Hi Everyone,We had a great trip on the Celebrity Constellation. Our ports of call were; Grand Cayman, Cartagena, Panama, Costa Rica, and Cozumel. This is close to the same itinerary that next years cruise with Carefree Birding will be; however, next year they add Roatan, Honduras to the list of ports and the ship will be the new Equinox which has it's maiden voyage in August.
Celebrity is a very nice cruise line. The food was excellent and the service was quite good. We really did not have any complaints about the cruise. We had a great time birding in all ports. In Grand Cayman we revisited the Queen Elizabeth Gardens (this is the place we will take the group). The flowers were blooming and the birds were chirping. We will be uploading some new video taken their and will let you know when it is ready for prime time. Some of the birds we saw their were; Cayman Parrot, cuban bull finch, yucatan vireo, west-indian woodpecker, western spindalis, loggerhead kingbird to name a few!
Then off we were to Cartagena. We took a boat ride on a river which was very productive. We saw snail kites, rufescent tiger heron, ringed kingfisher, black collared hawk, cocoi heron, lesser yellow headed vulture, southern lapwing and the most interesting bird, the Northern Screemer! (I attached a picture of this one). Then we headed to the botanical garden and saw a crimson crested woodpecker, crested oropendola. In all we saw about 35 species for our 4 hour trip.
We were a few hours late arriving in Panama, however, our guide Guido was there waiting for us. We explored a multitude of places to take you all and we had a great afternoon of birding. Besides the birds, we saw a two toed sloth and monkeys! The highlights of our birds were wattle jacana, yellow headed caracara, chestnut headed oropendola, panama flycatcher, thick-billed euphonia, slaty-tailed trogon and a golden collared manakin. Can you imagine if we had birded in the morning instead of the heat of the day?
Off to Costa Rica where Alex met us for a morning of bird watching. We started out by taking a quick trip down a river where our highlights were the collared aracari , green kingfisher, amazon kingfisher, and the ringed kingfisher. Then off we went exploring the country side! The highlights were keel-billed toucan, olive-back euphonia, yellow-crowned euphonia, , pale vented pigeon, common black hawk, montezuma oropendola and black-checked woodpecker. Alex wanted to show us and his son Kevin a black chested jay. We drove 40 or so miles and saw two of these birds, they are only found in a very small area of Costa Rica. We have stayed with Alex in his B&B several times in the last several years. For the day we saw around 46 species.
Our last port was Cozumel. There we explored a couple of new options for the next visit. After traveling around the island, we determined the San Gervasio ruins area is still the best location for seeing the endemics of Cozumel like the Cozumel Emerald. Our guide drove us to a very secluded place behind the ruins. It was hard to believe that we were on Cozumel, we did not see any vehicles or people for several hours. Then we returned to the beach and were reunited with civilization.
Both Linda and I had a great trip, but we missed our "Carefree Buddies" . We hope that you will be able to join us on the cruise next year so we can have more fun. We also look forward to meeting and laughing with our new CB's, as several new people have signed up and are ready to go.
About the pictured bird:
Our bird "expert" in South America who had no idea what any bird was told me that this was a turkey. So we called it a funny turkey until we got home and found out it was the Norther Screamer. There are about ten thousand of these birds in S.A. and two other types of screamers. When we first saw it, we said that it looked like a large duck, crossed with a goose, and had the wings of an eagle, legs like an ibis and a face of a vulture. We will have to go back and hear it scream.
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