Hi Tweeters,

Last month my husband Bill and I spent about 18 days in
Costa Rica birding the areas south and then north of the central valley
around San Jose. During the first part we birded in high mountains of Cerro
de la Muerte, then lower at San Isidro (including Los Cusingos, which was
Alexander Skutch?s home), Wilson Biological Station, and finally the far
south near Panama at an ecolodge called Esquinas Rain Forest Lodge right
near the Oso Peninsula. In the second part, we birded northern Costa Rica,
getting rained on and cold near the Poas Volcano, warming up again at a
resort in Ca?o Negro, close to Nicaragua, then more rain at Arenal Volcano
Observatory. Our last full day we drove to Guanacaste to escape the rain
and got a few birds in that area. It was a wonderful trip overall.

The link below gets you to the Flickr album of the birds we
got pictures of. I have arranged the pictures according to where we saw
them with a title picture in front of each grouping. Overall we saw about
400 species and we have pictures of over half of them. Bill is the main
photographer and I filled in some of the gaps.



https://www.flickr.com/photos/29258421 at N07/albums/72157664508785766



Aside from the birds I also took pictures of butterflies and
if you?re curious you can have a look at these too. As you probably know
Costa Rica has a large number of bird species relative to its size due to
its location between two major continents, being on a migration route, and
also because of the various habitats and elevations in the country. Costa
Rica is also home to a large number of butterflies relative to its size. I
only photographed about 30 species of these, however, so there are far fewer
photos
. The link below takes you to that album.



https://www.flickr.com/photos/29258421 at N07/albums/72157662189799534



In the past sharp-eyed viewers have found mistakes in our
identification of the birds. We welcome any corrections you care to make.



Good birding, Charlotte Byers, Seattle