Mike in the Wild

After witnessing six new hummingbirds in the course of just a few minutes, I would have normally been happy to call it a good birding day and gone home.  But I wasn't just anywhere; I was near the entrance to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Preserve in Costa Rica, at a shop that hung several sugar water feeders on its patio.  Violet sabrewings, green-crowned brilliants, and lesser violetears were among the scintillating birds competing for dominance at the hanging stations.  The misty rain didn't deter any of us awed tourists from snapping photos and risking ruining our cameras.  However I was actually visiting this park in search of a completely different bird, the resplendent quetzal.  It wasn't surprising that the variety and sheer numbers of wildlife I was finding in Costa Rica after barely four days in the country was mind-blowing.  Over the two previous days in Arenal National Park, I had counted close to forty species of birds alone.  In ...