Birding Road Trips and Walks

We have put together several birding packages for our guests. They will give you a chance to visit all the major habitats and important “hot spots” in the local area , with each spot offering a different variety of birds as well as several of our specialties which are hard or impossible to find in other parts of the country. From our 21 years of experience working with birders in this area, we have a fairly good idea of which birds our guests will want to see and where to find them at any given time.

The Tigre Birder packages cover the local hotspots.  The Tigre to Mangrove and the Osa Birder packages include a road trip, as well as covering the local hotspots.

Due to the density and variety of birdlife in the area, birding the local hotspots usually involves slow, short walks of around 1-2 kilometers round trip.  The best spots tend to be in different directions so one should plan on at least 3-4 walks during a visit.  We bird upriver, down river, the village, the road out of the village and the trails behind the lodge.  Occasionally, if guests are up for the climb,  we will walk up the hill across the river to a slightly higher elevation. On just about all the walks we usually see between 45 – 70 species.

Highly recommended is the special Roadside Birding Trip to Rincon which is included in the Osa Packages.  This is a great 5-6 hour trip usually totaling around 80 species, many which are more difficult or impossible to see near the lodge. We start at dawn birding the coastal plains, so we can catch the parrots cruising the fields at first light, the Striped Cuckoo displaying, Black-bellied Wren, Great Antshrike, the Red-breasted Blackbird, Yellow-bellied Seedeater, Rufous-breasted Seedeater during morning feeding time and still be able to make it to the bridge in time to catch the Yellow-billed Cotinga flying back and forth across the river. Usually we also encounter Turquoise Cotinga, often in the same tree as the Yellow-billed Cotinga. Also seen on this trip are Mangrove Hummingbird, (a Costa Rican endemic), Red-rumped Woodpecker, Gray-lined Hawk and Pearl Kite.  The trip usually ends at the Sandalo mangroves for great looks at the Mangrove Hummingbird and sometimes roosting owls, nightjars, Mangrove Warbler and Panama Flycatcher.  There are usually a good assortment of raptors to seen on the way back to the lodge..

Another popular option is the shorter 3 hour Roadside Birding to the Sandalo mangroves included in the Tigre to Mangrove packages. The roadside birding is a bit more relaxed along the approximately 9 km of coastal plain leading out to the mangroves of Sandalo.  Many of the species found on the Rincon trip may be found on this trip except the Yellow-billed Cotinga.