big garden bird watch

A Passerini tanager with bright red rump on the bird table at a B&B in Sarapiqui north east Costa Rica.  The owner Alex, and his son are both brilliant bird guides.  Alex runs a green macaw project which pays the land owner who has a tree with green macaws nesting in it to not damage or destroy the tree (usually on farmland).  Within half an hour of arriving at his b&b we had seen a group of 10 green macaws in a tree opposite, 5% of the Costa Rican green macaw population!  They are beautiful birds, they flew away from the sun revealing brilliant golden underwings, they are such a mass of colours it is a shame they are just labelled "green" it's hard to believe they are real and wild.

Bananas and mangos out on the bird table attracted fantastic coloured birds, black and red Paserini's tanager, blue grey tanager, bright yellow orioles and bright green honeycreepers.  The national bird of costa rica however is the dullest bird in the country, the clay coloured robin, its on the bird table in the picture above.  The reason for it being the national bird is it's song but it's not even as good as a blackbird (in our opinion).

Blue grey tanager on the table

Our first baby sloth!!  At the end of the garden a retired german lady was looking after a baby sloth that had fallen out of a tree and not been recovered by its mother.  We visited it in its cot and then met it one morning when it was out for its morning toilet stop in the garden.

It snoozes all day and then rampages around the cot all night!

Visiting the sloth at home

We were over in this part of Costa Rica to visit Rara Avis (rare birds) a private nature reserve which is a small remnant forest oasis in the middle of  fields for grazing cattle.  It took 3 hours by tractor to get to the reserve, the road was too rough even for a normal 4 wheel drive vehicle.  We sat in the trailer with Hanneke a dutch girl and a local family who lived on a farm up near the reserve.  Amazingly the two little girls managed to sleep the whole way, while we had trouble staying on the seats!

Topo the tractor driver negotiates the narrow suspension bridge over the river

We passed this man on horseback wearing a chemical spraying napsack, oh and for some reason there was a JCB in the river too.

We passed through endless fields of grazing cattle which looked just like an English landscape, in the distance the original forest remained. No matter how badly maintained the road it seems there is always a shrine