the magic of Sierpe

The Sierpe National Wetlands, much like Corcovado National Park to the south, are a marvel of Costa Rica’s biodiversity. Unfortunately, they’re also in tourist no-man’s land: too far south from Manuel Antonio to be worth a visit, but not quite part of the Osa Peninsula further south either.

It is possible to visit the wetlands by boat, hugging the shoreline either from Uvita to the north or Drake Bay to the south, but the tours are pricy and not straightforward to organize. The one leaving Uvita, where we spent Semana Santa with friends, depended on the tides and would have spanned the hottest part of the day — not ideal from a bird-watching perspective and likely uncomfortable also. As it was, the boat tour we took up the Sierpe River, which left from the namesake town, was almost too hot to bear, and we started early in the morning.

Staying in Uvita, it would have taken us about the same amount of time to drive north to Quepos to reach the Damas mangroves as to drive south to Sierpe. Having visited the former when we stayed in Manuel Antonio with S’s parents, we opted for the latter this time around. Because our tour started inland, we never crossed into the national wetlands conservation area itself. Our guides took us quite a ways up the river, though — much farther than we had expected them to, in fact. At one point, we reached a shallow point where the guides had to hop out to nudge the boat across a barely concealed sandbar; we had expected them to turn around there, but they kept going until we had reached a strand of bamboo where we found a troop of squirrel monkeys, the most playful and hardest to find of Costa Rica’s four primate species.

Because of D’s passion for birding, we’ve toured quite a number of Costa Rica’s wetlands and waterways in the year-and-a-half we have spent in this country to date: Caño Negro Wildlife Refuge and the Medio Queso wetlands near the Nicaragua border, the aforementioned Damas mangroves and the Playa Grande estuary on the Pacific coast, the Tempisque River and, now, the Sierpe River as well. With the exception of Caño Negro and Medio Queso, where we saw about a hundred different birds and still felt like we barely scratched the surface, most of these have similar birdlife. We keep going because birdwatching from a boat is delightful — and because one always sees something new even if the bird species stay mostly the same.

On the Tempisque River, it was crocodiles — monstrously big ones, by far the biggest ones we’ve seen. Along the Sierpe River, which had more bamboo than mangroves, we saw an impressive array of different animals to go along with all the usual birds: crocs and caimans, bats and monkeys, raccoons and agoutis, a large snake whose name escapes us, and even a neotropic river otter. One of our favorite things on guided tours is when our guides are just as excited by the wildlife we come across as we are. On the Sierpe tour, there were several instances when our guide whipped out his own camera and eagerly snapped photos alongside D or lamented missing a particularly rare sighting, like the river otter.

Living in Costa Rica, one sometimes feels like one is in a country-sized zoo, with all sorts of nature’s most marvelous creations on display. After a year-and-a-half, we still don’t take any of it for granted.