the diner in paradise
this post is just an excuse to show you a bunch of pictures of hummingbirds
some vistas are so iconic that they’re instantly recognizable by people around the world, whether or not they’ve been there. you know what i’m talking about: the grand canyon. mount fuji. christ the redeemer. the view from the diner along the road through cinchona, costa rica.
warning: this post is just an excuse to show you a bunch of photos of hummingbirds.
i’m only sort of exaggerating. soda y mirador cinchona is (or should be) a stop on the itinerary of basically every birder visiting costa rica. the view is spectacular, as the san fernando waterfall spews forth from the barva volcano, seen across a deep forested valley from the poas volcano. but it’s the birds that make this restaurant so famous. the humble “soda,” the tico word for diner, hosts a bird feeder setup* guaranteed to provide visitors an intimate encounter with endemic and near-endemic birds. and it’s this view that has allowed the diner to rise from the ashes of one of costa rica’s worst natural disasters.
soda y mirador cinchona is probably the first thing i learned about birding in costa rica. while i don’t remember the conversation, i had scribbled “poas mirador cinchona” into an iphone note before even booking a flight to the country. i mentioned it to my guide on my first visit, but he’d already built it into our itinerary before my asking.
it’s a humble spot, a shack of corrugated sheet metal across the street from a stable with a pair of braying donkeys. a few posts support a shaky wood platform in the back with tables and chairs looking out over the deck.
but it doesn’t matter what the building looks like. because set against the sublime backdrop were bird species i wouldn’t see anywhere else. rare hummingbirds fed inches from my face. colorful tanagers tussled at a platform feeder. and on the ground below, the skulking, range restricted buff-fronted quail dove quietly cleaned a banana peel. i could experience all these birds while sitting back with my jugo de mora and arepas.
cinchona sits at a privileged position in a steep-sided valley through the country’s cordilerra central at middle elevations. the geography of costa rica produces lots of endemic species (you can read about that in my prior newsletter on the topic) and i’d guess the soda’s offering free bird food on a steep slope also concentrates birds from lower and higher elevations. whatever’s going on, birders have recorded 423 bird species at this diner alone. that’s comparable to some of costa rica’s national parks.
i insisted on returning on my last visit to costa rica. i didn’t care if saw any new birds or not. hiking hot trails looking for rare birds is work. soda y mirador cinchona is vacation.
the soda sites on hallow ground. catastrophe struck in 2009 when a magnitude 6.1 earthquake hit costa rica, centered below the restaurant. at least 34 people died in the area and the entire town of cinchona was wiped off the map by landslides. hundreds needed to be evacuated.
the soda’s owners jorge mora and elisa rodriguez nearly lost their own lives as the former building collapsed—they were saved by a concrete slab wedged above their heads while they took refuge in the ground floor of the building, according to an article in la nación. the country’s national emergency commission declared the town of cinchona unfit for inhabitants, and built a new town for displaced survivors called nueva cinchona down the road.
mora and rodriguez attempted to sell food at the side of the road, but were drawn back to the site of the soda. they restored the drinking water service, recycled what they could, and rebuilt the restaurant. what was formerly a sturdy two-story building became today’s more humble digs. but the customers came back, and more—after all, it was now the only soda left in a town that once had four.
and today, you’d be hard-pressed to find an organized trip to costa rica that doesn’t include a stop at the famous soda. i think the many photos i’ve included in this newsletter entry do a good job demonstrating why.
trying to get “the authentic experience” has become a pretty important part of american’ vacations. and while i hesitate to say that such a thing exists, i do love that cinchona has managed to be nothing more than what it is—a cheap diner with good food and good birds—and yet has become so central to so many tourists’ visits to the country. if you haven’t already, hope you get to see it some day.
pre-postscript
*wild animal feeding is illegal in costa rica, but is rarely enforced and it seems to be accepted that ecotourist places will set out bird feeders regardless.
postscript
we went to colombia for brittany’s 30th birthday! we had a ridiculous time. we saw 450 species of birds within a 50-mile radius of bogota. i have a long narrative written, but ebird’s narrative section is broken and won’t let me paste in text longer than 10,000 characters. so i won’t be able to share the trip report until it’s fixed. but i’ll include some in my next newsletter post.
however, i do want to recount a litlte tale that i wrote about on my twitter, since it’s not really the right kind of story for my newsletter. while researching my trip, i found a single report of a recurve-billed bushbird, one of colombia’s rarest and most storied birds, from a year ago at one of the sites we were slated to bird. me and my guide, camilo, got to see that bird.
the recurve-billed bushbird is a weird, mega-rare bird with an epic story. it’s a skulking black or brown bird from the antbird family with a massive, upturned beak, probably for peeling bamboo. after its discovery, it was rarely encountered, going completely unseen from 1964 to 2004. but then, searches in venezuela turned up one site for the bird, and a few more were found in colombia in the followiong years. today, it’s known from only few locations, including a proaves reserve named for the bird that’s many hours out of the way. at least one expert was skeptical of the report that i’d found, so close to bogotá.
during our trip we ran into oswaldo, the finder of the bird a year before. we asked him about it, and he mentioned that he’d heard the bird again at the site, called laguna el tabacal, a month before. i was positive that we, too, would encounter the bird, and told camilo so several times.
after a quiet morning birding tabacal with no bushbirds—and no hint of habitat that a bushbird could inhabit—we encountered an extremely brushy clearing. as i detail in the twitter thread, usually camilo gets to this spot and plays the bushbird’s song to try and get it to respond, but the more common blue-lored antbird would always respond instead. so i told him to play the blue-lored antbird, and a bird started singing immediately that sounded the same as the bushbird recordings online. we dove into the brush and eventually we recorded diagnostic audio and got a good look at the bird’s upturned beak before it—and its mate!—fled into the thickets. unfortunately it was too distant and deep in the tangles for a photo. but now i really want to go back to get that photo.
you can see my thread on twitter here, which includes the recording. i’d say it was the best birding moment of my life to date.
https://twitter.com/RyanFMandelbaum/status/1770129999632249179