So like I mentioned in my overview post here, Nayara offers about a billion different tours ranging from super adventurous to very low key. We are definitely more low key travelers, and picked a few tours that challenged us a little, but weren’t anything like zip lining or doing anything having to do with cliffs.

Brian and I are extremely amateur birders, and I keep a life list in a note in my iPhone. I really keep thinking I should get a proper app to keep track, but I still haven’t. Either way, we love birding because you get to see a whole different level of the ecosystem which, if you’re not paying attention, you could totally miss. We learned to use binoculars properly our first time in Belize in 2019, and we both have our own pair now. No long, telephoto lenses for cameras or anything, we usually rely on our guides and their fancy monoculars for photos.

For this outing, we got up way before dawn and met our guide at 5am in the lobby of the resort. He told us we were going to a different resort to see some birds, which is more of a place geared towards naturalists. I was a bit skeptical at first, but this place, the Arenal Observatory Lodge & Trails, is really a very cool place and not really a resort, but more of a place where you can wander around and see some really cool stuff. The views here were incredible! Our guide Hugo was about our age, super chill, and extremely knowledgable. He was also super patient if I was having a hard time finding whatever we were looking at, and took a few really great shots with my iPhone through his monocular.

Our first stop here was on the deck of the main part of the lodge, where they have a giant feeder that they put all sorts of melons on, and a ton of different species come here to chomp on the sweet yummy fruit. We saw at least 15 different species come around in the span of about 30-40 minutes. It was really a lively place, and a nice way to start the morning, even if it was kind of like cheating. Some of the species we saw here were: Green Honeycreeper, Crested Guan, Emerald tanager, and a ton of Montezuma Oropendolas.

We then started wandering around the grounds, which were really pretty. There was a whole area with a lot of flowering bushes where we saw at least five or six species of hummingbirds (we saw eight total hummingbird species during the course of the morning!).

THEN we saw the bird that I was hoping to see while we were in Costa Rica. When I saw the Collared Aracari in the Costa Rica bird book, I thought, “Boy, this is one of the coolest looking birds I’ve ever seen!” We actually saw several!

We also got a great view of a broad billed motmot – one of my other faves from our trip.

Bird watching often gets a bad rap as an “old” person activity. Plus, you have to wake up super early to see the most species at dawn when the birds are the most active, so it’s not super popular amongst the younger set. However, I think that it is so cool that you can see these incredibly beautifully-plumed animals that you usually think you could only see on a NatGeo show or Discovery Channel or something. But if you look a little bit, and make a tiny effort, the birds are always all around you! I highly recommend checking out a birding tour wherever you may go. You’ll be so surprised at how much you will see!