Category: Hotels-Lodges

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BIRDS of Playa Cativo

There are a lot of both land and water birds at this rainforest beach lodge, and even though it didn’t give my highest count of birds, it is good! My favorite was the Red-capped Manakin which has been very difficult to photograph in other places and was easy here! 🙂

Though no “lifers” (first-time seen birds), it should no longer be expected for someone who has already photographed over 358 species of birds in Costa Rica. 🙂 Below are photos of 25 different birds of 23 species. Two of these species have male and female so different they look like different birds, thus a photo of each! 🙂 I saw more birds than this but have no useable photos of the others.

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Boat-billed Heron on Esquinas River, Parque Nacional Piedras Blancas, Costa Rica.

After my previous trip (Chachagua Rainforest Hotel) I did a separate post on each bird and decided not to do that this time. Enjoy the one photo of each species now and later I will have multiple shots of each in my trip gallery.

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Jungle waterfall

Jungle Waterfall, Playa Cativo Lodge, Piedras Blancas National Park, Costa Rica.

My birthday morning was sunny with lots of birds singing and the Howler Monkeys closer than they were the previous morning! 🙂 The monkeys serve as the roosters to wake you at 5 am when you’re in the rainforest. After a great breakfast I walked the half-kilometer all uphill to the waterfall closest to the lodge. It is left natural as it would be if no humans were around, thus vegetation hides part of the upper falls and a tree fell in the lower falls and they will let nature take its course, as the tree will eventually rot and be washed away, but now the only human “improvements” are the trail to get there and that could use some more improvement! 🙂 (I will include photos of the trail in my trip gallery later.)

Note that in the above photo you can partly see the upper falls while in the next two from the bottom, it is mostly hidden by vegetation.

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Bottle-nosed Dolphin

Every morning has been free of rain in the rainforest so far with the usual afternoon and evening rainy season rains that are great for sleeping at night! 🙂

This morning I had switched my planned morning hike in the mountains after learning how steep the trail is to a boat trip up Esquinas River and the Mangrove Forest for birds and maybe other wildlife. The highlight ended up being a group of about 5 Bottlenose Dolphins which are a little different from the Spotted Dolphins I’ve seen at Drake Bay and Uvita. They are “friendly” and followed our boat part of the way back to the lodge. 🙂

Bottle-nosed Dolphin, Golfo Dulce, Costa Rica.

And five more shots . . .

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Red-capped Manakins

I’ve seen this bird in only 2 other places (Maquenque Ecolodge & Corcovado National Park) and they were skittish and difficult to photograph, while here they were all around my cabin and in just 2 days I’ve had many opportunities to photograph several of them, like a big Manakin family or village! 🙂 I did not see any of them do their courtship dance, this time, the Michael Jackson moon walk shuffle across a limb, like I saw in Corcovado NP, but there were plenty in the trees to photograph.

Red-capped Manakin, Playa Cativo Lodge, Golfo Dulce, Costa Rica

Read about the Red-capped Manakin at that eBird link or see more of my photos of them in my Red-capped Manakin Gallery. It’s another cool bird found only in Central America! 🙂 Here’s a slide show of 6 of my shots . . .

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Goodnight from a Rainforest

Dark, damp, misting rain with no sunset as such but a trace of color as I eat my dinner at Playa Cativo overlooking the Gulf of Dulce on the Pacific coast of southern Costa Rica, while north of us Hurricane Bonnie is rushing across northern Costa Rica and Nicaragua and the handful of us here are thankful it didn’t veer south! 🙂

I saw and did a lot the first afternoon, but too tired to curate more photos now, so this rainforest report begins with a dark sky that will surely brighten as the week goes by. If not raining, I go on my birding hike at 5:30 in the morning and I got a head start with two pretty good photos today in the low light of a Great Curassow and a Scarlet-rumped Tanager.

And Of course I already like this place! 🙂 Later I’ll tell you about my beachside cabin and share photos from this nature-rich forest.

¡Pura Vida!

Playa Cativo Lodge Website

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Guava Skipper

My second time to see this colorful butterfly was almost two weeks ago (yeah, I’m writing posts way ahead again, but will do it live daily on my trip in July). It was after breakfast, walking in my garden, when I found him. The Guava Skipper, Phocides polybius (Wikipedia link) is found from South Texas through Mexico and all of Central America down to Argentina. My only other time to see one was at Xandari Resort Alajuela for my birthday in 2019. Those photos plus these here can be seen in my Guava Skipper Gallery.

The one at Xandari was bluer than this one which is darker or close to black. And it is interesting that most of my butterfly photos at home show them on a Porterweed flower even though I have many other flowers. An obvious preference for butterflies and hummingbirds! 🙂 And by the way, they are called “Guava” because they lay their eggs on a Guava Plant, which is somewhere between a shrub and a small tropical tree. 🙂

Guava Skipper, Atenas, Costa Rica

Now here’s six shots in a slideshow for a change . . .

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Misc. Wildlife

I’ve already done so many posts with photos from Chachagua Rainforest that I decided to lump these miscellaneous “other wildlife” together, especially since most are not great quality photos. Note that I saw Agoutis and Coatis but they were shyer of people there and thus no photos. Below is a gallery of 10 photos of 9 different animals with 2 shots of the fish with front-end and back-end in different shots! 🙂 So those receiving email notice will start with at least one photo, here’s an unusual spider you might like . . .

Unidentified Spider
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Two Basilisks

Everyone prefers the Emerald Basilisk, sometimes called Green Basilisk, but the Brown Basilisk is seen just about as much even with his better camouflage. 🙂 In these photos, the Emerald is an adult male with the head crest while the brown without a crest could be either a juvenile or a female. Both are found all over Costa Rica, especially near water. Note that both have a tail longer than the body. And both are sometimes called “Jesus Christ Lizards” because they walk on water (or run).

Emerald Basilisk, Chachagua Rainforest Hotel, Costa Rica.
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“Upside-down Yogi” (Sloth)

This Brown-throated Three-toed Sloth (Wikipedia link) was in this Guarumo or Cecropia Tree long enough for multiple efforts to photograph it, though in the shadows or no good light, at Chachagua Rainforest Hotel grounds. A peaceful creature! 🙂 In a peaceful place! 🙂

Brown-throated Three-toed Sloth, Chachagua Rainforest Hotel, Costa Rica

“The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. A good-natured smile is forever on its lips…I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, looking up at a sloth in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of scientific probing.”

― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

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