When we originally planned to visit Costa Rica in March of 2020, we decided to make it a five-day, four-night affair. That trip had us landing in San Jose on day one; traveling to Tortuguero National Park on day two; coming back to San Jose on day four; and going home on day five. Since it took us two and a half years after that time to finally make it to the land of Pura Vida, we decided to reward ourselves with an extra day. I know...we are absolutely wild and crazy sometimes with our vacations.
Finding something to do for a day in Costa Rica seemed like a simple proposition. When we started planning that extra day, maybe it wasn't so simple. You know how much stuff there is to do in Costa Rica? Plenty. And that's way understating the situation and all of it seems to be absolutely incredible. We looked pretty much everywhere in the country and any of it probably would have been a great extra day to the trip.
But there were issues with some of our ideas. Arenal? Already been to volcanoes elsewhere. Braulio Carillo? Looking for something other than just birds. Manuel Antonio? Way too far. Monteverde? Also too far. Not way too far but too far, especially considering we just came back from Tortuguero. Stay in San Jose? Not exciting enough. Sure, we needed something close to San Jose but also clearly different than Tortuguero.
After a lot of looking (and I do mean a LOT), we settled on Carara National Park, an area of primary and second growth rainforest about 30 miles west and south of San Jose towards the Pacific Ocean that was established as a national park in the late 1970s. There are pockets of Costa Rica with just unbelievable biodiversity and Carara is certainly one of those. It's a relatively small place (it's about 1/6th the size of Tortuguero National Park) but holds over 400 different species of birds, including its star resident, the scarlet macaw. And truthfully, we really, really wanted to see some scarlet macaws.
The big scarlet macaw in the cover photo of this post doesn't count. We wanted the real thing.
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| Welcome to the jungle. The Carara National Park rainforest. |
In addition to its potential as a major birding destination, Carara National Park is bordered on the north side by the Tarcoles River, a body of water that runs from the capital city of San Jose all the way to the Pacific. Around Carara, the Tarcoles is notable as the home of the greatest collection of crocodiles in Costa Rica. We figured a walk in the rainforest followed by a trip down the Tarcoles to spot some crocs seemed like a pretty good day out.
Close to San Jose? More than birds? Walking and getting on a boat? Costa Rican lunch after the tour? Check. Check. Check. And check. Carara was the place.
We sometimes have some crazy expectations for our days on vacation, especially when it comes to wildlife. I know, I know...we should know better. But surprisingly (and admittedly I'd read ahead about Carara and knew there was a possibility of the toucan sighting that had to this point eluded me on this trip), we did actually keep our sights within the range of reasonable possibility on this trip. I thought I'd be OK with scarlet macaws and some crocodiles. It seemed like a rational and perfectly attainable expectation.
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| Golden orb spider (top) and some sort of millipede (bottom). Carara National Park. |
I know I have said this before but I'll say it again. Never, ever, ever expect nature to be predictable or behave the way you expect. Dying to see a specific type of bird or reptile or animal in a particular place? Keep your expectations very, very low. Wild creatures are not here for your amusement. They are living their lives likely in constant peril from some sorts of danger every day. If we expected to see crocodiles or macaws, there was absolutely no guarantee of success here.
We got to Carara at about 8:30 in the morning. Maybe a touch before that time. Our boat trip on the Tarcoles was a 10:30 departure or something like that. That meant (complicated math here, I know...) that we had two hours to see what we had to see in Carara and make it to the river.
Now 8:30 may seem early, particularly because it's a two hour drive from San Jose, but by 8:30, the odds are most species of birds are probably already inactive. The best time to see birds, whether it's at home where we live or anywhere else in the world, is first thing in the morning. Like sunrise. Or maybe even a bit before. Our 8:30 arrival time was late. For birds. We hoped it wouldn't be too late.
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| Poison dart frog (different than the ones we saw in Tortuguero) and leaf cutter ants (difficult to see, I realize). |
Let me say this: the life we saw in Carara was just incredible. Whether it was the vines wrapped around trees climbing to the forest canopy or spiders or poison dart frogs, there was something to look at everywhere. We were right there in the middle of a jungle with living things all around us.
Many of these things that made up the life were really pretty small or really, really massive. Insects. Amphibians. Arachnids. Giant trees with enormous leaves to suck up every bit of sun (read: life) that can penetrate down to the floor of the forest. There wasn't a lot in between these two extremes. And honestly, we were sort of looking for the in between.
Although there was certainly a lot of joy in at least one of the tiniest forest residents.
I wrote in my Tortuguero post that I didn't come to Costa Rica with a species wish list, but if I had, leaf cutter ants would surely have been on this list. And they were everywhere in Carara, walking down trees or across the path we were walking with pieces of leaf representing many times the body weight of the ant itself on their backs. We had seen a leaf cutter ant nest in Tortuguero and witnessed a troop of ants transporting leaf fragments on our night excursion to see turtles, but this was the first time we managed to stop and watch worker ants obediently transport leaves back to the queen under the watchful eyes of massive soldier ants. I feel really fortunate that we got to see this. I'm sure it's common in Costa Rica but not so much for me in everyday life.
But about 90 minutes into our visit to Carara National Park, the lack of birdlife was getting to be a little concerning.
So sure, there were clearly birds in Carara. We heard them everywhere, including those scarlet macaws. But after an hour and a half of walking and with my clothes now soaked from sweat (I sweat heavily in hot, humid environments, what can I say?), the best bird looks we had were a single cinnamon becard (above, top) and three buff-rumped warblers (above, bottom). I love birds and I'd never seen either of these things before, but we did not come to Carara to see little brown or brown-and-yellow birds, even if the warblers were perpetually engaged in some butt-shaking mating dance with their buff-colored rumps.
If there was anything to exacerbate this concern (and there was, by the way) it was the enthusiasm coming from our naturalist guide, Rigo, about what we had seen so far. I was a bit concerned that he'd be OK settling for the looks at the small birds we had in the Park before moving onto the river. Rigo, to his credit, was enthusiastic about seeing pretty much everything.
And that's when it happened.
If my memory is correct, I believe we were looking at some monkeys in the canopy which we hoped were something other than spider monkeys (we'd already seen plenty of these...) when we looked up into the trees in front of us and spotted a pair of scarlet macaws. This is what we came to see. Forget whatever else was around, these two birds became our sole focus.
I used the word "we" a couple of sentences ago but it was really my eagle-eyed wife who has a knack for spotting wildlife who came through again in Carara.
Yes, these two photographs are incredibly similar. And yes, they are both washed out with the light shining through the leaves of the trees. Neither is the best bird photograph I have ever taken in my life. But this is why we came to Carara. We had actually seen two scarlet macaws earlier in the day at a stop near a bridge where people typically watch for crocodiles. But this sighting far exceeded the quality and duration of that one earlier in the day.
It is pretty astonishing to me that there can be any bird out there with the outrageous colored plumage that these macaws sport. We saw great green macaws in Tortuguero earlier in the week and those birds are spectacular but they also blend in with the almond trees they feed in. Not so with the scarlet macaws. They are absolutely so brilliantly colored. It's like someone has just used the brightest colored paints to invent a species of large parrot without any regard for species survival or anything like that. There's no camouflage here. They are absolutely amazing creatures. Carara was no longer any sort of candidate for being a disappointment as soon as we saw this pair. I was good with just the two. They made our day trip worth it, no matter what we might see or not see on the Tarcoles.
We did make it to our crocodile-focused boat ride on time by the way. Well, maybe a couple of minutes late. They waited, since we were three of the five total booked on the tour that day.
I have been on many wildlife tours in my life, particularly over the last nine or so years, and I have just one way to start the summary of our boat ride that day. I can't think of too many tours that were better than the couple of hours or maybe a bit less that we spent on the Tarcoles River. In fact, for its length, it may be one of the best two or three ever. I know, that's high praise, but it was well deserved.
Three things about this tour (Jungle Crocodile Safari was the company, if you must know right now). First, the variety of wildlife we saw was fantastic. Second, the guide who was with us, Hansel, was awesome; that dude knew everything that was out there and he engaged in what I thought was absolutely the right detail without dumbing things down. Third, they gave us each a bird and reptile spotting brochure to help us identify what we saw. For years, we have been carrying with us on trips a series of laminated wildlife spotting pamphlets and they have been so useful. Well done, here.
This brochure, by the way, has 58 different kinds of birds and three reptiles on it (Hansel seemed to know them all by heart) and most of the bird species depicted are super colorful and distinctive. I mean just the kind of things we can't see at home easily the way you can see in Costa Rica. All the species except the last that is, the clay colored thrush, which is literally just a small, all-muddy brown bird. It's also the national bird of Costa Rica. Yep, with scarlet macaws and toucans and all sorts of herons to pick from, Costa Rica chose the clay colored thrush. Apparently, it occurs everywhere in the country, and other birds do not.
Unfortunately, the Tarcoles River was also populated with a lot of trash (it will show up randomly in some of the pictures below). The story here is that for a while, the River was seen as some residents of San Jose as an easy way to get trash transported from their city to the Pacific Ocean. How this is any sort of logic that makes sense is beyond me. I mean, I can't imagine anyone thinking that trash belongs in the Ocean rather than a city. But that's what happened. Over the years or decades, there has been a ton of human-generated garbage in and around the environment that our boat took us that afternoon.
It sounded like the situation we witnessed was actually a vast improvement over years past. The trash was noticeable to us, but not everywhere we looked necessarily. Apparently, there has been and is an ongoing effort to clean up the River and get it back to being safe and habitable for the wildlife, although the need for this effort to continue suggests that there is still some pollution going on, even now. When will we ever learn?
So what was so great about the Jungle Crocodile Safari if it wasn't the crocodiles? Come on, you know the answer already and yes, I know I'm fixated a bit (or a lot) here but it was unquestionably the birds.
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| Tarcoles birds (top to bottom): snowy egret, brown pelicans and black-necked stilt. |
Because of this, we got to see the only pelicans of the trip and the only magnificent frigatebirds close up that we saw in Costa Rica (we did see frigatebirds in the distance near Tortuguero). There were flocks of both of these birds just perched in the trees by the sides of the River.
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| Magnificent frigatebirds (top two) and black hawk (bottom), Tarcoles River. |
We also managed sightings of egrets, spoonbills and tons and tons of herons. More types of herons than we had seen previously in the week for sure, including the night-hunting black-crested and yellow-crested night herons. I had never seen either of these last species anywhere before (although we had heard their calls when turtle-watching on the beach just a couple of days prior), nor had I seen the boat-billed herons we found by the side of the Tarcoles.
There is an inevitable thrill in finding a new species. All three types of herons we found for the first time this day were just that, as were the superior looks we got at some of the little blue herons this day. We'd seen some little blue herons along the side of the Rio Suerte on our way to Tortuguero, but we didn't really stop long enough to look much. In all, we saw five different species of heron this day one after the other. All five are shown in the photographs below: black-crested night heron, little blue heron, boat-billed heron, tiger heron and yellow-crested night heron.
We also saw a new predator: the black hawk. And not just one. If I'm remembering right we saw three of these birds. The best look we got is above, standing on one leg while the other is tucked against its body (apparently it saves energy to do this). It's always special to find birds of prey because (and I guess vultures are not applicable to this logic) there are so few of them around.
One last comment about the birds: just check out the eyes on the two night herons, especially the yellow-crested one in the bottom pic.
We spent the last part of this tour getting close to some crocodiles. Like maybe 10 feet away or something like that. The size of these big males is just immense and the jaws look incredibly powerful (the crocodiles with their mouths open in the pictures above are not males). I also appreciated the complete lack of other boat traffic on the River that day. It allowed us to linger where we wanted and how we wanted. I know I wouldn't want to meet one of these crocs out of the safety of our boat.
On our first day in Costa Rica, we were told by the guy driving us from the airport to our hotel in San Jose that it starts raining in Costa Rica at about noon or 1 in the afternoon on pretty much a daily basis. This is exactly what we had encountered in San Jose like clockwork. I took my last picture of a crocodile along the Tarcoles (it's below) at seven minutes before noon. By the time we got to our lunch place, it was probably a bit before 12:30. A few minutes later the heavens opened. Like clockwork, I'm telling you. Going to Costa Rica in the rainy season? Do what you got to do before lunch.
That's it for Costa Rica for this year. I could definitely go back, if not to Costa Rica then to central America in general. Panama, Belize and Guatemala definitely await.
How We Did It
With no car and no plans to drive ourselves around a place like Costa Rica, we found a tour operator to take us to Carara National Park and along the Tarcoles River. We found Oropopo Experience by doing some searching on Viator and then reaching out directly to Oropopo to inquire about their specific tours. While we didn't know it at the time, they are a company founded by and led by naturalists, which was a great bonus when looking for animals in the jungle. I'd definitely consider these guys for future trips in Costa Rica. Everything went about as smoothly as it could. The stop for coconuts and fruit along the way was a great bonus. We paid $100 each for this tour for three of us. It was not necessarily a private tour but it ended up being just that.
The Tarcoles River portion of our tour was provided by Jungle Crocodile Safari. I was serious when I wrote this is one of the best tours I have ever been on. Money definitely well spent for the 90 minutes or so along the River. You will see so much. Hopefully that comes through loud and clear when looking through the pictures on this post. They actually have two more tours they offer other than the one we took. Both are 3 hours long and focus on bird spotting and photography. I'm not sure how what we took wasn't about birds and photographs but I'd certainly give these guys another shot for double the time. The cost of our boat ride was included in the $100 we paid Oropopo but it looks like as of this writing that the cost of the boat trip we went on is $35. Bargain!!!
One last Costa Rica sentence before signing off for this trip: tip your guides. It's the best way to flow your money right down to the people doing the real work in a tourist-based economy. Pura vida!
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