April, 2022 – Corcovado National Park was one of the first places in Costa Rica I heard about before I even considered moving here. Despite having dreamed of visiting since I was an adolescent, and having previously planned but canceled two trips there, it took me ten years of living in Costa Rica to finally get to Corcovado. National Geographic once referred to Corcovado National Park as the most biologically intense place on Earth. The numbers tell an impressive story. It is home to 2.5% of the world’s biodiversity despite being only .001% of the Earth’s landmass. Even in a country as biodiverse as Costa Rica, it is exceptional. Despite the Osa Peninsula (which Corcovado is a large part of) being only 3% of Costa Rica’s landmass, half of all its plant and animal species can be found there. Thanks to it being an island until (in geological terms) quite recently, many species on the Osa Peninsula are found nowhere else in the world.
Corcovado’s 700-plus species of trees make for a greater variety than in all of the United States and Canada combined. About thirty jaguars probably call the park home, and it’s one of the last remaining strongholds of wild jaguar populations in Central America. It’s also an important site for endangered species like the Baird’s Tapir, White-lipped Peccaries, and a nesting site for critically endangered Hawksbill Turtles.
Getting to Corcovado
If you tell your average Costa Rican–as I learned from telling my friends–that you’re visiting Corcovado you’re likely to be met with reactions like “Where’s that?” and “I think I’ve heard of that place.” Physically getting to the park and making arrangements to visit are both quite a challenge. It’s a beautiful but long drive to either disembarking points: Puerto Jimenez or Drake Bay. The park is limited to 505 total daily visitors and only 155 to the Sirena Ranger Station in the heart of the park. That’s further limited to 55 overnight visitors (which in my opinion is the only wayto really experience Corcovado). In order to visit you need to send an email at 8 am sharp (no earlier) 30 days prior to your stay. Overnight visitors then have to make reservations for their meals and lodging (no food can be brought into the park) with Corcovado Asosciación de Desarollo.
We arrived in Puerto Jimenez the day before our three-day / two-night trip to the Sirena Ranger Station. After many months of both watching his TikTok videos and swapping messages back and forth, we met up with our now minor celebrity guide, Dionisio “Nito” Paniagua. Nito has been a guide in Corcovado for over twenty years and was recently interviewed by National Geographic about his conservation work. His true claim to fame is as costaricaguide on TikTok. He started a TikTok during the pandemic to show off the National Park and quickly amassed over 150k followers, which led to several appearances on different TV news programs. One day when he replaces David Attenborough, I can say I knew him before he was truly famous.
At 5:30 am, we met up at a delicious local bakery to grab a bite to eat before walking down to the docks for our hour-and-a-half journey to Sector Sirena.
Sirena
Sirena (Spanish for mermaid) is the most isolated of Corcovado’s four ranger stations. Located about one km inland in the central part of the Pacific Coast of the park, the only way in or out is by boat or by foot. Once you disembark and receive a brief safety chat and bag search, you can head to drop your bags at the Ranger Station. I made a video tour of the accommodations:
Wildlife of Corcovado
The sheer quantity and variety of wildlife you’re met with as you wander the trails is astonishing. As soon as we arrived, there were reports of Tapir activity and we went out to see if we could spot them. Shortly after heading out, three tapirs suddenly crossed the trail right in front of us. Thinking they were headed for a nearby river we went to try to photograph them at a distance from the riverbank. Little did we know they would head for the river right where we were waiting; the male walked within a few feet of me (a video of which ended up on the news).
Besides the tapirs, we managed to spot two of the elusive Silky Anteaters (Nito had never seen more than one in a single day in his 20 years of guiding in Corcovado), all four species of monkeys in Costa Rica (including one endemic to the south of Costa Rica), and came painfully close to seeing a puma. I didn’t have high hopes for finding one given their infrequent sightings. But the morning we were to head out reports of one down near the shore were coming in and we went off trying to find it. We walked and walked, with our guide Nito checking everywhere for the puma. In the end, we walked within about 100 meters of where it was off in the forest. Next time.
As we searched, Nito shared some stories of puma encounters in the park. One of them still makes me laugh when I think about it. Pumas are basically house cats on steroids, mischievous playfulness and all. They’re rarely aggressive with humans but, especially when young, they are naturally curious. Normally solitary, siblings from the same litter will stay together as adolescents. Nito related a story from several years back about a pair of juveniles who would playfully stalk tourists on the trail, just for their own entertainment. They never attacked anyone, they just seemed to get enjoyment from scaring visitors. It would go like this: hikers would spot the pair of pumas following and slowly closing on them. No attempts at scaring them away would make them depart. Freaked out, sometimes they’d run down onto the beach since the pumas dislike going out into the open. After a while, they’d rejoin the trail only to find themselves again being stalked by the pumas. Tourists would arrive at the ranger station crying or requesting the be airlifted out from a fear of ever setting foot in the jungle again. Hopefully, in hindsight, their frights are now fondly recounted memories of a wild adventure.
Birding in Corcovado
A total of 393 species have been registered for Sector Sirena on eBird. We managed to spot an impressive 144 species in three days thanks to Nito’s near encyclopedic knowledge of the songs and habits of the birds there. Also, a key to our success was being the first ones to hit the trail in the mornings. We left before dawn searching out owls and nighthawks both mornings in the park. Two sightings in particular were exciting. (A third we also heard–and my wife briefly saw flyover–a pair of the rare-for-Costa-Rica Red-throated Caracaras)
American-Golden Plover
This sighting was almost accidental. When we first arrived and were looking for the tapirs we ran across a collection of shorebirds. Nito spotted one and told me to take a picture. I would not have caught the subtle difference between it and the plethora of juvenile Black-bellied Plovers on the beach. Sure enough, later in the day as we consulted some references we discovered that it was a juvenile American-Golden Plover. American-Golden Plovers migrate from their wintering grounds in Argentina and Chile to breed in the Alaskan Arctic. They’re infrequently registered on eBird for Costa Rica (103 sightings as of this writing) and this was the first sighting for Corcovado (in fact for the entire Osa Peninsula).
Choco Screech-Owl?
I put the question mark here not out of a doubt as to what we saw, but because what we reported as a Choco Screech-Owl has a high probability of actually being an as-yet undescribed species! This was our main target both mornings. The first morning we heard it, but it seemed to be done with its movements for the day. So the next morning we went out even earlier, about an hour before sunrise, nearly stepped on a Fer-de-lance (the most venomous snake in the Americas), and managed to spot it after a lot of running up and down the trails.
Final Thoughts
I could fill a small book with the adventures we had in just a few short days. My only regret is that it took me so many years to finally visit. Corcovado is a place like none other and if you are willing to make the arrangements and go completely off the beaten track I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you want to go with Nito his Whatsapp number is on his Tiktok profile or you can visit his family’s business website.
