whole, which contains some fifty species, the males are the showy ones with a dazzling range of colours - yellows, reds, blues, oranges and more. Females are generally more subdued, with a palette of dull greens and browns.  As a result, identifying female manakins of different species can be tricky. Such a colour discepancy between the sexes (the technical term is sexual dichromatism) provides a hint aboout their respective life strategies: males display to attact females and mate, but do very little else, while it is the females that make the nest, incubate the eggs and feed the young. No comment!

Mind you, the males put a lot of effort into enticing a mate. The White-collared Manakin has a neat courtship dance which we were able to observe easily at Tirimbina biological reserve (website link here) because the male concerned was displaying next to the main entrance path. His stage was an area of forest floor, which he had partially cleared, dotted with a number of conspicuous vertical stems. Perching on a low branch, he made a loud buzzing sound followed by dramatic pops or snaps like the sound of a breaking twig. These are produced by vibrating the wings; making mechanical noises in addition to their vocalisations is a key manakin trait. (Have a look at this video showing the extraordinary display and sound of Ecuador's Club-winged Manakin, for example.)

Every now and again our male would fly sideways to sit at the base of another stem and repeat the process, sometimes zipping back and forth rapidly between perches. The following two pictures were an attempt to capture some manakin movement.

White-collared Manakin - ready for launch

White-collared Manakin - airborne

(Apologies for the quality of the second image. The light was poor and the bird moved fast.) 

We watched entranced, as the busy male buzzed from side to side. It wasn't obvious whether his efforts were being appreciated, although we had seen a female earlier nearby - an olive-green bird with vibrant orange legs - so her presence may have prompted the show. But the females can sometimes be hard to spot during the courtship process until they make their selection. 

The White-collared Manakin's dance is spectacular, and worthy of being filmed - something that didn't occur to me at the time (but we had more birds to find of course!). However, there are a number of examples available online - such as this short YouTube video by Arnon Dattner from another forest reserve in Costa Rica. Enjoy, with the sound on.

I have watched manakins displaying in other Neotropical forests, including the closely-related White-bearded Manakin at the Asa Wright reserve on Trinidad.  In that case, a number of manakins had gathered at the lek site, although they weren't particularly mobile. ("Lek" is a name given to both the place where males come to display and the displaying process itself.) But at Tirimbina, our White-collared Manakin male seemed to have the stage to himself. I'm hoping that his efforts weren't in vain.

It's good to know that neither White-collared Manakins nor their Orange-collared cousins are considered to be threatened, being classed as "least concern" by the IUCN, even though - as with many other bird species - their overall numbers are decreasing. Habitat protection is the key to their survival, and the future of both species within Costa Rica is likely to remain secure if places like Tirimbina continue to thrive. Of course that raises the thorny issue of how to balance the benefits of eco-tourism, which gives such reserves an economic justification, against the contribution of long-distance flights to climate change. But that's a discussion for another time.

Right - just three birds to go. What will be in the top three? And which bird merits the number one spot?