Península de Osa, Corcovado National Park, Costa Rica
Today, aboard National Geographic Sea Lion, we had the opportunity of visiting one of Costa Rica’s most isolated destinations and considered around the world to be one of the major hotspots of biodiversity, Corcovado National Park.
In the morning we took hikes around the buffer zones of the park, known as Caletas. Buffer zones play a significant role in increasing the limits of protected areas and are probably the most important trend in conservation science providing ecosystem services typically seen as economic benefits provided by natural ecosystems.
For this privately owned land around the park, the underlying assumption is that if scientists can identify ecosystem services, quantify their economic value, and bring conservation more in synchrony with market ideologies, then the land owners will recognize the irrationality of environmental destruction and work to safeguard nature (McCauley, 2006).
Because Costa Rica has encourage this idea for years, today we enjoyed the occasion of spotting some interesting wildlife like capuchin monkeys, spider monkeys, coatimundis, birds like the bare-throated tiger-herons, ant shrikes, tanagers, honeycreepers and what became one of the highlights, scarlet macaws.
In Costa Rica, the scarlet macaw originally occupied 42,000-km2 of forested habitat. A few decades ago, only two local populations remained. Approximately 700 individuals lived in the Osa Conservation Area (Stiles & Skutch 1989), and 330 macaws lived within a 560-km2 area of the Central Pacific Conservation Area (Vaughan 1983, Vaughan et al. 1991). Because of buffer zone programs like the one in Caletas, and conservation programs involving ecology and management of population of scarlet macaws within them, nowadays we enjoy more frequent sightings of this spectacular animal.
As we returned to the ship, a mother humpback whale together with her calf became immediately another highlight of the day. Behaving in a playful manner they pointed the way to our next destination of the afternoon, Corcovado National Park. Here, now within the boundaries of the park, we also had some great findings like all three species of monkeys, spiders, howlers, and capuchins, together with pale-billed woodpeckers, great curassows and the famous endemic bird of the peninsula, the black-cheek ant-tanager. After enjoying a dip in the refreshing waters of a waterfall and started seeing the dimming of the light, we returned to the ship to a magnificent view of the sunset and the excitement of what tomorrow await for us in Golfo Dulce, Costa Rica.
