Wildlife Sightings During One Week In Tamarindo Costa Rica

Caroline and I just finished up our first week in Costa Rica. We will be here for just about a month in total. Our prior trips have all just been a few days. Normally at that point we’d be heading home, but since we are now empty-nesters, there is no rush, and we are happy to still have more than 3 weeks remaining in this trip!

We are not adventure seekers, and pretty much stick to walking around town from our condo to the beach and to various restaurants. But in Costa Rica, there are many opportunities to run into interesting wildlife just around town.

Pig on the beach

OK, this one is a stretch, since the animal is domesticated and not wild, but on our very first day, we walked the beach at sunset and spotted a family walking their pig on a leash!

It’s not the best photo because of the lighting and distance, but you can clearly see it is a pig.

Squirrel or chipmunk?

Also spotted on our first day, while we were eating at a restaurant on the beach, was a squirrel that almost looks like a chimpmunk.

The head and bushy tail look just like a regular squirrel, but the body is more brown or reddish, and has more of the look of a chipmunk! We’ve since seen many of these in trees around town, so it is apparently the common squirrel in these parts.

Confused crab

I’m no expert on crabs and how they live and what their tendencies are, but any time I’ve seen a crab at the beach, it is in the water and they generally seem to dig themselves down into the sand at the water line.

But we came across this really big crab that seemed confused, no doubt scared and agitated by the people on the beach. It eventually headed up the sand away from the water, and towards a restaurant, probably not the best choice…

We had a second interesting crab sighting. We had rented a car for a few days and were driving on the road from Langosta to Tamarindo, and saw two giant RED crabs cross the road. I wasn’t able to get a photo, as I was driving, but it was fun to see. The red crabs are apparently pretty common in Costa Rica, and according to Wikipedia, they often live in the rain forests and return to the ocean to breed. The direction in which we saw them, they were in fact crossing the road from the forest area to the beach area, so perhaps it is ‘that time of the year!’

Yellow breasted birds

We first ran into this species of bird with yellow breast on the beach. Then when we were spending some time at Casa Salita, there were three of them playing in the trees and pool in the backyard.

I can’t figure out which species it is exactly because the call of the bird in my video is different than the calls of the birds I thought were possible matches. Apparently there are many different kids of yellow-breasted birds in the region. Many of them are also considered flycatchers, which might be one of the reasons there are fewer bugs flying around here than you might expect.

Howler Monkeys

Howler monkeys are very common in Costa Rica and can be heard everywhere in Tamarindo. It is common to hear them, but not so common to see them. It is not that they shy away from humans, but that their call can be heard over long distances, so even when you hear them, it can be hard to tell exactly where it is coming from. They also blend in with the trees so they are hard to spot even when they are nearby.

In all of our trips to Tamarindo, only once before did we get a good look at howlers, in a big guanacaste tree on one of the main roads. I took a few photos that did not come out well.

On this trip, we had a great sighting on one of our walks to the beach – a large group of howlers in a tree, seen in the first video above. Then I had a solo sighting after a morning run, and the 2nd video shows them eating and howling!

Leaf Cutting Ants

On our very first trip to Costa Rica, when we were evaluating a possible real estate purchase in the southern zone, we were staying in a house and I became fascinated by a stream of ants going by in the evening carrying leaf pieces that were much larger than the ants themselves. It was hard to tell where they came from and where they were going, because their path was too long to see where it started and ended, but there were hundreds of ants, seemingly running, in a straight line along a gutter, and each carrying a leaf piece! I took a photo at the time but it didn’t come out at all – you can see the gutter, but not really the ants or what they were carrying.

While not as spectacular, on this trip I was able to spot another set of ants carrying large leaves. An ant would walk by every minute or so, with a leaf from nearby flowers. I was able to track them walk across the pool area at Casa Salita, go up a set of stairs to the porch of the house, and proceed all the way from the back of the house to the front of the house in soil under the deck.

This Tico Times article does a pretty good job of explaining how Leaf Cutting Ants work and why that job is so important to them.

Cow in the road

While a pretty common sight during our trip to India, it is more unusual to see cows wandering the road in Costa Rica, and something we have not seen here before. We’ve sometimes seen horses, but never a cow.

We initially spotted the cow while we were walking to the gym. It was grazing on the side of the road and someone was taking a photo of it. About 45 minutes later, after my workout, I was walking down the road to buy something at the grocery, and this time, the cow was standing right in the middle of the road, and not moving. The car traffic simply had to go around it.

I’m not sure what happened, but when I came back around 15 minutes later, the cow was gone.

Gecko worshiping the sunrise

I only know what a gecko looks like because of all of the Geico car insurance commercials I’ve seen over the years.

I’m terrible sometimes at taking photos as you can see by this one that is too far away, but the head of the gecko was unmistakable as I walked past this spot after a morning run. The sun was soon to appear from behind the buildings, and this gecko appeared to have climbed to the top of a pole and was waiting and watching for the sun to appear!

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That’s a summary of the wildlife we encountered in our first week in Costa Rica. With three weeks to go, I’m sure there will be more!