friends and nemeses
The human mind is a funny thing: the greater one’s success, the more it tends to magnify one’s failures. When he was in college, D had a friend who after graduating attained tremendous success playing poker professionally. He was named among the top 30 players under age 30 at one point. At the height of his success, he would take at least one month off every year to clear his head and beat back depression: accustomed to making the right play and calculating the odds to perfection, it wasn’t the big hands that he won that stayed with him; rather, it was the bad beats that haunted his dreams and drove him to the breaking point every year.
So it goes with many other pursuits. When one expects to succeed and does everything in one’s power to ensure success, failure brings with it a particularly jarring emotional shock. In birding, one of D’s passions, there is an appropriately dire-sounding term for this phenomenon: the nemesis bird. As Peter Kaestner — the world’s most successful birder and D’s personal idol — explains, “It’s a species that eludes you after multiple attempts, especially if the bird was or should have been there. There is a connotation that something supernatural is getting between you and seeing that bird.” Even Kaestner, who has seen nearly 90 percent of the world’s known bird species, has his nemeses.
When one is just starting out in this hobby, one does not think in terms of targets and nemeses, as every outing provides seemingly limitless possibilities of seeing something new and exciting. For D, after nearly two years of focused birding all over Costa Rica, researching target species before he sets out has now become an indispensable part of his routine. There are still too many species he hasn’t seen to think of nemeses, but he’s also seen enough — roughly 60 percent of Costa Rica’s recorded species — that proactively looking for specific birds and knowing where to find them is the only way to continue adding to his life list.
For example, when D headed out to Braulio Carrillo National Park several weekends ago — his first birding outing in Costa Rica in nearly three months! — he went looking for two birds in particular: the cinnamon woodpecker, which had eluded him on multiple prior outings, and the slate-colored grosbeak, which is known to frequent a small, family-run reserve on the outskirts of the national park. The woodpecker cooperated easily enough. The grosbeak, on the other hand, stayed out of reach, responding to playback from its perch in the dense foliage but never deigning to show itself: a definite nemesis candidate.
As if to offset this non-sighting, D unexpectedly lucked into a Louisiana waterthrush — a migratory bird that had long been on his target list and which has been recorded on a mere one percent of all checklists submitted in the area. And in the national park itself, where D went for a mid-morning walk after his visit to the reserve, he saw (though failed to photograph) a blue-and-gold tanager — a rare, vulnerable bird he had sought for many months. Making friends out of three potential nemeses counts as a definite success at this stage of D’s Costa Rica birding quest.
The following weekend, D and a friend from his frisbee team spent a night at another family-run reserve — this one near Tapanti National Park — to look for the sharpbill, a unique and elusive bird D had only ever come close to seeing once. Birding in the late afternoon and spending all of the following morning on the trails before breakfast, D and his friend enjoyed tremendously good fortune. D managed to lure a sharpbill out of the canopy with playback; a group of white-crowned manakins D saw for the first time put on a courting display; and he also added two tyrannulet species to his life list. D’s friend, who works as a naturalist guide, said he couldn’t remember the last time he had seen new birds in Costa Rica.
Pictured from top to bottom: snowcap; king vulture; violet-headed hummingbird; Louisiana waterthrush; sharpbill. The slideshow contains three new lifers that would not pose for close-up photos: cinnamon woodpecker; rufous-browed tyrannulet, and white-crowned manakin (female). The male white-crowned manakins have spectacular black-and-white plumage, but they were too busy courting the females to sit still for long. D managed to get a male manakin in his crosshairs only once and only for a split-second; the bird flew off before he could focus the camera properly or snap a photo.
towels packed, will travel 