Hum along with the planet’s most resplendent birds, laze around with the world’s slowest mammals, hop about with marvelous frogs, and lose yourself in an imponderably beautiful sunset. Come to these cloud forests, and you’ll see that such a thing as paradise does exist.
In one word: prosperous. In two words: preposterously prosperous.
Hosting a dizzying 500,000 species — that’s more species per unit area than any other earthly country, by the way — Costa Rica stands as a sumptuous ecological tapestry draping the southern hemisphere. And when you consider that it houses 5% of Earth’s biodiversity in just 0.1% of its landmass, its name, which literally means ‘rich coast’, suddenly seems like the byproduct of excessive subtlety.
But then, when have words been anything but a travesty of Nature’s wonder? When have verbal eulogies been able to capture the magic of the birds rising to the clouds and the clouds descending to the treetops? Hence this Tour, so you may experience it firsthand.
If you’ve inferred that you’ll see and photograph a lot, you’re absolutely accurate.
Orchids and tropical flowers welcome us at the hotel in San José. And it’s all upwardly mobile thereafter.
In the Atlantic Lowland Rainforest range, keel-billed and chestnut-mandibled toucans, and brown-hooded parrots; green, red-legged and shining honeycreepers; lowland hummingbird species such as crowned woodnymph, white-necked jacobin, green-breasted mango, and scaly-breasted hummingbird.
In the idyllic premises of the Central Volcanic Mountain Range, your guest list may include black guan, silver-throated tanager, agouti and coatimundi. Meanwhile, the forests will treat you to the sheer extravagance of scarlet and great green macaws. Imaginatively named species like violet sabrewing and green hermit will capture your imagination, while the eulogized ones like the purple-throated mountain gem and the green-crowned brilliant will cause you to rapturously add to the eulogies.
All this avian frenzy will be complemented by some truly exquisite landscape photography at a nearby 360-foot waterfall and the delightful cloud forest around it. But the bird photography hubbub will not slow down even here, as black-bellied hummingbird, coppery-headed emerald, green thorntail and white-bellied mountain gem do a most efficacious job of distracting you from your wide-angle lens.
Meanwhile, there will be detailed discussions, extensive demonstrations and execution of flash-based photography setup and camera techniques, particularly with the many-hued, magnificently nimble hummingbirds, the only birds to have a reverse gear in flight! So the experience is as sweet for you as it is for these diminutive birds sucking nectar off the exquisite flowers.
Later, in the Talamanca Range Cloud Forest, you’ll be fully exposed to the wonders called golden-browed chlorophonia and long-tailed silky flycatcher, even as the delicious possibility of adding scintillant and green violet-ear hummingbirds to your already impressively long species list looms large.
But the flagship species here is without doubt the resplendent quetzal, which might as well have been named splendacious, for it dazzles with brilliance to yield exceptional delight. With a really long tail, a vivid front and a small beak, it’s a big marvel, and a massive draw.
Adding the icing to the cake could be hairy and acorn woodpeckers, golden-hooded tanager, sooty robin and large-footed finch, so you can see just why this Tour is such a delicious prospect.
Important Information: Indian citizens need a valid visa to enter Costa Rica unless the traveller possesses a valid United States visa. A U.S. visa enables free entry into Costa Rica.
This Tour commences at San José on the morning of 2 February 2020, and ends at the same place after breakfast on 13 February. Flight fares are not included in the Tour fee.
Entry into Costa Rica requires a valid visa. Please get in touch with us well in advance to have your visa application for the Tour processed. This typically needs at least two weeks.
Upon your arrival in Costa Rica, you will be met by Tour Skipper Sachin Rai, and if you arrive early enough, you’ll have the opportunity to photograph the orchids and other tropical flowers in the gardens of the hotel. Please note that meals are not included in the Tour fee on this day.
After an early breakfast, we check out and head to our first destination, a rainforest lodge where we photograph many birds at the feeders. Later, back at the lodge, we enjoy a highly enjoyable interactive session with Sachin Rai, prior to supper and retirement.
We will set out to photograph monkeys, crested guan, and collared aracaris around the lodge. Also, we will take time to photograph the numerous Montezuma oropendolas at the lodge feeders, where the staff will help us photograph colorful animals on natural stages that we will set up on site.
Prior to an invigorating breakfast, we enjoy a spot of good bird photography before climbing higher to the cloud forests of the northern Central Volcanic Mountain Range, where we’ll check in to our next lodge. En route, we stop at a nearby farm for a delicious lunch and then photograph macaws in flight and on attractive perches. In the evening we’ll enjoy a highly insightful session on flash-based setup photography by Sachin Rai.
After breakfast this day, we get straight down to the highly enjoyable task of photographing hummingbirds with our multiple-flash setups right on the lodge premises. The Skippers will run the setups and provide attractive native flowers to ensure that you capture some fantastic hummingbird images. When not on the setups, we can relax and download images, and photograph the other birds and mammals that frequent the premises. We can also explore the cloud forest trails for macro and landscape photography.
After breakfast, we visit a nearby waterfall for a round of landscape photography of some lush tropical foliage. In addition, we’ll have the opportunity to set up our multiple-flash ‘studio’ here to capture a few small hummingbird species. We’ll shoot throughout the day, alternating our time between the setups, perched hummingbirds, and landscape photography, enjoying a picnic lunch at the waterfall.
After an early breakfast this morning, we head up into the Talamanca Mountain Range en route to our last destination, the high cloud forests just on the Pacific side of the Continental Divide. We arrive at our hotel for lunch and spend the afternoon in pursuit of the resplendent quetzal, widely recognised as one the world’s most beautiful birds, and quite clearly our chief target over these three days.
Next morning we continue our search for the quetzal regardless of the previous evening’s success, for you can never have enough of this magnificent bird. After lunch we visit a house where special bird feeders will very probably get us some new species.
The third day at Talamanca will be spent visiting another property where bird feeders have been set up along with plants and bushes that attract some great birds. This afternoon, we’ll keep an eye out for the quetzal again, while also focusing on photographing a few different hummingbird species right outside the hotel’s restaurant.
After breakfast this morning, we’ll take a last shot at photographing some birds on the lodge premises before checking out and being transferred back to San José, arrive at the capital for lunch. We’ll spend the afternoon captioning and cataloguing images to ensure we get the species names right, and learn a bit of post-processing, before enjoying a farewell dinner in the hotel restaurant.
You are transferred to the international airport for your flight home, and the Tour ends after you’ve hopefully been introduced to the unbridled bounty of the American wild.
What can you learn on this Tour?
What if you are not a bird photographer?
Apart from interest, a valid visa and related documents, and a minimum level of fitness are essential. Visa assistance will be provided.
By what mode or modes will we explore Costa Rica?
We will travel between the destinations by road, but almost all the photography will be done on foot, or stationed in one place, in the case of setup multiple-flash photography sessions.
Considering the meticulous attention to timing we pay while scheduling Tours and the local expertise we leverage, we believe that it would be extremely unfortunate if our sightings and photography were unsatisfactory. Costa Rica is a country blessed with the greatest biodiversity, and the destinations we’ll be visiting are teeming with wildlife, particularly birds, but since we will be in an uncontrolled environment, we do not claim that sightings of specific species are guaranteed.
For birds, a lens with a focal length of around 400mm is essential. For mammals, a telephoto zoom lens in the range of 100 to 400mm works very well, but a longer lens is fine too. A wide-angle or normal zoom to capture landscapes or creative perspectives of wildlife is a must, along with a macro lens for closeup flora work. A tripod, with a gimbal head (such as the Wimberley II) or ball head is necessary, and so is an external flash unit with preferably a Better Beamer flash extender. However, if you do not have appropriate equipment, there is no need to fret. Toehold offers an exhaustive array of cameras, lenses and accessories for hire, so you can always hire what you need. Visit our Rental Store to see what we offer.
Exploring the rainforested wilderness in Costa Rica on the Toehold Photo Tour was an exhilarating experience. Not only will I cherish the stunning moments I got to capture as photographs but will always treasure the very experience of being there.
In this Central American country, apart from the countless breathtaking details of natural beauty, what stood out for me was watching this tiny little wonder, the humming bird, and making some interesting images of it.
Costa Rica contains many a wonder that will lead us to sensory overload. I particularly enjoyed watching and photographing the majestic creature, quetzal.
In a land far away from home, under the guidance of the Toehold Skipper, Jayanth Sharma, we had a great joy of exploring diverse wildlife and photographing them in their natural habitat. I hope to go back to Costa Rica again.