Birds
Costa Rica Pictures

Specialists in Latin America adventure travel, Footloose have been organising small group tours of Costa Rica for many years. Late Booking Discount | Brochure | Costa Rica Discovery | Jewels of Costa Rica

Another bird photo below

A blue-crowned motmot.

Birds are one of Costa Rica's biggest wildlife attractions but little will be seen without powerful binoculars and a good guide spotting for you. As any true twitcher knows you'll need a vast lens [400mm+ with image stabiliser] to catch any decent pictures of our nervous feathered friends, though the country plays host to hundreds of unusual birds.
Some of the best wildlife parks for birds are:
La Selva Biological Station on the Northern Plains [excellent for amateurs]; the ever-popular Monteverde Cloud Forest on the Northern Plains [400 species including quetzals, emerald toucanets, blue-crowned motmots]; Palo Verde, NW Costa Rica mostly for 279 species of water birds [best Sept-March]; Carara in the Central Pacific zone [scarlet macaws, boat-billed herons, trogons]; Cerro de la Muerte in the South Pacific zone [especially good for quetzal sightings] and of course the distant but still untamed Corcovado, also South Pacific, with its large population of scarlet macaws.

A very rare and distant quetzal sighting with a too-short lens. On a good quality one week bird watching tour you may expect to see around 300 species.