Thursday, July 17, 2014

Day 4: Poás Volcano and La Paz Waterfall Gardens

Hi it's Ethan. Today we went to Poás, an active volcano located about an hour north of San Jose. Unfortunately, the rain was so bad that we made it to the crater, and couldn't see anything but mist. Despite the disappointment there, we were able to see several good birds, two of which still cannot be identified but we do have good photos to help us identify when we meet up with Rob Ripma tomorrow morning. From there, we went to La Paz Waterfall Gardens, after being stuck in traffic for over an hour. Upon arrival, we were greeted by a very friendly Coati:
 When we walked down to the area we were going to be eating at, we couldn't believe what we saw. The 8 hummingbird feeders located in the gardens attracted 10 species of hummingbirds and usually a bananaquit at any given time. It was like nothing we had ever seen! 30-40 individual birds were constantly buzzing around our heads and landing on our fingers. The species we saw were:

1. Violet Sabrewing
2. Green Violetear
3. Brown Violetear
4. Green Crowned Brilliant
5. Coppery Headed Emerald (our favorite)
6. Green Hermit
7. Black Bellied hummingbird
8. White Bellied Mountain Gem
9. Purple Throated Mountain Gem
10. Green Thorntail

This is what the feeders looked like at any given moment: (Video by Tyler)
Brown Violetear (photo by Tyler)
 Coppery Headed Emerald (photo by Tyler)
 Female Green Crowned Brilliant (photo by Tyler)
 Prong Billed Barbet (photo by Tyler)
 A Sooty Robin that was not happy to be in the rain (photo by Tyler)
 Female Green Thorntail (photo by Tyler)
 Violet Sabrewing (photo by Tyler)

After Viewing the hummingbirds, we went to the indoor aviary briefly to see if the rumors about being able to hold captive toucans was true... I think it was true! The keel-billed toucan we held was fiery friendly and weighed a lot less than we expected!

Ethan With Toucan
 Tyler With Toucan
 Josh With Tocan

 From there, we headed on to the waterfalls, it was a nice walk through the rainforest with a nice reward:


(this is actually not the biggest one there, the biggest was so big, Tyler couldn't get a good picture because his 300mm lens was too close!)


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