So my third tour was back into a different area of Corcovado National Park, the Sirena Ranger Station, with a group of 5 including Mierta from Switzerland who was lots of fun. Sirena Ranger Station is where Bob and I had tried to get to from Puerta Jimenez, so I was looking forward to actually getting there. Manuel was our guide again and the boat crew was also the same. Today we had to carry our lunch due to the length of the walk, but when we sat down to eat lunch we were pleasantly surprised at the presentation and evry little detail they had attended to, including a surprise chocolate chip cookie, freshly baked! It was another early start, at 6.30am, and the boat ride took about 75 minutes and was quite bumpy. I felt for one of the group who I knew got sea sick. She had been a sailing instructor and also got sea sick snorkelling.. quite weird but she managed it well. The second most spectacular part of this trip was the beach landing amongst the breakers...some seriously good boat manouervering was done to get us safely close enough to the beach that we didn’t even get our shorts wet.
The most spectacular thing was the sighting of a puma just as we arrived on the beach. Not quite as spectacular as the day before when others had seen it eating a monkey but nonetheless there it was in view under a tree and we watched it for some time until it got up and walked away. We also saw squirrel monkeys and capuchin (white faced) monkeys which we did not see in San Pedrillo area. Then of course there were the spider and howler monkeys. One of the capuchin monkeys came down
and stole two birds eggs out of a nest and took them back up into a tree and ate them in full view. We saw both types of pecarrys, the white collared and the white lipped. A large group of each passed right in front of us, across the track we were taking. We saw two different types of trogons. A bird eating snake, about 5 feet long, lay across the trail and wasnt very happy we were there. It eventually slithered off into the bush. Im not sure it was better when we could see it on the trail or when it was in the vegetation and not so visible...eek!
We also saw a caiman and 3 crocodiles. A couple of days earlier the group had seen a crocodile take a pelican on the shore. As we watched one of the crocodiles return from the see we thought we may also be witness to something like this as it disappeared under the water close to a bird on the shore. Nothing happened but we were torn between wanting to stay to see what happened and the fact that we couldnt see it any longer and it could just as easily have surfaced on our side of the shore..eek again!! Another pretty bird – female yellow and green, turkeys (guans) and jungle chickens. Two sloths, a toucan, macaws overhead. Needless to say, we were once again exposed to a mind boggling amount of wildlife in its natural environment.
On the return trip we were treated to an up close look at Gerona Waterfall and some spectacular coastline. Again some great boat driving to deal with the swell and to take us up to the coastline and through rocky islands to show us some brown boobies. Also a potoo, that is also known as a stick bird as it blends in like a stick in a tree. There were loads of butterflies here including two blue morphs which are always spectacular to see.
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