Marsh Firetail

I photographed this Marsh Firetail (Telebasis digiticollis) along the pond at the Laguna Lagarto Lodge on 13 July 2017. Our tour walked along the edge of an incredibly muddy road. The good news was that the road allowed plenty of room for us to see and take pictures of most of the dragonflies we encountered.

Marsh Firetails are found from Mexico south to Venezuela. The species has been recorded since 2010 almost annually in Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, This damselfly is found in ponds and marshes, usually with dense vegetation. Unlike many other firetails, this one is not tied to floating vegetation. Young Marsh Firetails are often found in forest marshes. Deforestation and global warming are both potential threats to the species. Both threats would potentially dry the temporary wetlands where these firetails breed (IUC Red List).

Green Honeycreeper

Three species of honeycreepers flocked to the feeders at the Laguna del Lagarto lodge on 13 and 14 July 2017. All are small, bright tanagers. We also saw all three at other locations in Costa Rica, but the feeders at the lodge offered the best opportunities for photography.

The first of these birds is the Green Honeycreeper. The female is in the first photo, a male in the second. This species mostly eats fruit but also consumes insects and nectar. Like other honeycreepers, they can be found alone, or in pairs, often traveling in mixed species flocks through the forest canopy. Green Honeycreepers range from southern Mexico south across across much of northern South America. Although common where it is found, relatively little research is devoted to this species (Zamudio and Burns 2011).

Metallic Pennant

Metallic Pennans, Idiataphe cubensis, are found from Central America into central South America. One key feature to their identification is their dark coloration. In other species in the genus, males are often found near water. Females seldom approach water except when they lay eggs (https://www.biologie-seite.de/Biologie/Idiataphe)—so this individual is probably a male. I photographed it along the Laguna del Lagarto Lodge ponds on 13 July 2017.

Keel-billed Toucan

Keel-billed Toucans also fed at the Laguna del Lagarto lodge in mid-July 2017. Their bills are even more colorful than the Chestnut-mandibled Toucans in my last post. The Keel-billed Toucan seemed to be the slightly scarcer of the two. They have similar diets. Chestnut-mandibled Toucans often follow Keel-billeds to discover food supplies. Keel-billed Toucans range from southern Mexico south to northwestern Columbia and Venezuela. Both species suffer after deforestation.

Chestnut-mandibled Toucan

Chestnut-mandibled Toucans often descended on the Laguna del Lagarto Lodge’s bird feeders during our two-day stay in July 2017. The toucans ate fruit and, perhaps, fruit-eating insects. In the forest, toucans eat fruit, insects, lizards and frogs. They also use their huge bills to plunder eggs from long, hanging bird nests. As you cann see in the first photo, toucan bills can be dextrous tools.

This was not our first encounter with Chestnut-mandibled Toucans. We often saw and heard them in many locations in Costa Rica. Their call is described by Rice et. al (2010) as “yelping, far-carrying cry…Dios te De,” God Gives You. These crow-sized birds travel through forests in flocks of up to a dozen birds.

Chestnut-mandibled Toucans breed from Honduras south through western Ecuador. Similar birds, Black-mandibled Toucans, range from western Venezuela south through Peru. Ornithologists are still studying if these populations are one species or two.  If the populations are genetically similar, then the two go by the inclusive name of Yellow-throated Toucan.

Caribbean Yellowface

This Caribbean Yellowface flitted back and forth from its perch on a lily pad. When the damselfly flew, it kept low to the water surface. Erika and I found it in the lagoon at the base of the Laguna Lagarto Ecolodge in northern Costa Rica on 13 July 2017. Caribbean Yellowfaces are found from the southern tips of Florida and Texas south through the Greater Antilles, eastern Mexico, and the lowlands of Central America south to Venezuela.

Long-tailed Tyrant

Long-tailed Tyrants are flycatchers found from Honduras to much of northern South America. In this range, they are common but local. They require a stump with a nesting hole and nearby stingless bees. They flick their long tails up and down and fly out after their insect prey. A pair of these birds greeted us when we arrived at Costa Rica's Laguna del Lagarto Lodge on 12 July. They nested in a dead palm stump next to the hotel.

Amazon Sapphirewing

Looking through photographs of Costa Rican Odonata, the Amazon Sapphirewing (Zenithoptera fasciata) stands out as one spectacular dragonfly. All of us hoped we would encounter this species. On the morning of 13 July 2017 at the Laguna del Lagarto Lodge, we hiked up an incredibly muddy road along the lodge’s ponds. There we found sapphirewings. I regret that I did not spend more time chasing the sapphirewings. The male in the first photo perched quite some distance away in a marsh. The female in the second was much closer, on the roadside. I would have liked to get closer images of a male.

Later in the morning we took a hike in the jungle. We came upon another female sapphirewing deep within the forest. Dennis remarked that seeing a dragonfly with its wings splayed out in different directions was strange. Perhaps the dragonfly was moving oxygen through its wing trachea. Most dragonfly wings lack air passages, the wings being composed of non-living cuticle. Guillermo-Ferreira et al. (2017) discovered trachea within Zenithoptera wings. These authors surmise that the trachea in sapphirewings are needed to supply air to melanin-filled cuticle layers, which contribute to this dragonfly's unique structural coloration.

Black-and-white Hawk-Eagle

Among the King and Turkey vultures, flew a Black-and-White Hawk-Eagle. The hawk-eagle is probably a rarer sighting than the King Vulture, thus further cementing the Laguna del Lagarto lodge as my favorite place in Costa Rica. We only saw one once, on 13 July 2017.

Despite a large range from Mexico south to northern Argentina, this large raptor is poorly known—apparently only one nest has been documented (Tate 2012). These hawks soar, then dive on prey, which includes mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians.

King Vulture

The Laguna del Lagarto Lodge was my favorite location in Costa Rica. Anywhere with King Vultures soaring overhead vaults near to top spot! During our graduate research in Peru and Ecuador, we seldom saw King Vultures. In Ecuador we only occasionally saw them when we flew in small airplanes over undisturbed jungle.

Ornithologists argue if King Vultures were historically found in Florida. William Bartram described one from the St. John’s River in the 1770s. His painting is not quite accurate for a King Vulture, leading some to suspect it could have been simply a flight of Bartram’s imagination or a distinct subspecies. At least one other pioneering ornithologist, however, claimed to have seen this vulture, and several Native American artifacts depict what could be King Vultures (ABA Blog).

My seventh grade teacher and birding mentor, John Trott, believed that Bartram did not hallucinate his King Vulture record. He believed Bartram to be scrupulously honest. John pointed out that several Florida plant species became extinct after record freezes occurred in the region shortly after Bartram described the vulture. Perhaps the vulture, never common, met the same fate.

Update: an apparent King Vulture was photographed in Miami on 14 March 2018: https://ebird.org/view/checklist/S43649624. Zoos in south Florida do keep King Vultures, so the eBird record may be an escaped bird. On the other hand, the nearest wild King Vultures to south Florida are seen in the Yucatan, not that far (as the vulture flies).