An Excellent Addition

Yellow Crab Spider

As I wrote in my previous post, our first full day in Costa Rica was an unplanned addition and as such didn’t appear in the itinerary. However, it turned out to be an excellent, if surprising day.

We motored out of San Jose on the tour bus for about an hour before we turned off the main highway and down a rough track, stopping outside a house. We were met by the owner and ushered into the garden where we were to spend the day.

At first I admit I was sceptical about what was in store for us, but we were kept busy the whole day.

The owner of the house is a self-taught and exceptionally talented artist. He has set up the garden so that he can attract plenty of birds and animals to give him an unending supply of subject matter. In so doing, he has also created an environment that satisfied our needs as photographers.

The day was planned around certain set ups that saw each one of us have a number of 30 minute sessions. Whilst not doing a set up, we were in a hide next to a pond where there was a constant stream of birds to capture.

The first set up was for Hummingbirds and introduced us to the techniques involved in capturing sharp and well-lit images as the birds came into a flower. The main species here was the White-necked Jacobin, not altogether a surprise.

Running in parallel with this was another set up where we could get to grips with our macro technique. After all, macro was one of the main subjects for the trip. My first session involved an unusual, but very beautiful yellow Crab Spider. Ordinarily, I’m not a lover of spiders, but this trip introduced me to some beautiful specimens and I’ll look at spiders differently from now on.

A number of the birds we were seeing were the same as those we’d photographed in Trinidad and Tobago earlier in the year, but in my times between set ups I had a number of first sightings.

Outstanding among these were the Grey-necked Wood Rail, Collared Aracari, Orange-chinned Parakeet and the Chestnut-headed Oropendola.

With plenty of activity going on, it was a surprise how quickly lunchtime was reached. A delicious meal prepared by the house owner’s wife set us all up for an equally busy afternoon. There were more surprises to come.

After a time of carrying on the morning programme, we all climbed back on the bus and headed a mile or so down the road to a forest where there were known to be Crested Owls. Once there it didn’t take long to find them, but photographing them wasn’t going to be easy. It was naturally quite dark in the forest and we were somewhat distant from them. We needed 600mm focal lengths to reach them and with a requirement for a degree of flash, the Better Beamers were pressed into service. Even then I was shooting wide open at f/5.6 and an ISO of 6400 still only gave me 1/80th sec shutter speed.

Before we left the forest, our guide took a look around for some Honduran White Bats and to our great good fortune he found some. The final piece of luck we had was reserved until we were all boarding the bus. The guide had spotted a Slaty-tailed Trogon, deep in the forest and quite high up, but a notable sighting.

Arriving back at the house, there was still more to come and as we were preparing for the next set up, word went around that there was a young male Sloth in the tree above the house. Finding it was something of a challenge due to the vegetation and its proximity to the buildings, but two or three of the group managed to get a spot to take some pictures.

The rest of the group started to look around for a better vantage point and we were well rewarded. Further up the tree was an adult female and the gentleman who lived in the next-door house invited us into his garden to take our shots. From there we had an uninterrupted view as she climbed even higher up the tree. As she did so it slowly became apparent that she had a baby clinging on to her fur. We were enthralled for fully thirty minutes.

It’s fair to say that all members of the group had hopes of seeing a Sloth on this trip, but knowing the likelihood wasn’t that great. We weren’t due to travel to the area of the country where they are most prevalent. But to see three on our first full day was very special. We didn’t see any more.

Once this excitement was over, it was back to some more macro shooting and I ended my day with images of a Ghost Glass Frog and a Brown Leaf Katydid.

All too soon it was time to board the bus for the hour back to our hotel after what had been a very productive extra day. It was no surprise that evening that no-one decided to go out after dinner for more macro.