The new millenium certainly started off with a bang! After all the fireworks and hoopla over Y2K had faded away, I took my children out to Finca Las Concavas (between Cartago and Paraiso) to look for a Northern Pintail that had been reported there during the Cartago Christmas Bird Count, held December 19, 1999. Our outing took place on January 4, 2000 -- a little more than two weeks after the count -- on a partly overcast but generally pleasant day, especially considering all the rain that the area received during December and January.

It was Leonardo, my oldest son, his eye at the telescope while panning through scores of Blue-winged Teals, who made the discovery. "Hey! Look at this!" he shouted in astonishment. One by one, we took our turn at the eyepiece to marvel at a cracking male Green-winged Teal calmly standing on the far bank of the pond, flanked by blue-wings.

Since this was literally "a sitting duck" and the chances were very good that it would not leave the spot, that evening I began making phone calls and sending e-mails to local birders to get the word out. During a phone conversation just the other day with Robert Dean, he informed me that he visited Las Concavas in mid-March and the bird was still there. Jim Zook, who went to see "our" Green-winged Teal shortly after the discovery, saw another male of the species at Palo Verde National Park in February! He also thought that someone had seen another individual somewhere else this year -- when it rains, it pours. I'll try to follow up on that report in the next newsletter.

A scant four days after our encounter with the Green-winged Teal, David (one of the twins) was birding out in the yard when a male Painted Bunting flew in to one of the Gumbo-limbo (Bursera simaruba) trees along the back property line. News of the sighting came bursting through the windows like bricks hurled by demonstrators and those of us inside went scrambling for binoculars and the nearest exit.

The trip got off to an auspicious* start as we traveled to Limón and then up the canals to Tortuguero on February 13. We had just entered Tortuguero National Park from the southern entrance at Jalova and were enjoying the jungle ambiance of the narrow, winding waterway when our boatman, Modesto Watson, cut the throttle. Following his instructions, our attention was brought to a Green Ibis sitting on a nest. From what we could see, the nest consisted of a platform of twigs placed on a horizontal portion of a Raffia palm (Raphia taedigera) frond about three meters above the water. I mention this because as of the publication of the field guide, the nest of the Green Ibis was undescribed (although I strongly suspect that nearly every native boatman in the Tortuguero region has long known what one looks like!).

Several days later, our itinerary had us in Guanacaste where we visited Santa Rosa National Park at dawn on February 18. Coming in the paved entrance road from the PanAmerican Highway, we spent more than an hour birding the patch of primary forest encountered at about five kilometers in from the park entrance. The birding was quite entertaining with a good variety of native species and North American migrants, although the mutually agreed highlight was the performance of the Long-tailed Manakins -- two males and two females that allowed us the privilege of witnessing their entire courtship song and dance routine THREE TIMES!

As a postscript to this story, upon returning home from the trip a week or so later, I checked my mailbox at the local post office and found the Spring 1999 (sic, it's a long story) edition of Cotinga, the Journal of the Neotropical Bird Club. And whaddya know? There on page 21 was an article by Mark W. Lockwood, "Occurrence of Western Slaty-antshrike Thamnophilus atrinucha on the Pacific slope of Costa Rica." On March 8, 1998, he observed and photographed a pair of adult birds in the same patch of evergreen forest.

From mid-March through early April, Costa Rica was plagued by outbursts of social unrest resulting from a general discontent with a controversial new telecommunications/ power-generation bill being debated in the Legislative Assembly. The sporadic roadblocks that appeared on various of the country's main thoroughfares made for difficult and unpredictable traveling. For reasons I'm not really sure of, the town of San Isidro del General was one of the most ardent centers of dissent.

It was also one of the places I had most wanted to visit since my son Leonardo had attended the Birding Club of Costa Rica's outing to the area in mid-February.

Following a morning visit to Los Cusingos -- Dr. Skutch's farm -- a few of the keener participants spent the afternoon birding on the grounds of their hotel, the Talari Mountain Lodge. It was in an overgrown pasture with scattered trees down by the Río El General where they saw a Pearl Kite "sitting high in the branches of one tree for several minutes before disappearing into the denser leaves of an adjacent smaller one. Very close investigation failed to flush it, making us suspect it had fled unnoticed, yet when we eventually decided to give up, it took the opportunity to fly out, landing on an exposed branch some twenty feet up in another tree, affording us our best views yet . . . . Meanwhile, George Wallace had been vigilantly scouring the tree in which it had remained silently for so long and discovered a nest, attended by our bird's mate!" (from Robert Dean's trip report).

And speaking of Jim Zook, his phone call on March 13 was the REAL reason for my desire to get down to the San Isidro area. That very morning, he had seen three Southern Lapwings in a field near the El General sugar mill. (And to sweeten the pot, he also mentioned seeing Red-breasted Blackbirds and a Pearl Kite in the same area-all three of these species would be new for my Costa Rica list, and the former two would be lifers.)

Finally, on Saturday, April 1, 2000, I decided to take advantage of the fact that the protesters seemed to be taking the weekends off and made my pilgrimage in search of these three ticks. With the four boys loaded up, we pulled out of the gate at 4:00 and were up at Km 96 by 6:00, enjoying a crystal clear morning on Cerro de la Muerte. By 7:30, we were pulling into the rustic roadside restaurant "El Trapiche de Nayo" situated at about 1050 meters above sea level and just about 15 minutes away from San Isidro. We had trouble ordering breakfast though, not because the menu was extensive (there was a choice of gallo pinto any one of three ways), but because there was so much bird activity just off the balcony that I could hardly get the kids' attention. To make matters worse, we discovered that we were in the middle of hawk migration and small kettles of Broad-winged and Swainson's Hawks kept swirling up from below and passing right over the restaurant. The real breakfast-stopper though was a Black Hawk-Eagle that came right in just above eye-level, glided over the building, and disappeared over the ridge across the highway. Great looks and a lifer for the boys!

On March 16, Winifred (Winnie) Orcutt rang to report a goodie she'd seen that day at La Virgen del Socorro: a Lanceolated Monklet! It was sitting on a low branch less than 100 meters in the forest trail to the right just before you reach the old bridge over the Sarapiquí River-in other words, apparently the same spot where at least a half dozen other fortunate observers have encountered it.

Rafa Campos called on Sunday evening, April 2, with third-hand news of a Clapper Rail report. The way I got the story is that a group of North American birders saw this species somewhere along the Tempisque River. Hopefully, Julio Sánchez will have more details that I'll be able to report in the upcoming edition of this newsletter, but he's currently off on a field trip.

And finally, I thought I'd pass along this little tidbit that I stumbled upon while surfing for an image of a Western Slaty-Antshrike (which, by the way, you'll have noticed was not an image, but a sound clip and a brief mention of why this species is no longer called Slaty Antshrike in Central America). It's an abstract of the paper: "A test of the Skutch hypothesis: does activity at nests increase nest predation risk?" published by J.J. Roper and R.R. Goldstein in Journal of Avian Biology, No. 2, June 1997 (ISSN 0908-8857).

I hope that you've enjoyed this newsletter and welcome any comments at gonebirdingcr@gmail.com or if you're in Costa Rica, feel free to give me a ring at 293-2710.