travel: Central America 2024

Travel: Panama & Costa Rica Day 11: Selvatura Hanging Bridges

Wendy Dembowski

13 Apr 2024 • 4 min read

Our exploration of the cloud forest continued on day 11 of our trip with a tour that took us into Selvatura Park to walk across the hanging bridges, visit the sloth sanctuary, and the butterfly garden. I'll segment this tour into three posts because otherwise it will be far too long.

Our tour guide for the morning was Roy with Roy's Monteverde Nature Guides. Roy was great, he helped us locate the birds and knew a lot about the local flora. Roy has lived his whole life in Monteverde so he also talked a bit about the history that included transition from dairy farms back to native forest.

The first part of this tour took us through the sky forest on our way to the seven sky bridges that would give us sweeping views of the cloud forest canopy and its inhabitants. Selvatura also does zipline tours, so we heard and saw the zipliners along the way. I have no desire to zipline, so we didn't try it out on our trip.

On the way up to the bridges, we encountered some creates in the lush forest bushes and small trees.

A Stripe-headed Sparrow hides among the leaves

A Spotted Barbtail checks out the area below it

A Slaty-backed Nightingale-Thrush stands near the ground.

A Tawny-capped Euphonia on a small branch

Not a bird, but these tiny orchids and other orchids were common to see on the trees of the cloud forest.

As we made our way higher toward and onto the bridges we were able to have great views of the birds who occupy the canopy rather than the mid and lower levels of the forest.

This Orange-Bellied Trogon perches on one of the bridge supports

As we approached one of the bridges, Roy pointed out a specific type of avocado tree as a tree that Resplendent Quetzal are often found in. Shortly after that several Resplendent Quetzal perched in those very trees. These birds are majestic and at the same time incredibly cute with their big black eyes and their fuzzy heads! I had hoped to see them while we were in Costa Rica, and feel incredibly lucky that we got to see probably about 6 of them in this group.

Another boy with his long tail, and from the front you can see the red belly

A female with similar coloring as the males, but without the extremely long tail feathers.

We also saw a Black Guan who has an amazing blue beak. I'm sharing a few photos of the same bird because it was so striking.

Black Guan lifts its wings as it moves around

The Black Guan's feathers on its head are a bit tufted here

This was the vista from the hanging bridges. It was very cool to be at the top of the forest.

Roy called this flower out as one that hummingbirds love, although we didn't see any hummingbirds near it. Roy did give us a lead on a Hummingbird Café, which we visited after we parted ways with him. I'll save that for a different post.

The last creature I captured a photo of before leaving this part of the tour was this little snail

The hanging bridges part of the tour was really great. I'll share more in my next posts about the sloths and butterflies!