Author: DMcA

In March and April 2026, I spent three weeks in Costa Rica on a solo trip dedicated to bird photography. I travelled around 1,500 km in a 4×4, visiting 21 birding locations. My route took me from San José and Vara Blanca through the Sarapiquí River region, the Caribbean-slope rainforest and northern lowlands, onward to Arenal and the Central Pacific, and finally into the cloud forest of the Talamanca Highlands.

At every location, I hired experienced local guides who could point out the area’s unusual and remarkable birds. Over the three weeks, I took 70,000 images. This album brings together around 30 of the very best. I hope you enjoy them and that they pique your interest in exploring the 13 individual albums that follow.

Across the collection are Resplendent Quetzals, hummingbirds, toucans, tanagers, vultures, owls, macaws and many other birds, alongside photographs of frogs, bats, insects and waterfalls. Each album offers a closer look at a different part of this varied, beautiful and memorable country.

In particular, don’t miss the final album: the Resplendent Quetzals at Paraíso Lodge in the Talamanca Highlands. That was the most extraordinary bird photography experience of my life and, without a shadow of a doubt, the most incredible photographs I have taken of a flying bird.

Full details of the trip—including where I stayed, the birding centres I visited, transportation, food tips and other useful information—are in my Costa Rica trip report.

A note on camera and lenses

I thought long and hard about what camera equipment to take and settled on the Olympus OM-1 Mark II and the OM 50–200mm f/2.8, with the MC-14 1.4× and MC-20 2× teleconverters. Every bird photograph in this album and the 13 albums that follow was taken with the 50–200mm.

Many photographers, particularly bird photographers, question the use of a 2× teleconverter for serious work, especially on a zoom lens. Before the trip, I extensively tested the 50–200mm f/2.8 with and without the converters in February 2026, and wrote about it in this post. The tests showed that the lens produced excellent image quality, even with a 2× converter. But test results are one thing; a once-in-a-lifetime bird photography trip is another, so I reviewed the 70,000 images with some trepidation when I returned.

I’ve been extremely happy with the results, particularly given how lightweight and usable this lens is. The bird images show every element of the feather detail and capture and enhance all the colours and Iridescence of their plumage. Across the 245 bird images in these albums, the EXIF data show that about 45% were taken with the MC-14, 43% with the MC-20, and 6% with the 50–200mm alone.

In this album, the numbers are: 2 without a teleconverter, 16 with the MC-14 (1.4×), and 12 with the MC-20 (2×). I’d be interested to know whether you can tell which images used the 2× converter and which used no converter (the answer can be found by clicking the “i” button in the top right corner of the image page).

This trip confirmed the 50–200mm as my go-to wildlife lens for the foreseeable future. I hope the albums might also help other photographers considering a high-quality, lightweight super-zoom setup.

To view an image at full size, select it to open the viewer, then use the arrows to move through the album. Open the information panel to read the image title and description.

On the drive from Sarapiquí towards Boca Tapada, I took a detour into the volcanic hills around Bajos del Toro, about two hours by road from San José. This area has spectacular mountain scenery that really surprised me, and some gorgeous waterfalls. It lies on the northern flank of the Poás volcanic complex, where rivers have cut deep valleys through lava and other volcanic deposits.

Catarata del Toro is the most dramatic single fall: the water drops about 90 metres (295 feet) into what the reserve describes as an old volcanic crater, with steep rock walls and dense greenery around it.

There are several viewpoints above Catarata del Toro before the long, 500-step staircase to the base. I went all the way down, and the close view of the falling water and spray was impressive. The climb back up was hard and time-consuming, however. If I returned, I would spend longer photographing from those upper viewpoints and save more energy for the amazing Blue Falls of Quebrada Gata across the road.

There are six of these beautiful waterfalls, three to the right of the trail and three to the left. Of the six, I would recommend the second in the series, Las Gemelas, or the “twins”, so called because it consists of adjacent waterfalls fed by two separate rivers. The water at Las Gemelas is an extraordinary azure colour caused by minerals in the water flowing through this volcanic landscape.

The approach path is really well laid out and safe, and offers several places to photograph the blue river before the main fall, which is flat-out one of the most gorgeous waterfalls I’ve ever seen. The second fall is enclosed by a ravine around a corner and is reached over slippery rocks with a local guide watching. A terrific experience and one I would return to in a heartbeat. For these shots, I used the OM-3, hand-held with the 18–25 mm (36–50 mm full-frame equivalent) lens. If you ever go, I found that longer exposures both softened the water flow and brought out the intense blue of the river.

Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right-hand corner to get the best viewing experience. For information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon. And finally click the “heart” icon for photos you particularly like – this helps me understand which photos are more popular

Boca Tapada is a small settlement beside the San Carlos River in the northern lowlands of Costa Rica. This is a landscape of farms, river channels and rainforest near the Maquenque Wildlife Refuge, much quieter and less developed than the Sarapiquí corridor. Laguna del Lagarto Lodge, my base for two nights, is about 7 km north of the village and roughly 15 km south of the San Juan River, which forms the Nicaraguan border. It is around 70 km by road from Puerto Viejo de Sarapiquí, or about three and a half hours’ drive from San José airport.

The lodge has a lagoon, a substantial private rainforest reserve and trails, and strong links to specialist photography sites on nearby properties. This combination makes Boca Tapada really worth the journey for bird photographers.

My first session was at the lodge’s vulture hide, which featured an impressive array of rare King Vultures. The hide gave me close views and some impressive wing positions, but the daily feeding arrangement felt more managed than the mountain hide at Pierella.
Andrew’s Garden was different again: a simple private garden with flowering shrubs, stools to sit on, and little else. The hummingbirds came to feed among the plants in natural light. When I visited, it was fiercely hot and bright, and following small birds through the tangle of stems was not easy, but the garden produced a gratifying range of flight positions and flowers in a completely natural environment.

The album starts with four King Vulture photographs, then moves to twelve from Andrew’s Garden. It closes with two photographs made in natural light at Adolfo’s nearby garden: a Clay-colored Thrush, Costa Rica’s national bird, and an encounter between a Blue-gray Tanager and a Palm Tanager.

Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right-hand corner to get the best viewing experience. For information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon. And finally click the “heart” icon for photos you particularly like – this helps me understand which photos are more popular

Next to Laguna del Lagarto Lodge, Adolfo and his assistant Emilio run a specialist photography area on a covered deck adjacent to the forest. They have designed a sophisticated multi-flash setup in conjunction with expert bird photographers, enabling stunning photographs to be taken in almost perfect conditions.

By day, hummingbirds come from the forest to feed on flowering plants lit by the multi-flash setup. After dark, nectar-feeding bats visit another arrangement of flowers and flashes. I photographed both sessions on my own rather than in a group (which is the normal setup). Having the entire place to myself was terrific and gave me the flexibility and time to get some of the best hummingbird shots of the trip, as well as some remarkable shots of bats, which I had never achieved before.

The huge advantage of this setup is being able to shoot at base ISO for maximum image quality while simultaneously freezing the wing motion in a way that even 1/4,000 s cannot achieve. These were the only shots on the entire trip where the wing detail was fully captured without the slightest blur. It’s clearly not a wholly natural environment, but the birds are used to the flash and seemed completely untroubled by it. It is an entirely different situation from suddenly exposing a frog to a blinding flash at night.

The covered deck is not lit except when the flashes fire, so the scene is actually pretty dim. Following the birds through the viewfinder in this light is a real challenge for any photographer. However, the OM-1 Night View display, which amplifies the viewfinder brightness in dim conditions, transformed the situation, and I completely recommend it in multi-flash setups like this. Night View plus Pro Capture enabled me to take thousands of perfectly sharp frames, from which I have selected ten with different species, flowers, angles and wing positions.

The bat session was much harder. It took place at night, and the space was completely dark apart from a dim modelling light. The technique that worked in the earlier hummingbird session did not work here at all. The bats appeared briefly and flew too fast for me to use pre-capture. In addition, I found after a frustrating 20 minutes that Night View caused a small but crucial delay between pressing the shutter and the flash firing. This was not an issue with the relatively slow-moving hummingbirds, but resulted in a lot of missed photographs for the lightning-fast bats. Once I turned Night View off, the flash responded immediately, and my hit rate improved.

It was still very difficult photography because without Night View, all I could do was roughly point the camera at the flower and fire as soon as I sensed the tiny movement of a black bat in the night. A group session preceded mine, and a very disconsolate French photographer told me he’d managed to get only one shot and wasn’t even sure about that. I was therefore absolutely delighted to get these final eight photographs, which follow the Pallas’s Long-tongued Bats as they approach the flowers, feed and fly away.

Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right-hand corner to get the best viewing experience. For information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon. And finally click the “heart” icon for photos you particularly like – this helps me understand which photos are more popular

The Arenal area is dominated by its volcanic cone and the enormous lake beside it. I stayed at the Observatory Lodge, about 125 km from San José and 22 km from La Fortuna, on the ridge between the volcano and the lake, with forest trails, landscaped grounds and broad views right outside my room. The main viewing deck brings birds down to eye level at the fruit feeders, while nearby trees give them convenient places to gather before coming in. It is a much more accessible place to photograph birds than a dense forest walk, although the action can be just as difficult to follow.

The Red-legged Honeycreepers were particularly entertaining. They did not arrange themselves into neat portraits: they chased one another, left the feeder, changed height and crossed the frame in fractions of a second. I spent time watching which perch each bird used and where it went next, so that I could follow a sequence rather than guess at a single instant. Hummingbirds and a Gray-capped Flycatcher gave me further chances to catch birds leaving or passing through the viewing area.

On a guided walk, we also found a rare pair of Gartered Trogons. Our guide told me he had never seen one in Arenal before, and I was able to get shots of the male in flight, which was particularly pleasing. The album closes away from the feeders with two evening landscapes from the lodge: a golden view across Lake Arenal and a red sunset beyond the ridges and wind turbines.

Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right-hand corner to get the best viewing experience. For information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon. And finally click the “heart” icon for photos you particularly like – this helps me understand which photos are more popular

After Arenal, my next stop was Costa Rica’s Central Pacific coast, where the Tárcoles River flows into the ocean. It felt immediately different: much hotter and more humid, while still densely forested.

The main goal for the journey was a bird-focused trip on the Tárcoles with Jesús, a specialist bird guide who had driven over from San José for the tour. Jesús and the boat pilot were excellent guides for our morning boat trip, which started at 6:00 a.m. This pair have a profound knowledge of the birds on the river, and have individual names for most of them.

A handful of swifts accompanied us for the entire tour, and a Great Egret (“Walter White”) came to the boat and alighted on the bow for quite an extended period. Birds also fly across the river very photogenically, almost on demand. The photographs from the river include herons, egrets, a Ringed Kingfisher, Turquoise-browed Motmots, Magnificent Frigatebirds and Ruddy Turnstones near a Roseate Spoonbill. Altogether, it was a very agreeable and delightful experience, and highly recommended.

I also booked a tour in the nearby Carara National Park, which was a “peer into the almost black forest and see a dot in the middle distance while whistling hopefully” kind of bird-spotters’ tour. I wouldn’t recommend the tour or the park entrance fee. However, the same young guide took me to a freely accessible trail closer to the river, at this location, where in a small grove of tall sweet cashew trees to the left, about 1 km in, we saw some beautiful macaws feeding and flying in and out, and I got my best macaw shots of the trip.

The photographs move from those macaws into the busy river morning: egrets and herons, a kingfisher and motmots, frigatebirds lifting from the water, and Ruddy Turnstones near a stationary Roseate Spoonbill.

Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right-hand corner to get the best viewing experience. For information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon. And finally click the “heart” icon for photos you particularly like – this helps me understand which photos are more popular

This segment of the trip was in the beautiful and much cooler San Gerardo de Dota valley, a dramatic valley high in the Talamanca mountains southeast of San José. It is a haven for small birds including the famed Resplendent Quetzal. The road that descends into the valley is unbelievably steep and twisty and not recommended for nervous drivers.

By the side of the river that plunges down the valley, there is an established Quetzal nest which can be seen from the valley road. The nest location is known to every tour guide in the valley, who all bring their clients to this single spot on the road. My tour started at 5:30 a.m. with a few fellow guests, but within an hour over 100 people turned up to get a glimpse of the Quetzal.

While we did see the Quetzal (and indeed I got some nice photographs of it), it was in less than ideal conditions, fifty metres away in dark forest, through a tiny opening in the canopy. We stood around for over two hours in a rugby scrum of people running up and down the road at the latest sighting of a Quetzal. This location and this approach are basically for people who do not know what is available at the top of the mountain and particularly at the Paraiso Quetzal lodge, which I will describe in the next album.

The rest of our bird tour was, by contrast, rather lovely. Just up the road from our hotel, behind the Savegre Hotel (which is probably a far better place to stay than the Lauraceas) is the Feathers Garden. This is a simple and delightful natural garden with two very nicely situated viewing platforms and an abundance of different hummingbirds and other small species.

I also went to the Batsu Gardens. This was excellent and would have been a highlight of the trip had I not already by that time got something like 3,000 portfolio-level hummingbird images. It is a very nicely landscaped garden located 400 m up the valley slope. I was the only photographer there for three hours. It’s a great place to spend as much time as you need getting exactly the right shot with the right background of your chosen bird, and it was designed with photographers in mind.

Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right-hand corner to get the best viewing experience. For information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon. And finally click the “heart” icon for photos you particularly like – this helps me understand which photos are more popular

Paraiso Quetzal Lodge stands high on the Talamanca ridge above San Gerardo de Dota, about 90 minutes from San José. This was the last birding stop on my trip and by far the greatest birding experience of my life. I cannot praise this hotel and its facilities enough. The staff, the hotel location, the facilities and the room were all absolutely exemplary.

The hotel is in a stunning location, and my room had the most beautiful mountain setting of the entire trip, but that is not what sets the hotel apart. What made this place completely memorable, if not astonishing, was its unique access to Quetzals. The lodge has an arrangement with a farmer nearby, in an area popular with Quetzals.

Eight years ago, they set up a special nest for these extraordinary birds, in a tree trunk located around 30 m from a small but simple viewing platform attached to the farmer’s house. Two chicks had hatched two days before I arrived, and this was the perfect time to see these extraordinary and magnificent birds.

From the viewing platform, you can see the ritual as the male or female Quetzal emerges from the hole in the trunk and flies off to forage for food. Both the inward and outward journeys offered unmatched opportunities for flight shots, particularly of the male Resplendent Quetzal with its extraordinary tail feathers.

Seeing the birds at all was by no means guaranteed and you might only get a couple of fleeting glimpses in a two-hour session, but it was a world away from the zoo down in the valley. This was such an incredible opportunity with such fleeting moments of extraordinary beauty that I went three times to the farm to photograph the Quetzals.

Both the arrival and the departure of the male and female birds were over in a matter of seconds and you had to be continuously alert for hours to be able to capture them. Their speed of travel and relative closeness to the viewing platform made panning with the birds’ flight paths technically quite hard and really good technique was required along with the highest possible shutter speed. The OM-1 responded magnificently and I got shots that I am really very proud of and which I think I will never be able to repeat in my lifetime.

The last session was my final bird-photography experience in Costa Rica on this trip. I was able to put all the learning I had got in the earlier two sessions to use and got some extraordinary images of these truly mystical birds in the last minutes of my tour. The feeling of elation and wonderment was overwhelming even for a cynical old coot like myself.

I cannot recommend this lodge and its sensitively managed and ecologically sound Quetzal-viewing experience enough. This alone is sufficient reason to come to Costa Rica in my view.

Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right-hand corner to get the best viewing experience. For information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon. And finally click the “heart” icon for photos you particularly like – this helps me understand which photos are more popular

Pierella’s family-run garden in Horquetas de Sarapiquí also has a mountain property about an hour away up a very rough dirt road. This was the family ranch before they bought the butterfly station property down in the valley. The area is a favourite location for Turkey and King Vultures, so Pierella have built a very well-equipped viewing station available for private bookings.

Vultures, of course, are scavengers, and to provide a concentrated viewing experience, the guides placed raw meat (in this case, pigs’ heads) on two tree stumps adjacent to the viewing platform. It wasn’t long before the first Turkey Vultures arrived and enthusiastically tucked in.

They were followed by a Crested Caracara and then some magnificent King Vultures. From the platform, I could follow the birds as they approached, settled, competed around the food and took flight again. Their size and the spread of their wings made a striking change from the small birds photographed earlier in Sarapiquí, and the forest canopy provided an arresting backdrop.

Vultures are not popular birds with many people, but in flight I think their magnificent wingspan, highly expressive faces and beautiful colouration make them some of the most impressive of all raptors.

Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right-hand corner to get the best viewing experience. For information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon. And finally click the “heart” icon for photos you particularly like – this helps me understand which photos are more popular

Donde Cope is a small wildlife garden in La Unión de Guápiles, about 45–50 minutes from my base in Sarapiquí. José Alberto “Cope” Pérez is a Costa Rican artist, photographer and naturalist who has turned the land around his house into a unique place to photograph wildlife. A small river runs below the viewing platform in his back garden, with extensive forest beyond it, and every part of this is explored.

Cope is unique because he is a superb photographer in his own right and understands what photographers need. He also has a profound and instinctive understanding of his own patch of forest, and a visible bond with the animals living around it. He led us into the forest to see Crested Owls and a Spectacled Owl, which were improbably deep in the forest and almost invisible, even when he pointed to them. A real find was the remarkable Great Potoo (Nyctibius grandis), a nocturnal bird whose plumage makes it look like part of the broken tree on which it rests. Back in the garden, he had lights set up around flowers for hummingbird photography without flash, which led to some of my most dramatic shots of the trip so far.

The clearest example of Cope’s bond with nature was that a full-grown female Brown-throated Three-toed Sloth and her baby were living in his back garden. They came slowly down a tree to within two metres of us, in one of the most extraordinary experiences of the trip. Most sloths I had seen were a distant patch of fur high in a tree, so this was a privileged opportunity to photograph something rare and special.

Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right-hand corner to get the best viewing experience. For information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon. And finally click the “heart” icon for photos you particularly like – this helps me understand which photos are more popular

The character of the Sarapiquí forest changes completely after dark, as does the style of photography. At night, the subjects were suddenly at arm’s length: frogs on leaves, a spider on a stem, and creatures whose colours and shapes would have been easy to miss during the day. Here I was able to use the remarkable macro and close-up properties of the 50–200 mm lens, which can focus as close as 78 cm even at its full 400 mm full-frame-equivalent focal length. Flash photography of nighttime wildlife is strongly discouraged in Costa Rica for obvious reasons, so I used a continuous LED light for illumination.

At Tirimbina, I went on a couple of nighttime tours of the forest with experienced guides who were extraordinary in their ability to spot well-camouflaged insects and lizards that I could never have seen without their help. There’s no question, however, that I should have taken an evening to get familiar with nighttime macro photography before I started the tour, because the worst time to stop and adjust your settings is in the pitch black, surrounded by other tourists and being moved on every few minutes. A further problem with group tours like this is that everybody else has a torch, so your carefully composed shot with perfect lighting suddenly becomes orders of magnitude brighter as other guests train their torches on the insect or frog.

Centro Manú provided a much richer and more pleasant experience, despite some very challenging weather. This is an education and conference centre 6 km south of Guápiles, with tours led by the owners’ son, Kenneth Matarrita, a passionate and experienced frog expert and guide. I went on a solo tour, which was reasonably priced and completely eliminated the problem of being surrounded by tourists who were not photographers.

It was still a difficult session because absolutely torrential rain fell throughout the frog tour, making visibility and the operation of the camera and lens extremely challenging. With a different camera system I would have had to stop because of the risk of water damage, but the incredible water resistance of the OM-1 camera and telephoto lens allowed me to photograph for a couple of hours in absolutely drenching rain without any impact on the system. The camera coped rather better than my waterproof clothing; I ended the evening completely soaked but with some good frog photographs.

The Tirimbina and Centro Manú photographs include a glass frog, tree frogs, a Smoky Jungle Frog, a tree snail and other small forest subjects.

The album also includes six photographs from Pierella Garden. They were taken in daylight but include some of the best shots from the entire trip of the Red-eyed Tree Frog, as well as a surprising shot of tiny but fully grown Honduran White Bats tucked beneath a leaf.

Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right-hand corner to get the best viewing experience. For information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon. And finally click the “heart” icon for photos you particularly like – this helps me understand which photos are more popular

Dave & Dave’s Nature Pavilion is in La Virgen de Sarapiquí, only a few hundred metres from Tirimbina Lodge. It is a world-famous site for hummingbird photography and has been designed around capturing these birds in the most photogenic surroundings possible. The family bought what had been a palm plantation beside the Sarapiquí River and replanted it to attract a variety of local species, advised by the nearby La Selva Biological Station.

A deck above the slope to the river puts the photographer at eye level with flowers and the hummingbirds that visit them. Heliconia flowers are set out within about two metres of the deck, without sugar being injected into them. I could stay in one position, watch the birds’ approaches and photograph them hovering in natural light at reasonably low ISOs. I took around three thousand perfect images, far too many, but the ability to get such fabulous shots of hummingbirds so close was irresistible. You’ll be pleased to hear that I am showing you only six photographs here, displaying different distances, angles and wing positions that you rarely see so close up.

Pierella Garden, in Horquetas de Sarapiquí, about 20 minutes away, was also hugely enjoyable. This family-run property is centred on a commercial butterfly-breeding operation, yet packs a remarkably rich range of bird and frog species into its grounds (the frog and bat shots from here are in the next album).

One of the absolute highlights shown to us by the guide was a pair of Rufous-tailed Jacamars perching on a branch near the butterfly station. Our guide remarked that they ate butterflies and was prepared to go and get some dead ones from the station. We then had an extraordinary sequence of the jacamars flying off the branch to collect their butterfly lunch and returning to eat it, presenting some really gorgeous wing positions and colours in the process. The garden photographs also include a nightjar resting on the forest floor.

Dave & Dave’s and Pierella were clearly set up with photographers in mind. In contrast, La Selva Biological Station, while an important research centre, was firmly oriented towards bird spotting, and hence only two photographs from it make the album: a green parakeet in flight beside a tree and a male Scarlet-rumped Tanager perched among the foliage.

Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right-hand corner to get the best viewing experience. For information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon. And finally click the “heart” icon for photos you particularly like – this helps me understand which photos are more popular