birding the pine ridge

Our first morning at Hidden Valley in Belize’s Mountain Pine Ridge Forest was a gloomy one. D woke up early, eager to sneak in a birding walk before breakfast. Rather than set an alarm, he had left a curtain open just a crack so that a sliver of natural light would filter into the room in the wee hours of the morning. He figured this, coupled with his excitement for birding for the first time in a new country, would be enough to rouse him out of bed while S still slumbered. D laced up his hiking boots, gathered his birding gear, and stepped outside to find the Pine Ridge blanketed in thick fog. It wasn’t raining — not really — but the air was heavy with precipitation, and tiny drops of water would occasionally spray out of the soupy mist. These were sub-optimal birding conditions, to put it mildly.

Still, since he was already awake and dressed, D forged forward. He took a short trail from the lodge and slogged through some slick and muddy forest terrain. In half an hour of walking, D saw just one bird — not one species, mind you, but rather one solitary bird. What’s worse, the bird had been in a thicket and had spotted D first, so all D saw was its tail feathers as it flushed from its hiding spot and sped away. It was not the start to our Belize vacation D had envisioned. Then again, things could only get better, he reasoned. D soldiered on, and was rewarded for his perseverance.

The first bird D actually saw well was a rusty sparrow. Not the most exciting of birds, one might think, but D was thrilled to find one, as it was a lifer for him. A skulking Central American species, the rusty sparrow only shows up in a couple of spots in Costa Rica; D tried to find it once with a guide but came away empty-handed. Along with the sparrow, D spotted a rufous-capped warbler, which popped up out of the brush for a split second. It was too brief of a sighting for a photo, alas. D would have loved one, as this species — which was split from the chestnut-capped warbler we have in Costa Rica — was likewise a lifer. Two birds, two lifers — the day was looking up even if the weather remained dismal. Heading back toward the lodge to warm up and have breakfast, D spotted his third lifer of the morning — a white-eyed vireo. The climactic conditions were such that D did not even bother trying to get a photo; luckily, he saw this bird again a few days later in more favorable light.

The inclement weather cleared up after lunch, so the two of us set out for a birding walk around the lodge, spotting two more new-to-us birds in quick succession: the yellow-tailed oriole, which had eluded us on our visit to Caño Negro and Medio Queso (one of the few places where it can be seen somewhat reliably in Costa Rica), and Couch’s kingbird, which is nearly identical to the omnipresent tropical kingbirds we see in Costa Rica. A hundred feet down the trail, another lifer — the yellow-throated warbler — presented itself in a mixed warbler flock. D took a handful of proof-of-life photos before we were forced to beat a hasty retreat to our room. We had forgotten to put on bug oil, which proved a terrible mistake. The no-see-ums in Belize are fiercer than in any place we’ve ever been. The rain had kept them at bay in the morning, but with the weather improving they were out in full force, swarming our unprotected hands, necks, and faces without mercy.

We returned to the trails slathered up in the eucalyptus-scented bug oil provided by our lodge and enjoyed an immensely pleasant walk around the Hidden Valley trails, seeing three dozen species and notching one additional lifer — the azure-crowned hummingbird — along the way. Seven lifers during our first day — without even leaving our lodge and despite the inclement weather — was a stellar start to birding Belize. It also proved to be the largest single-day bump to D’s life list. He would pick up half a dozen additional new species by the time we left the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, but they were all “onesies and twosies” — a couple of species here, another there, but never again such a big haul as we enjoyed on our first full day in Belize.

Some of our Belize lifers — like the green-backed sparrow, wedge-tailed sabrewing, and golden-fronted woodpecker — are simply impossible to see where we live, because these Central American specialties don’t reach down to Costa Rica. Others, like the yellow-winged tanager, have an extremely limited distribution in our host country and had eluded us for two years. Spotting this gorgeous bird, in particular — first in a mixed flock at Caracol National Monument and then on the feeders at Black Rock Lodge — filled D with joy. Black Rock was the last of the many places we visited across the Pine Ridge, and though our hike there yielded only one lifer, it was the most special find of our weeklong stay: a thicket tinamou flushed from its hiding spot right along the trail and ran out into the open briefly before diving back into the thicket. D’s photos were diagnostic but not worth publishing; the sighting of this furtive, rarely-seen bird, however, was spectacular, especially after D had sought it in vain all over Guanacaste the previous month.

Pictured from top to bottom, all lifers: yellow-winged tanager, rusty sparrow, white-eyed vireo, yellow-tailed oriole, golden-fronted woodpecker, green-backed sparrow, wedge-tailed saberwing.