My husband, Larry, and I sipped cold beers beneath a swirling ceiling fan in the bar of our hotel and contemplated leaving Caño Negro. We’d arrived only hours earlier in this northern lowland area of Costa Rica and had planned to spend a few days fishing but the town was far more remote than we had ever imagined and the temperature was taking the chill off our beer and stoking our simmering moods.
The three-and-a-half-hour drive in our rental car to Caño Negro from San Jose had put a damper on our “we’re on vacation” euphoria. I don’t do well driving in foreign countries and I’m worse as a passenger. Larry let me use the phantom brake on the floor of the passenger side three times before he threatened to leave me on the side of the road and our final 12 miles were on a dusty, rock-strewn stretch of what looked like a road on our map but was more like a barren moonscape with craters that could trip up a little Toyota sedan like ours, and send it cartwheeling end over end.
We had gone for a walk around town, as our guidebook suggested, to look for the ranger station in hopes of finding a guide who could take us fishing. Along the banks of the Rio Frio, all we found were some empty boats and a closed information window at the dock. A man approached us from his bench, under a tree in the park.
“The water’s too low for fishing,” he told us.
In town, we found more cows on the dusty streets than people. We passed the quiet soccer field and the simple, one-story houses provided no glimpse of anyone living here. We decided it must be happy hour.
“Who comes here?” I whined. “There isn’t anything to do,” I said, as I dropped another ice cube into my beer.
Just then a tourist bus pulled up outside and a dozen or so people began filing out. Men and women clad in travel vests, dangling cameras and binoculars strapped down by suspender-type harnesses. One woman carried an overstuffed, needlepoint tote bag and a couple of younger men hefted tripod-mounted cameras with lenses the size of Big Gulp cups over their shoulders. I thought: Birders.
Larry and I were in Costa Rica for a two-week vacation and birding was nowhere on our list of things to do. Birding was too passive—too boring—for us, but we knew from our guidebook that this area was also a birder’s paradise. The Caño Negro Wildlife Refuge, in the northern part of Costa Rica near the Nicaraguan border, protects about 25,000 acres of marshland and is home to some 350 species of birds and hundreds more
during the migratory season.
The birders scattered to their rooms and Larry wandered over to hotel’s front desk to see about setting up a river boat tour for us. We were confirmed for a tour the following morning.
The next morning I awoke at 5:30 to the grunting of howler monkeys. I drew back the curtain on the window to see if I could spot them, but instead, saw the group of birders scouting the hotel grounds. I watched them shuffle, en masse, as they focused their binoculars from tree to tree. Then, a small bird landed on the chair outside my sliding glass door. It was red and black. Its feathers shimmered in the gentle morning light and I was awestruck by its delicate beauty. It was radiant.
I slowly and quietly slid open the door to get a better look but it flew away. I threw on my shorts and t-shirt, grabbed Larry’s binoculars, and slipped outside. I followed the direction of the little, black and red bird’s flight path and found it sitting on the branch of a tree.
The birders were congregating near the pool so I inched my way over to see what they were looking at. It was another red and black bird. “It’s a Passerini’s Tanager,” I heard a woman’s voice blurt out. I scribbled in my little notebook, “Passerini’s Tanager—the bird I saw out my window. Black bird with a red band around its lower body,” and slipped it back into the pocket of my shorts.
I tagged along with the birders and that was when I found myself in the last place I ever expected—in a lineup looking at a bird. We all had our binoculars aimed at an unspectacular, little brown bird perched on the branch of a tree.
“It’s a Clay-colored Robin,” I heard a man’s voice say. “It’s Costa Rica’s national bird.”
“It’s just a little, brown bird,” I said. “Why on earth would Costa Rica pick a dull-looking robin as its national bird?”
“All the good birds were already taken,” said the man next me.
I looked up from my binoculars to see a gray-haired man, wearing a khaki vest and floppy hat, smiling down at me. I couldn’t tell if he was poking fun at me or if this was common birding humor, so I just smiled back.
After breakfast, Larry and I met our guide, Ernesto. He handed us a laminated field guide with the names and pictures of about 100 birds on it as he launched our four-seated, boat equipped with a canopy to shield us from the blazing the sun. As we cruised the river’s gentle, brown waters, we passed locals fishing along the shore or walking the well-worn trail into town.
The wetlands of Caño Negro were rich with graceful birds pacing the shore. Ernesto pointed out pink, long-legged Roseate Spoonbills with their spatulate bills, Black-necked Stilts, Snowy Egrets, Great Egrets and Blue-grey Herons. There’s a Purple Gallinule,” he said. “See the bird with the yellow legs, purple chest and green body?”
“It looks like it was put together with stray parts.” I said, laughing.
Ernesto also spotted a Jabiru, with its snowy white body, black head, black bill and red collar. We heard the rapid, clicking sound of the Nicaraguan Grackle, and tried to spot it.
I wrote down the name of every bird I spotted in my notebook: “Anhinga, Limpkin, Boat-billed Heron, White Ibis, Green Ibis, Bananaquit, Montezuma Oropendola,” forty-five in all.
After an hour and a half, Ernesto turned the boat around and we headed back to the dock.
“Ernesto,” I said. “Why did Costa Rica pick the Clay-colored Robin as its national bird?” Then I told him about my exchange with the birder who told me all the big, colorful birds had already been claimed as national icons by other Central American countries.
He laughed. “The Clay-colored Robin is an important bird to Costa Rica because it signals the coming of the rains,” he explained. The national honor bestowed on the little, brown bird finally made sense to me.
On our walk back to the hotel, Ernesto’s son rode by on his bicycle and yelled, “Hola.” I noticed how clean the town was and the beautiful flowers growing in front of each house. Mango, orange, and papaya trees stood in every yard and Ernesto pointed out his father’s blue house with a scuffed soccer ball resting by the front door.
It was as if I was looking at Caño Negro through the magnification of my binoculars. I could finally see its beautiful detail. Like the Clay-colored Robin, I had been unimpressed with Caño Negro at first glimpse, but I had come to realize the beauty of Caño Negro was in its simplicity.
If you go:
Costa Rica Tourism
Caño Negro Natural Lodge
