Rincon Costa Rica and the Yellow-billed Cotinga

2-8-19

Day 3: Rincón

Two hammocks slung like smiley faces between support beams, three white rarely used fans, a table dark like mahogany and fit for a Viking dinner party, and three rooms blessed with air conditioning. This is our home for the week in “downtown” Rincon.

From San Jose to Rincon takes about 8 hours from bus stop to bus stop. An 8 hour bus ride sounds grueling, but in Costa Rica it is a mixture of incredible views, a roller coaster, and a library. The mountains are steep here. They were created by the crashing of the Nazca and Pacific tectonic plates and create the spine of the country all the way from Nicaragua to Panama. The youth of these mountains and constant erosion from rain create the steep decline down to the lowlands. From the bus, as it is pitching from side to side on soft suspension, you can see across valleys to incredible ridgelines. If it leans far enough you can even see down into the valleys themselves. My 8 hours was spent attempting to read papers and take notes as the bus wound down to sea level and Golfo Dulce at the beginning of the Osa Peninsula, and our lodging.

The Osa is hot and humid, exactly what you’d expect from a tropical rainforest. Except no one tells you it feels like 100 damp towels being wrapped around every inch of your body. However, the human body is amazing. After only 2 nights of being here, my body has peeled off the towels one by one and there seems to only be one left. Not a morsel of cloud has graced us with shade the past two days. Only the hundreds of species of trees and other plants can do that for us.

We are poised at the mouth of the Rio Rincon where there is a patch of mangrove forest that abuts primary lowland tropical rainforest. Any place where two ecosystems come together is called an ecotone. This specific ecotone between mangrove and lowland forests is prime habitat for the yellow-billed cotinga, a rare, small, white, football shaped bird with a yellow bill. There are between 250 and 999 individuals in the wild, and very little is known about them. Where the Andean condor has 10’s of papers written about them, the cotinga has 5. For the next week we will be helping research efforts by monitoring their activity.

Day 4: Rincon

4:00 am, I’m awake before my alarm. We leave at 5 to begin our monitoring. My mind is singularly focused. I must get coffee and food. I slept with my clothes for today on. My recently dry backpack sits next to my bed full: binoculars, pencil, notebook, sunscreen, water, two way radio. The rest of the team filters out of their rooms. We all sip Costa Rican black gold.

A left on the only road and excitement builds with each step. It only takes 10 minutes to reach the place where we rent kayaks, and we split up into two groups. One is going to a bridge over the Rio Rincon where the highest number of bird species has been recorded in Costa Rica, and the other is paddling to the mangrove system surrounding its mouth.

We shove off into the water while the sky over the mangroves shifts from silky black to a soft orange glow. By the time we enter the first channel that cuts into the mangrove forest the sky is bright and what used to be a black blob becomes the organized chaos of mangrove trees. Their roots drip down off their trunks straddling an imaginary boulder beneath it. Orange sunlight trickles through clouds filling the sky like a glass jar full of rocks. Mist rises off the waters. There cannot be anything more beautiful than a Costa Rican sunrise.

For the next three hours we drifted in and out of the forest of mangroves. The plan was for half of the kayak group to navigate through an unexplored (by us) canal in the mangroves and the other half to go straight to the mouth of the river where our last sighting was. I slipped into the canal and pushed up against the flow. The deeper into the mangroves we paddled the tighter the canal got. Logs and branches draped over the path and rose up from the water. We had to duck, limbo, and swerve to get around. The tree ferns and tea mangroves reached out to touch us. Every meter we moved basilisk lizards hurried deeper into the forest and kingfishers chattered. It was truly wild.

Our objective was to try and observe display behavior of the male cotinga. They are high canopy fruitavores. That lek. A type of courtship where males all display in the same location. That just means they spend their time at the very top of the canopy, eat fruit, sometimes, and return to the same place to display. After 3 hours of craned necks, we saw no cotingas, but dozens of other birds. Toucans, swallows, egrets, shore birds, herons, hawks, gulls are just a few of the types. It seems like every bird I know is here, and then 8 new birds in the same family I have never heard of. There are also all the shapes, families, and species I’ve never even dreamt of. I know I am not the first to write this but it can’t go unstated. The diversity is almost unfathomable. So, even though cotinga sightings were limited (one male right before we headed back) the trip through the mangroves was astonishing.