We have spent a ton of time in our travels this year looking for wildlife. What can I say? It's a huge passion, and we have really made it a priority this year in our trips both within the United States and abroad as we've started to feel confident traveling internationally again. We hoped for (and found) roadrunners in Joshua Tree National Park in March; renewed our love of bison in South Dakota in May; spent a few days chasing down seabirds in Scotland in late June and early July; and really amped up things this month by heading to Costa Rica for a trip focused almost exclusively on wildlife.
Most all of our time searching for mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, insects and everything else we could find on those trips had one thing in common: we did it during the daylight hours. I mean it makes sense, right? It's a lot more difficult to find creatures at night than it is when the sun is out. But for many places in this world, there are a whole group of species that are active ONLY when it is nighttime. That is especially true of a place like Tortuguero National Park in Costa Rica. So, when we were offered the opportunity to take a night boat safari, well, how could we refuse?
If it seems a little silly taking a boat into the jungle at night armed with a couple of spotlights to try to see what we could find, you might be right. After all, there are deadly poisonous snakes in the Costa Rican jungle. But we did it anyway. And we did actually find a lot, although I'm not entirely convinced that everything we found could only be found after sundown. But life and travel are about different experiences, so we were not really going to say no to the opportunity.
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| Agami heron, Tortuguero National Park. |
I have found that the success of a tour like this, like most other searches for wildlife during any time of the day, is directly related to the skill of your guide. Luckily for us on this night, we left the dock of Turtle Beach Lodge with Don Fernando, the same guide who escorted us on all the other walks and boat rides from the Lodge during our two days on property. And it did not take Don Fernando long to spot something.
I have to say that we were on this boat trip for about 90 minutes intently gazing into the dark as illuminated by the spotlights that both Don Fernando and our pilot were waving into the jungle and honestly, I have no idea how they found anything. The narrative we were fed here was that the spotlights would show eyes reflecting in the light against the dark of the night. I never saw any, but somehow they did. If that's what they were doing, it worked. But I never saw what they were telling us to look for. Experience counts, I guess.
Our finds started small. A butterfly. A frog in the roots of a tree. Another frog, this time on a tree. A small-ish tarantula. A rat. And in all these cases (except for the rat), the creatures pretty much froze. I suspect that they are used to moving under cover of night so that they could be invisible to predators. Having a white spotlight shone on them pretty much ruins that.
So how were these encounters? I mean I guess frogs are cool-ish, although the frog in the tree was not one of the red-eyed tree frogs we had hoped to see in Costa Rica. It was just a regular frog. In a tree. The tarantula was cool. I've never seen one of those before in the wild but it did, in fact, look smaller than I expected. The most interesting sighting was honestly the butterfly, who seemed camped out for the night on a branch next to a spider in her web. I'd been trying to take pictures of butterflies in the daytime at Turtle Beach Lodge and they wouldn't sit still. Finally got one at night.
I didn't care about the rat, by the way. I can see rats in Washington, D.C. or New York. Not taking a picture of a rat in the jungle.
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| Frog no. 1 (top) and small-ish tarantula (bottom). |
One of the premises of this excursion was that it would give us an opportunity to see caimans, small crocodiles that are relatively inactive during the day, but which hunt at night. And we did see caimans. Plenty of them. Well, plenty considering the amount of light available to us. But caimans hunt fish, which are of course active below the surface of the water. So while we did see caimans, we didn't see them hunting. A little disappointing there. I think there were better ways to hype up this trip.
And ironically, we saw more caimans and got better looks at caimans in the daytime each of the two days after our night boat tour. We saw one completely out of the water sunning itself on the canal bank and saw a second hanging out in the Lodge's dock area feet from the piers that the boats were tied up to.
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| Frog no. 2 (top; the one in the tree) and a caiman (bottom). |
However, and in direct contradiction to what I wrote earlier about not being convinced we saw birds that we couldn't have very well have seen during the day, we did actually see some bird species that we only saw on this ride. We saw a lot of herons of every variety in Costa Rica, but the only agami heron we saw was roaming around the swamp in the dead of night (we actually saw two). Same for a grey-necked wood rail; daytime sightings were zero but we found one after dark on the boat ride. We also saw a green ibis which we may not have seen at any other time on our trip, although we did zoom by some similarly colored ibises on an excursion the next morning. Bird-wise, we definitely added to our species list by opting for an hour and a half in the dark in the mangroves.
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| Green ibis (top). Grey-necked wood rail (bottom). I know, the colors don't show. |
It is not easy for someone as amateur as I am with a camera to take good photographs at night. Some of the pictures on this post are blurry (sorry...really no excuse there) and some are washed out with color. It's not all my fault. The color differential across some of the images are caused by the quality of the lighting. A spotlight definitely does not provide the best uniform light quality, especially when being directed into roots and trees. Shadows are unavoidable. I am convinced the first creature we came to yielded the best picture. I think the butterfly resting in the dark next to a spider's web (complete with spider!) is the keeper of our night trip into the jungle.
I am a firm believer in taking every opportunity to do something unique or new when I'm traveling, even if it seems to offer little real value like going wildlife spotting at night. Sometimes, you might just get surprised, especially if the alternative is grabbing a beer at the bar and looking at the iPad while doing it. I thought it might have been a bit of a long shot that this tour would pay off big time, but it did pay off small time in some big ways, even if it's only for the butterfly picture below.
Sometimes, you have to try everything you can when you are away from home. You never know what you might find. And I'd do it again.
How We Did It
This one is not complicated. Our hotel, Turtle Beach Lodge, offered an optional night boat tour into the jungle and we took them up on it. There was an additional charge (it was less than $40 if I'm remembering right) but I'm not sure why I would pass up something like this. I mean when else am I going to get the opportunity to go on a boat ride at night in Costa Rica with an expert wildlife spotting guide?
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