The elusive sunbittern was a sight to behold during trip to Costa Rica.
The hunt was on. Our group had been looking for the frustratingly elusive sunbittern in the rapids of the Tuis River of Costa Rica’s central highlands near the Rancho Naturalista eco-lodge.
Turns out we’d been staring at the bird without noticing it.
Even our sharp-eyed guide, Cali, who was raised in a community near the river, didn’t catch sight of the bird until it suddenly unfurled its radiant wings and took flight down the river, causing my wife, Kathy, consternation for not snapping a photo.
Cali led us along a branch of the nearby Rio Pacuare, cascading from the mountains and swirling around dark-gray boulders. Dense trees, shrubs and vines lined the river’s edge — a perfect habitat for a sunbittern.
We spotted the bird standing on a rock at the opposite side of the river in the shadow of overarching trees. There were great views through binoculars, but Kathy needed closer camera shots.
She crept through chigger-filled grass and around cows until finally she stopped and sat, as still as a tree stump. The bird across the river preened its feathers, flared its wings, made quick flights to nearby boulders –but mostly stood stone still. So Kathy got her photograph.
The bird resembled a small, sleek heron with long, skinny legs, a long tail and cryptic plumage. The bird’s grayish-brown pattern and horizontal stance on gray boulders at the edge of river rapids shaded by overhanging trees made it nearly imperceptible to our eyes and presumably to predator eyes.
An elongated slateblack head showed beady red eyes bordered above and below by a white
stripe. The medium-long, spear-shaped beak was muted orange on the lower mandible and grayish on the upper mandible. A buff-colored neck and creamy underside contrasted against the graybrown upper side with transverse dark bars and white speckles, altogether enhancing the bird’s stonelike cast —until the wings unfurled.
The broad spread wings revealed two huge eyes radiating color bursts like the image of an ancient sun god. When the wings and tail flared in unison, they formed a half-circle that made the bird appear imposingly large, and likely terrifying to a predator.
“If your song is like your plumage, you are the most beautiful of forest inhabitants,” said the seductive fox to the raven in La Fontaine’s “The Raven and the Fox.” But the fox would have fled in fright at the fantastical sunbursts on a winged sunbittern if not upon hearing the bird’s eerily drawn-out whistle resounding over the din of river rapids.