A Bird Bander’s Life

In a letter sent home to friends in Canada John describes their Costa Rican Bird Banding Adventures:

“Maureen and I work in four different locations in the province of Guanacaste in northwest Costa Rica. We purchased a small car last year, a Hyundi Excell, to get around in and essentially live out of. We spend about a week at each of our four bird banding locations mid-November to mid-March and usually return to Liberia, the provincial capital, at the end of each week. We usually stay at Hotel Liberia, in the center of town where we are close to grocery stores (Supermercado), Internet cafes, and where we can get some laundry done.

We are camping most of the time so it is always a treat to sleep in a bed once in a while and have a nice shower.

To get to our banding locations we either drive to Playa Grande and Estero Tamarindo, about an hour and a half away, or drive to Playa Panama then take a boat ride with our friend El Gato to Estero Iguanita, or hire Eladio to take us to Estero Naranjo in his 4 wheel drive Toyota Landcruiser. Either way it’s a full day to get into one of the sites and set up, followed by 3 days of bird banding then another day to get back to Liberia.

We’ll take you through a trip to Estero Naranjo, a mangrove swamp adjacent to Playa Naranjo in what was formerly known as Santa Rosa National Park but is now part of the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste, Sector Naranjo. After driving to Eladios, about half an hour north of Liberia, we load up his Landcruiser with enough food and water for a week, along with all our camping and bird banding equipment then head north to Santa Rosa. The trip across Santa Rosa to the Pacific Ocean is on a very rough road and takes about and hour and a half.

About half the ride is through regenerating tropical dry forest that was once pasture. On the slope down to the ocean the forest is more mature and we see a rich diversity of trees. When we arrive in November, at the end of the rainy
season, everything is very green but over the course of the winter we see a great change as the trees gradually lose their leaves. Many of these trees are covered with gorgeous blossoms by the middle of the dry season.

Arriving at Playa Naranjo we set up camp near the ocean then go for a swim as it is generally mid-day by this time and the temperature has climbed to at least 30C. Around 3 in the afternoon we take our mist-nets into the mangroves, about a ten-minute walk from the campgrounds, and set up for the next day. We have wooden net poles in place so it is just a matter of attaching and adjusting the nets. This usually takes a couple of hours, leaving just enough daylight left to return to camp and prepare dinner on our little one burner propane stove. By 6pm it is dark, Ferruginous Pygmy Owls. Pacific Screech Owls and Common Pauraques serenade us as we do a little reading and prepare for the next day.

We’re up at 4:30 am; if we don’t hear the alarm clock the Howler Monkeys will wake us up with their pre-dawn loud ‘woof-woof-woofing’. It’s still very much nighttime and the stars are still out. Every night they are visible as there a
very few clouds in Guanacaste in the dry season November through April. We see the North Star, very low at about 10 degrees about the horizon, reminding us how far south we are. By 5:20 am we’ve had coffee and cereal and are heading out with backpacks on loaded with bird banding equipment, water, and snacks for the day. The sky is showing enough gray in the east so we can see where we are going but we have headlamps handy to illuminate our way through grassy areas where Rattlesnakes or Vipers may still be out hunting.

Depending on the tides, the mangroves may be dry enough for tennis shoes or wet up to our knees, usually somewhere in between. When there’s lots of water we are always on the lookout for crocodiles, though we see few and those we do encounter are generally shy and retiring.

While opening nets we make our first observations of birds for the day, we always keep a daily list. Herons, Ibises, and Egrets squawk their displeasure at our intrusion into their domain. We split up to open nets and rendezvous after half an hour at our banding site not far from net 8: we open 16 nets each day. It is fully light by 6 am and at this time the many parrots that roost in the mangroves are dispersing to feed in the nearby dry forest. There are many Yellow-naped Parrots, often traveling in pairs, greeting us with their cheerful ‘move it, move it’ calls. The White-fronted Parrots have more raucous voices and there are also small flocks of Orange-fronted Parakeets.

The doves start calling at this time too. We hear the low hoot of the White-tipped Doves and the more elaborate calls of White-winged Doves that seem to be saying ‘take of your shoes’, which is good advice if the tide is high. Great Kiskadees and Brown-crested Flycatchers are the first songbirds we hear, as well as the cheeky White-throated Magpie Jays that often follow us around squawking alarms at our presence.

At 6:30 am we check our nets for the first time.

We split up for this task also, each of us taking care of 8 nets. This is always the busiest time of day with more birds captured than at any other time. This first net run usually yields 5 or more Prothonotary Warblers, the most abundant
songbirds in the mangroves at this time of year, as well as lesser numbers of Northern Waterthrush, Tennessee Warblers and Yellow Warblers.

We often catch bats at this time too, the largest of which has a 30 cm wingspan and a set of teeth to match and thus needs to be handled with care.

All the birds we capture are placed in cloth bags and returned to our ‘banding station’, a plank in the shade beneath a large mangrove tree at the edge of the swamp.

Here we identify, band, measure, age, sex, and weigh all birds before they are released.

By the time all birds have been processed and released it is time to check nets again. Checking the nets is physically demanding, they are spread out over a 1 km trail through the mangroves and we are either wading through water or trudging through mud. We estimate that we walk 10 km through the mangroves each day.

It is exciting though, with the expectation of surprise captures at each net. We capture a lot of birds that we do not band because they are not migratory. These are resident ‘Costa Rican’ birds that we document the same as the birds we band. We capture quite a lot of hummingbirds, Cinnamon Hummingbird and Steely-vented Hummingbird being the most abundant.

It’s always a treat to find such colorful birds as Black-headed Trogons or Long-tailed Manakins in our nets.

And so goes our day, check nets, process birds, then do it again until the day is over. Our day’s work is often terminated by noon when the wind begins to blow making mist-netting impossible. These winds are typical of the Guanacaste dry season and often continue to blow until well into the night. They often come in strong gusts that sound like freight trains as they come roaring through the dry forest. Our last task of the day is to furl up our nets so that birds will net get caught again until we re-open them the next day. On average we process 30 to 40 birds each day (as few as 5 and as many as 98) of 5 to 10 species. Our list of observations for each day typically includes 30 to 50 species. We do three days of mist-netting and then take down our nets for use at our next stop. The following day Eladio picks us up and takes us back to our car. Then we’re off to Liberia to overnight and re-supply in preparation for a visit to next of our study sites.

We do love our work despite the feeling of being homeless for the four months we are in Costa Rica, moving once a week, setting up and taking down camp and nets, and packing everything into our little car. We meet tourists from all over the world who show great interest in our work and we have made many friends among the people of Costa Rica.

It is a great treat to have our friends from Canada come down to visit us. There are many exciting encounters with wildlife, other than birds, such as the 3.5 m Boa Constrictor that ate a 1 m long Iguana at the campsite at Playa Naranjo last week. Capuchin Monkeys, Raccoons, Agoutis, Anteaters, and Coatis are animals we frequently encounter while camping or working.”

April through October John and Maureen run the Thunder Cape Bird Observatory (http://www.tbfn.net/tcbotbfn.htm) on Lake Superior near Thunder Bay. For the remainder of the year they volunteer their time in Costa Rica surviving on small grants from the Canadian Wildlife Service and the US Fish and Wildlife Service that cover the basic expenses of transportation and food. They solicit your help to continue with this important conservation effort.