It’s great to be back after a long break to be with my two kids in Costa Rica for the birth of each of their first child (so my first and second grandchildren) and then shortly after a birding trip to Colombia with Hillstar Nature and Mollee Brown. The time with family was great, both mom’s and babies are healthy and beautiful, and I am glad I took the break. That said, I’ve missed the podcast, and am happy to be back.
This episode was done at my house in Tacoma local birding buddy Bruce LaBar. One of the good things about the pandemic and quarantine is the improved ability to video conference, and I’ve used these exclusively for a while now, so it was fun to sit down in person and record an episode.
Here are lots of links and a few photos from the trip.
Hillstar Nature
Nighthawk Agency is Mollee Brown’s company.
Montezuma Rainforest Lodge is the first lodge we stayed at and the home of Yessenia’s family.
Tinamu Hotel was the home base for several trips to great birding spots and is great in and of itself with trails and feeding stations for Gray-headed Dove, a Golden-collared Manakin lek, and more.
Doña Dora’s the great roadside restaurant and feeder station. The opening page of this site had a great video.
PNN Navados
My Trip Report on eBird This has a day by day narrative.
Tag: Colombia
The Bird Banter Podcast #172 with Joshua Covill Additional Info.
On this episode I got to reminisce with Josh Covill about our Colombia Santa Marta trip, to learn about his guide business in Montana and how he becamne so proficient with the birds of the neotropics. Josh is both an outstanding birder, but also a funny, humble and all-around nice guy. I was so happy to talk with Holly Garrod, whom I learned about from Josh while on the Colombia trip, and she was such a terrific guest on episode #170.
Josh was right on in his assessment of the group on our trip. We all seemed to have fun together, and there were no real difficult individuals. For anyone interested you can read about our trip on my eBird trip list here. Here is a link to an article about the new antpita species we got to see at El Dorado. For some of my photos of the trip here is a Flickr album link.
You can find Josh’s website for Montana birding tours here, or his page on the Hillstar Nature site here.