A capital Sparrow ...before the mountains

White-eared Ground-Sparrow

An unusual Ground-Sparrow, and a great surprise. 

The morning's banding at INBio in San Jose came up with the goods !
More on Swainson's Thrushes wing lengths later. The sparrow was closely followed by this Baltimore Oriole, another 1st for us in Costa Rica.

Our San Jose site is our only site for White-tipped Dove too...

 In 2013 we banded over 500 Swainson's Thrushes in Tortugureo, this year 90 so far. Whilst at INBio we were surprised to band 12. We immediately picked up on the wing length. These migrants passing through Central Valley, Costa Rica seemed to have longer wing lengths. A quick look at our data confirrmed this.
In summary the average on the Caribbean coast 96.8mm  and through the Central Valley 99.2mm.
Races ?? food for thought...

Not all banding, we did pick up two male Golden-winged Warblers in our very local park !
We share this San Jose park with the front of the Justice Ministry of Costa Rica, and it's armed guards !!

We are now back in the mountains....
Yesterday our second Ovenbird in the Highlands - in four Fall visits.

 The new Garrigues still descibes it's migrant range as below 1500m - we are at 2500m.

Back to the resident species, we catch about eight times the number of resident to migrant species here in the Highlands, many endemic to the Highlands and adjacent Panama. With the nest of this next bird descibed as unkown in S & Sutch, I was delighted to hear Wendy shout !

I guess, 3/4 days old - this a very young Spotted Wood-Quail,...So we know they nest in Sept/Oct ..

On to today..

The large and hefty, c 80g of Streak-breasted Treehunter, nests in a two foot long tunnel excavated into a foest bank.

Gray-breasted Wood-Wren, our local forest wren.

Olive-striped Flycatcher, one of Costa Rica's 72  species of flycatcher. A  species like the White-collared Manakin that has very extreme emarginations in the outer primaries.

Like the Isle of Lewis today !!
....We have Wilson's Warblers too.

I guess the most common wintering warbler in the Costa Rica Highlands..