Finding Wildlife in Costa Rica part 1 - the Resplendent Quetzal

costa rica one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet [Music] i think i traveled for about 36 hours i drove to edinburgh took a night bus to london had a flight to houston and then my last flight to san jose costa rica [Music] i stayed in san jose for the night but i had no intentions of staying there for long so very next morning picked up a local sim card i got some colonists which is the currency in costa rica and i got a bus headed south on the pan american highway that took me up the hills of the talamanca mountains [Music] now here i wanted to find a bird that i've been reading a lot about from one of my now favorite naturalists alexander scooch and that is the resplendent quetzal [Music] i'm excited as a little kid i've just arrived my accommodation for the first three nights san garados this little valley that i'm in and it just is so nice i'm in a little cabin for myself i have a little double bed here and a single bed there it's only me though i don't need all that and they've given me probably one of the best cabinets here i feel check out this video [Music] i just want to do full freakout mode there my own one crashed and it kept crashing and i've looked it up though and there is an update for us i'm really hoping that's going to fix it but i've just arrived in costa rica first time i pull out my camera to photograph a bird it just goes blank i i can't even press the shutter yank the battery out try again same thing happens so unfortunately the update for my own one didn't work i kept getting an hour but there was no pattern to it and there wasn't really anything to do but let the professionals have a look which meant that most likely for the rest of this trip i wouldn't have my new om1 now i was devastated but i couldn't let it ruin my trip i still had my backup e-m1 mark ii and i was determined i'm gonna make the best of it it is a pretty dreary and miserable day out and it has been this way all night and all morning so i think let's just take advantage put on my waterproof let's try and get some birds and rain streaks in this weather [Music] right away i get a little rufus collared sparrow on the branch right across this edge and some hummingbirds i think just after a couple of minutes out anna who works here came and dragged me up here because there was uh there's plenty of cats in here they came out and made these sounds absolutely amazing [Music] you know standing up in this mossy tree here i just could see the side of its body couldn't get a good photo i tried to get a video and then it flew off in an instant grab an avocado and then went away if i got the call down right though i think i can still hear it every now and then i'm hoping it's still in the area gracias what what is your um do you have a favorite uh [Music] and i asked her as well what her what her favorite bird is since i think she said that the quetzal is close to her heart she had no gesture towards her heart she's super nice and she's just so upbeat and always walking around here singing and just cheerful i'm trying my very limited spanish to talk to her [Music] [Music] dog is feeding on the scraps that the birds aren't getting [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] i think i've been here for a couple hours now quetzal hasn't come back but i think i got some really cool images of birds in the rain so very happy with that that's kind of what i came out for today i think i still hear it down here though i'm gonna give another five minutes i'm gonna head back and warm up and dry [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] it's quarter to five in the morning i've been up since two o'clock i went to bed at eight yesterday with a stupid jet lag i'm in my little cabin and it's really cold at night but my watch actually says that i'm up at meters so i'm up quite high today though i'm going to look for the splendid quetzal the really nice lady who works here with the kitchen when she heard that i was going to go out it's early in the morning she gave me like a tiny little breakfast thing all wrapped up in foil in a banana just these kind of really nice sweet breads i'm just having that with my coffee just now ready to head down the hill i have about a five kilometer walk down the hill ahead of me um so so yeah just trying to get some coffee a little bit of food and pack my bag and go i need to go so i've been reading two of alexander skritch's books the imperative call and a naturalist in costa rica now for 18 months he stayed south of where i was staying in san gordo and there he had identified and studied the lives of 218 species of birds but there was one bird that he hadn't studied and that was the resplendent quetzal it was a bird that he had first become aware of as a schoolboy when he had a postage stamp from guatemala with a quetzal on it the resplendent quetzal is a national bird of guatemala it is known there as the freedom bird it was believed that it would rather take its own life than live in captivity when the 1930s when scotch traveled through costa rica there was a high demand for skins of birds to museums and private collectors way ahead of his time scotch didn't want to take a bird's life to have a post in collections so he collected plant specimens instead to finance his study of the behavior of living birds the behavior of tropical birds by western scientists at the time was pretty much unknown and filled with false assumptions as most field workers would shoot the birds long before any behavior was observed and recorded to study the quetzal scritch moved to cordillera central between the volcanoes poes and barba where he stayed on and off again for over a year some truly harsh conditions now one of the features that makes the quetzal such an attractive bird is its long tail or rather it's the upper tail coverts that can grow up to 85 centimeters on the males before the breeding season now until scritch began his studies it was though the quetzal had two holes in the nesting tree so that the male could enter one side and get out on the other side without messing up its long beautiful tail now skutch found that a pair would share incubation duties and he observed the long male's tail hanged down from the nesting hole when the male was on the eggs now it would blend in perfectly because it would look like a fern just hanging off the tree a male will actually damage his tail during this active time of year and shed it completely by the end of the breeding season now in the past tail feathers of the resplendent quetzal has been used as head work for aztec kings and chiefs it's reported the natives would snare the birds then pluck the tail feathers and release them to renew their plumage ascotch writes in his books that they took more thought to conservation than the people who wrestled their land from them definitely not alone there's quite a few people here it's really cool you can actually see the little small little avocados on these trees and that's what they go for [Music] so i'm not seeing it for a while now i've showed up for a few minutes and stood there probably i don't know 40 minutes after and people started to spread out apparently i was told that they only feed a little bit in the morning and then they head off and hide because they're so colorful and they stand out in the environment quite a bit so i can't afford to hang out in the open all day i'm incredibly grateful i got to see it in the beginning didn't get to see it again but got a photo of it got to view it and it looks absolutely amazing now i was told that it doesn't have the long tails they don't tend to have that this time of year they lose them when they go into their into breeding and uh they kind of get them back i think around september i was told some really nice and helpful guides around here who are just all too happy to share their knowledge now though i got 5k of uphill to track [Music] you

Channel: Espen Helland

Views: 31,325

Keywords: espen helland, wildlife photography, bird photography, photography, nature photography, olympus, wildlife, nature, birds, costa rica, finding wildlife, finding wildlife in costa rica, resplendent quetzal, hummingbirds, bird photography in the rain, alexander skutch, los cusingos bird sanctuary, los cusingos, toucan, emerald toucanet, espen in costa rica, costa rica travel, wildlife photography in costa rica, bird photography in costa rica

Id: 0N-DkntO5pE

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2022