One of the most popular things to do on your Costa Rica holidays has got to be bird watching due to the fact that the country has one of the best rain forest in the world. One of the best places for bird watching is Hacienda Baru which is located at the Southern Pacific coast of Costa Rica where the natural rainforest, wetlands and pristine beaches can be found blending together in perfect harmony.
A Costa Rica bird watching trip is a dream come true for many nature lovers, even if you are not really one, spending some time alone with our spouse in the natural surroundings of the rain forest will do a lot of good for your relationship. Costa Rica rainforest with its diverse and unspoiled habitat boasts of having close to 900 species of birds and many of them can only be found in Costa Rica or the Central America region.
The best way to go bird watching is to stay overnight in one of the forest lodges and you will probably need a guide preferably bi-lingual one so that he or she can describe to you about the different species of birds that you will expect to see in different parts of the rainforest. A typical itinerary for bird watchers will be to take a hike early in the morning together with your guide to one of the bird watching towers in the forest. The watch tower comes in 2 decks (lower and upper) and the upper deck would give you a tree top view and it’s great for spotting kiskadees, toucans, vireos and many others. The most famous species of birds in Costa Rica is non other then the famed Resplendent Quetzal which can be found in the Monteverde Cloud Forest. The male Quetzal has beautiful emerald green feathers with a striking Mohawk and red underbelly and breast. Watching birds at the tower can be time consuming but a rewarding experience and this usually takes a few hours to fully cover the many different species of birds there. From there, the guide will usually take you to one of the homes in the forest where they serve authentic Costa Rican food which you do not want to miss. After the sumptuous lunch, you would usually head to the river or wetlands where you would see the water birds such as Petrels, jaegers, gulls, egrets, herons, ibis and maybe even the elusive osprey if you’re lucky.
Apart from Hacienda Baru, there’re many other wonderful places in Costa Rica for bird watching or birding for short. At the top of the list is the Carara National Park which is about 2 hours away from San Jose. This is a great place to watch the colourful macaws in full flight. However you need to be there early in the morning because that’s when the macaws arrive. Next on the list if the La Selva Biological station where it’s home to almost 300 odd species of birds. In order to get to La Selva, you would normally go through the city of Puerto Viejo which is just a few miles away.
Another great place for birding is the Cano Negro Wildlife Refuge which is known to be a major nesting place for aquatic birds. The Jabira storks which is one of the largest of its kind can be found here. If you are interested in birding along the coast to look for migratory birds in flight, there’s no better place to do this than Aviarios del Caribe which is about 3 hours drive from San Jose. For the less adventurous, you can visit Wilson Botanical Garden which is home to thousands of plants, flowers and of course birds (more than 300 species to be more precise) with hummingbirds and tanagers being the most common species found here. At the end of your holiday here if there is one memory that you want to keep forever is the picture of the beautiful and diverse wild life that you encountered on your bird watching trip in the country.