The Sevegre Hotel and Spa  – location 3 on the map of a few posts ago – in the valley of the Sevegre River is known for its birding, and in particular for the presence of the resplendent quetzal.   Feeders around reception teem with hummingbirds and sparrows and tanagers and woodpeckers. Brilliantly coloured flowers bloom at every turn. One hardly knows where to starting taking photos … but someone must, so I happily took that task upon myself.

We headed out after breakfast to three locations known to be popular with the quetzal but in spite of heroic efforts by Tomás (left) and Alejandro (right) to locate the bird, it eluded us. Sigh .. back to the hotel for lunch.

After lunch, Alejandro organized a brilliant field workshop on photographing hummingbirds.

The secret is threefold: find a background that is fairly plain so as not to take away from the focus on the bird; use a very high ISO – 1000 or 1600 is not too high; and shoot at an extremely high shutter speed. The photo to the right is one of my before-workshop photos. I took the photo of the green violetear at the top of this post and the one below after the workshop. My shutter speed was 1/2500. Another trick is to use continuous shooting and follow the hummingbird – one of the photos is bound to be in focus.
 Here are a few more photos of hummingbirds. 

The birds in the top and bottom left below are a silver-throated tanager (top) and a flame-colored tanager (below). The bird to the right is an acorn woodpecker.

Later in the afternoon, Tomás took some of us on a walk to a sometimes used nesting place for quetzals. Alas it is a couple of weeks too early for nesting activity. However we did spot a spot-crowned woodcreeper creeping upside down in the forest.

Til next time!