The first pink bird you see wading in a Costa Rican marsh gets called a flamingo. Look at the bill. It is flat and widens into a spoon, and the bird sweeps it side to side through the water with its head down, feeling for food.
Where you’ll see it
The Tempisque wetlands at Palo Verde, an hour or so from Coco, are the great gathering place, especially as the dry season concentrates the water and the birds. Any estuary or lagoon on the coast may have a few.
What to know
The pink comes from the diet, like a flamingo’s. Spoonbills feed by touch, snapping the bill shut on anything it meets in the murk. They nest colonially in mangroves and often feed alongside wood storks, white ibis and egrets, so where you find one you find the whole wading bird cast. Palo Verde in the dry season is one of the great birding spectacles in the country.
