Surprises in Carara National Park

It was one of the easiest parks to reach on my eight-day trip to Costa Rica. Even though it's bordered by the main highway on the country's Pacific Coast, I nonetheless missed the entrance the morning I visited Carara National Park and then had to turn my rental car around in heavy traffic. A guide solicited me as I slowly drove through the open gate but I waived him off; I preferred to get my bearings and explore the visitor center first. However besides restrooms and an attendant to check my reservation, there was very little information displayed about the park. I had become accustomed to at least snapping a photo of placards with trail maps but the only one posted showed surprisingly little detail.

I was visiting Carara on my last full day in Costa Rica. It was my very last park and my last chance to see some birds that had mostly eluded me. Namely scarlet macaws were on my list, but so too were trogons. I had seen a pair of the macaws flying overhead when I passed the area two days before on the way to Quepos and Manuel Antonio National Park one hundred kilometers to the south. Also that morning when driving out of my hotel's neighborhood on the way to visit Carara, I pulled over to finally photograph a macaw; it was halfway in its nest in the hollow of a tree. And later, near the coastal town of Jaco as I sat in heavy construction traffic, another pair flew overhead. However except for a single female resplendent quetzal in the Monteverde cloud forest much earlier on my trip, I had struck out on trogons.

It didn't take long for me to decide to hire a guide on my late morning visit to Carara. Juan listened to me dictate my short wish list - trogons and macaws - and then negotiated a reasonable price to escort me on some trails for an hour and a half. However he recommended I follow him in my car from the main entrance to a second entry down the highway, not far from where I had turned around twenty minutes earlier. The trails were closer to the Tarcoles River that borders the northern end of the park. Except for some cars parked along the road, I'd have never guessed there was a park trailhead.

Not long after arriving, we spotted at least three scarlet macaws in the trees overhead. Juan said the birds liked to eat the large seeds from the trees that were known as chicken seed trees in English. Already I was happy to have hired him that morning.

Juan was not actually our guide's name: I decided to change it in my story to protect his identity. In our time together he shared a lot of his knowledge of the park and its flora and fauna, but he also spoke about his personal history. On the subject of wild cats, he lamented the preserve's proximity to a busy highway where ocelots were frequently struck by speeding vehicles. It was a poignant remark from a man who had actually been a wildlife poacher before he was a guide. Later, one of the last things Juan would point out to me on the tour was a hole in a tree, the opening to a macaw's nest. Before that he would show me motmot nests in trail-side berms. I never asked whether his former occupation was related to the illegal pet trade or to game hunting. What was important was he had devoted the last twenty years of his life to an education in his country's wildlife and, more importantly, its conservation. I was even more glad I hired him.

We followed a meandering trail through a flood plain not far from the Tarcoles River. I imagined the ground inundated with at least a meter of water in the wet season. The canopies of massive ceiba trees intertwined overhead; closer to ground, wild banana plants clustered in tight arrays like in an orchard. In the shadowed folds of one ceiba's high buttress roots slept a pair of bats. More active were the howler and capuchin monkeys that made sporadic appearances. When Juan told me the primates were always at the top of the wish list of families with children, I reminded him about the trogons waiting on mine.

When we arrived at a lagoon where water birds frequented, Juan scared off a green heron when he entered a tight pathway ahead of me. Of course he was thinking of safety first, checking for any crocodiles. There wasn't really much water that time of year, the very beginning of February, however there were five caimans lazily sunning themselves on the far side of the dried pond. Two days earlier, I had actually seen gargantuan-sized crocodiles on the Tarcoles River, at a popular tourist stop near the main highway's bridge a very short distance away. So few of those visitors peering over the railing spent any time in Carara; they were speeding home to San José after a weekend in Jaco or to busy Manuel Antonio National Park in Quepos.

We returned to the trail, which looked like it had dead-ended. But that didn't stop Juan from cutting through the brush, wielding the machete and ducking under low branches. He had just identified the calls of a gartered trogon: frequent, high-pitched, gentle yelps, sounding more like a puppy than a bird. We walked a bit, paused while Juan mimicked the calls, and then walked again, repeating the routine several times. We finally gave up after five minutes when the real bird went silent.

I couldn't say how deep we were into Carara, or how I would ever have gotten out on my own. I hadn't even seen any other visitors in a long while. We were already exploring for over an hour, and still had to eventually get back to where we began the tour. Yet there was still time to be hopeful about finding a trogon or at the very least some other exotic and new birds. I didn't really need to worry on this last point: Juan was an expert.

He proceeded to identify two different species of antbirds: both a male and female black-hooded antshrike along with one chestnut-backed antbird. Through Juan's viewing scope, we spied a common nighthawk asleep on a branch high in a tree. In the darkest corner of the jungle he found a turquoise-browed motmot. Hummingbirds? No problem, we encountered a little hermit. Then a female summer tanager, along with Costa Rica's national bird, the clay-colored thrush. And even a white-whiskered puffbird, which was basically incomprehensible when Juan told me its English name. All I could think was how I would never in a million years have found these birds without my guide.

Alas we never found that gartered trogon. But I wasn't distressed; I had at least already witnessed one three years ago on a trip to Belize. And besides, Juan had saved for last something just as beautiful, and maybe even more thrilling, when he pointed out several orange-collared manikins. There were at least three colorful males showing off their courting dances as practice for their upcoming breeding season. They hopped from branches to the dry, leafy ground and then back while making snapping sounds with their wings in order to impress lady birds. The displays weren't as elaborate as the courting dances of New Guinea's sumptuous birds of paradise that I've watched on Public Television documentaries, but they were nonetheless an exciting discovery.

My tour with Juan ended after two and a half hours, an hour longer than we had originally negotiated. The sound of traffic pierced the solitude of the forest. I decided to pay him what he had initially requested and not the lower price I had felt obliged to negotiate as a cheap gringo in Latin America. Sweaty and hungry, I wished I had visited the park closer to opening time rather than in early afternoon, the hottest time of day. As the nocturnal animals found safe places to sleep and the diurnal ones awoke hungry, I had no doubt that even more surprises would have revealed themselves in Carara National Park. Juan would have assured it.