Today’s blog post is a bit of a laundry list. I’ve been meaning to post something about Costa Rica for a while now, but the trip was pretty big and diverse. Frankly, I mostly took pictures of critters and didn’t do to much tourist photography. I need to get better at that again.

So, in the interest of sharing *something*, I decided to share the critter photos, location by location.

Tortuguero

Our first stop was Tortuguero. It is a rain forest. It rained. A. Lot. Most of our activities were along the canals in open boats so we spent a lot of time wet. My rain gear earned it’s keep on this leg of the trip. So did the weather sealing on my Nikon cameras.

Besides the rain, we saw more species of birds in a few days than I think I have in any other year of my life. I saw most of the species I recognize from Texas and a ton of others. I didn’t necessarily get photos of each of them though. We also saw bats, caiman, crocodiles and various lizards.

I didn’t even put pictures of every singly thing we saw in… There were so many things.

 

The only real disappointment (ignoring the constant rain) was not getting a good view of a sloth. The only view we got was from a distance and hidden in trees.

Manuel Antonio

Manuel Antonio was an unscheduled stop on our trip. We were suppose to white water raft into a lodge in the mountains, but unusually heavy rain was causing flooding. Instead, we ended up at a luxury boutique hotel. It was nice, but not our type of place.

Manuel Antonio National Park was crowded and a bit of a disappointment, but the grounds around the hotel were a huge win. We were at Hotel Gaia. They host a captive Scarlet Macaw breeding program trying to reestablish the locally extinct Scarlet Macaws.

There happened to be a release of juveniles the day we arrived. Eight or ten scarlet macaws were hanging around the grounds the entire time we were there.

There were a host of other birds on the grounds too include numerous toucans and their cousins and other small birds.

We ventured into the national park one afternoon. Despite the crowds we still saw some good stuff. My favorite was the Potoo. We also saw monkey’s and a sloth who wasn’t in a position to be photographed. Sigh…

Uvita

We stayed at a small eco-lodge outside Uvita. We had a private “tent” that was really a cloth house. The lodge’s grounds were beautiful and full of life. We were left to our own devices to explore, which is just how we like it.

A Tanager