Trogon-y trogons

Today was a great, productive day out in the pastures. We buzzed through a bunch of our playback experiments in record time, and even had time to explore the ranch for more potential groups/territories.

In the process, we saw our first owl of the trip, a Spectacled Owl, a super cool-looking bird:

This was in the same area that we saw a Tamandua (collared anteater) just a few weeks before:

Then we got to explore some more of the ranch, and hiked up one big hill, for a gorgeous view of the surrounding land:

And on the walk home through the forest, we came upon this guy perching right on one of the bridges. One of three species of trogons found here, this is the Black-throated Trogon. For some reason I think trogons are really cool; they're just little colorful birds with long tails and big funny-looking eyes. A year ago, I wouldn't have had any idea what a trogon even was... a few months ago my friend Angela was describing them to me for the first time, simply telling me that "they just look so trogon-y!" At the time, I found this a perfectly unhelpful description, but now I must say, there's a lot of truth in that statement... This guy sat still for a surprisingly long time and allowed me to get some great pictures!

Pretty trogon-y, huh?

Here is my video from a few weeks ago of a pair of Slaty-tailed Trogons duetting. Not a particularly great video, but I love that you can indeed tell how "trogon-y" they look, just from a silhouette, and that you can see their tails flick up every time they sing.