10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 12, 2019

Bird migration! Our big month of bird movements in Costa Rica, the 10th month of the year, is when most of the swallows, Scarlet Tanagers , thrushes, and other species on the South American express push through. The bulk of birds, though, move along the coast and through the northern lowlands. What do they eat?

Costa Rica 258

Costa Rica Nicaragua Birds Panama 258

10,000 Birds

APRIL 10, 2021

Birds are arriving in North America, flying from places far to the south. When birding in parks and woodlots of Ohio, Virginia, and Toronto, places with groves of maples and old craggy oaks, it can be hard to imagine that the Red-eyed Vireos of constant song were foraging for caterpillar larvae in rainforest just a few months earlier.

Costa Rica 259

Costa Rica Nicaragua Ohio Honduras 259

10,000 Birds

JULY 19, 2018

Birders follow different patterns of bird migration and their local activities and travel accordingly. It illustrates the bird richness per country. It divides countries into categories, where the next category has 200 more species. Shown as a list, it looks like this: Less than 200 bird species: Antarctica; oceanic islands.

Equatorial Guinea 190

Equatorial Guinea Costa Rica Guyana Central African Republic 190

10,000 Birds

JUNE 24, 2020

I had such a good time exploring the zone that I went back again the following week, something I rarely do, given that I have so many quality birding sites to choose from in my region. This sort of biozone mixing can create a tremendous richness of species. Each of these habitats attracts its own group of species.

Mexico 235

Mexico Lamb Nicaragua Sparrows 235

10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 15, 2018

A couple of the biggest of bird families are restricted to the Americas. Just about anywhere a birder ventures, the miniscule members of the latter family can be seen, and in most tropical locales, it’s not just one species. Purple and shining beryl adorn the males of this beautiful little bird. Costa Rica is no exception.

Costa Rica 209

Costa Rica Nicaragua Panama Honduras 209

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 3, 2019

“Target birds” The term can foster excitement but is easily contentious. It would be uber cool to lay eyes on a rare lifer, on species that only seem to live on the pages of a field guide but isn’t that somewhat discriminatory? Aren’t all birds worth watching? Looking for Bare-necked Umbrellabird ?

Costa Rica 202

Costa Rica Panama Birds Eagles 202

10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 15, 2022

and I am taking my observation-sofa position next to a glass wall, overlooking bird feeders in the misty cloudforests of the Cordillera de Talamanca. I met Serge five years ago, when he invited me to a mad bird race all the way from the Caribbean to the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. It is 6.40

Costa Rica 219

Costa Rica Panama Squirrels Nicaragua 219

10,000 Birds

MAY 30, 2015

There are lots of great birding sites in Costa Rica. In fact, go anywhere with a good amount of natural forest and the birding is gonna be good. However, there are a few stand out sites here and there that are significantly better for species like Jabiru, Lance-tailed Manakin, and Nicaraguan Grackle to name a few.

Costa Rica 173

Costa Rica Chile Nicaragua San Jose 173

10,000 Birds

APRIL 16, 2022

The birding in Costa Rica is always golden but some days, you really do strike gold. Go birding in the humid, moss decorated forests of the Caribbean slope and the feathered nugget might take the form of a Bare-necked Umbrellabird. Focus on birds in the southern Pacific region and treasure might be a Turquoise Cotinga.

Costa Rica 237

Costa Rica Fish Belize Nicaragua 237

10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 6, 2016

Birds know habitat. They don’t read treaties or draw maps or build walls and, as far as we can tell (since we can’t talk to birds, yet), they have no concept of political boundaries. Robert Gallardo’s self-published Guide to the Birds of Honduras came out in 2015, and is the first bird field guide dedicated to that country.

El Salvador 230

El Salvador America Costa Rica Honduras 230

10,000 Birds

JULY 30, 2014

The Steller’s Jay ( Cyanocitta stelleri ) is one of the ubiquitous birds seen at Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California. They are a non-migratory species found in western coniferous and mixed-coniferous forests, breeding from Alaska, western Canada, and the United States south through western Mexico to Nicaragua.

Nicaragua 171

Nicaragua Alaska United States Canada 171

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 6, 2016

Last weekend, I guided a trip to Laguna del Lagarto for the Birding Club of Costa Rica. Since all sorts of rare species are possible at this remote lowland rainforest site, I was looking forward to this trip for a while. Canopy birds like Blue Dacnis came down for a bite along with a dozen other species.

Costa Rica 124

Costa Rica Nicaragua Eagles Parrots 124

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 29, 2016

The proximity of both slopes also facilitates seeing a lot of different species in a short span because the montane barrier has resulted in differences in terms of species and habitats. But, if you want to go further afield, fear not, there is some wonderful lowland forest birding up near Nicaragua and down south by Panama as well.

Costa Rica 165

Costa Rica San Jose Panama Birds 165

10,000 Birds

JANUARY 10, 2015

Mountains are a boon for birding. Although marching up and down and up and down can be a literal pain, the feathered rewards come in the form of super cool local species that rarely or never make it down to lower elevations. Bird the high elevation habitats of the Talamancan Mountain Range and the regional endemics rule.

Costa Rica 150

Costa Rica Panama Nicaragua Honduras 150

10,000 Birds

JULY 23, 2016

Birders concerned with ticking off bird species from a list in North America already know all about the AOU Supplement. In this case, it augments and clarifies previous knowledge regarding the classification of the birds in North America.

Costa Rica 100

Costa Rica 2016 South America Panama 100

10,000 Birds

APRIL 1, 2017

Unless those non-birding folks happen to be duck hunters or love to go fishing, they tend to stay away from the marshes, the riparian zones, the bottom lands. See the birds? There are two main wetland areas in Costa Rica, one in the Tempisque River floodplain, and the other in wetland areas associated with Lake Nicaragua.

Costa Rica 100

Costa Rica Birds Ducks Pelicans 100

10,000 Birds

JULY 27, 2013

And while the birds that we in the western hemisphere refer to as blackbirds in their common names are from several different genera it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that if a bird is in the same genus as the North American meadowlarks that it would also be called a meadowlark. If only naming birds were so simple!

Blackbirds 166

Blackbirds Trinidad Costa Rica Nicaragua 166

10,000 Birds

MARCH 18, 2011

home about advertise archives birds conservation contact galleries links reviews subscribe Browse: Home / Birds / What is the National Bird of Honduras? What is the National Bird of Honduras? By Corey • March 18, 2011 • 1 comment Tweet Share The national bird of Honduras is the Scarlet Macaw.

Honduras 150

Honduras 2011 Deer Birds 150

10,000 Birds

MARCH 11, 2011

Which, naturally, got me to thinking about the newly erected order Suliformes, a development I mentioned in my December column, 2010′s Top 10 Developments in Bird Taxonomy and Systematics , but which I thought deserved further examination, for it’s one of those stories that defines the era in which we are living and birding.

2011 151

2011 Pelicans Papua New Guinea Birds 151

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 6, 2018

It actually makes a lot of sense, the geographic features of the isthmus between North America (including Mexico, because Mexico is part of North America) and South America cut across political lines, as do birds. It is the first bird field guide to every country of Central America (plus the islands governed by those countries).

America 212

America El Salvador Costa Rica Honduras 212

10,000 Birds

MARCH 11, 2011

And reports of birds nesting – not owls, of course, those weirdo snow fetishists, but other birds nesting – light up my life. Most exotics, at least in the bird world, stick close to their point of arrival and barely hang on – or don’t – over the generations. In 1998 W. And of Wyoming.

Montana 133

Montana 2011 New York Bahamas 133

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 27, 2021

I’ll be honest: As much as I enjoy writing for 10,000 Birds, there is an element of anxiety to the commitment. The rains have ended, the sun is back out, and new species arrive each week from up north. Every plant is blooming, and hummingbirds, our most colorful birds, are everywhere. Suddenly, it is mid-October.

Nicaragua 230

Nicaragua Mexico Guatemala Nashville 230

10,000 Birds

JULY 21, 2021

Of course, I also go there several other times each year; I have, after all, seen 160 species at this endemic-rich site. The reason for this annual pilgrimage is a single species, the Sinaloa Martin. All sightings southeast of the species’ Puerto Vallarta-to-Los Mochis breeding area are of migrating birds.

2016 260

2016 2015 Nicaragua Mexico 260

10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 4, 2018

And, for all our complaints about brown and gray plumages, gulls can be beautiful birds (well, some more beautiful than others, and Heermann’s Gull is one of my favorites, with one N at the end or two). In a birding world that celebrates identification, there are surprisingly few articles and books on gull identification.**

North America 195

North America America El Salvador Nicaragua 195

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 30, 2015

A recent comment thread on Facebook about absurdly high counts of some species in the eBird database got me curious. What is the most of any one species that has ever been reported at one time? Obviously, not all bird records have been reported to eBird. The most of any species ever reported is 76,000,000 Brown-headed Cowbirds.

Birds 161

Birds Louisiana Nicaragua Blackbirds 161

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 19, 2017

In Costa Rica, we don’t get many chances to chase birds. While we could chase a number of local, rare residents, looking for super tough species like Pheasant Cuckoo and Tawny-faced Quail is more akin to searching and lurking in appropriate habitat and just hoping to get lucky.

Costa Rica 100

Costa Rica San Jose Falcons Nicaragua 100

10,000 Birds

APRIL 28, 2018

In addition to Spanish, several other languages continue to be spoken, the pines and cypress trees of the Guatemalan highlands only occur as introduced species once you travel south of Nicaragua, and dozens of bird species that occur in Costa Rica and Panama don’t even make it to Nicaragua.

Costa Rica 113

Costa Rica Guatemala Birds Nicaragua 113

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 16, 2018

Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama make up Central America. Obviously, many (nearly all) of those birds exist outside that relatively small geographic area, up in to North America and down into South America. Species draswings are on the left leaf while descriptions and range maps on the left.

Antigua and Barbuda 114

Antigua and Barbuda El Salvador America Costa Rica 114

10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 5, 2011

But you are here for the birds. The curse of forest birding - a bird drought. Maybe the birds will come to you. They are the only birds able to fly backwards and the 340-odd species come in many different forms. Fantastic caterpillars, otherworldly insects, ghoulish spiders, tiny scattering creatures.

Colombia 279

Colombia Ecuador Bolivia Peru 279