Costa Rican Bird Guide Uses His Memory to Get Even With a Volcano

BOSQUE DEL SILENCIO, Costa Rica — A dense, predawn mist still cloaked the volcano’s crater, yet we had already seen a 28-14, a 14-1 and a 19-4.

“And there’s a 27-15,” said the guide Geovani Bogarín, fingers dancing across the focus knob of his scope. “Come quick, this is one you’ll really like.”

My wife, Grace, flipped frantically through the book “A Guide to the Birds of Costa Rica” by F. Gary Stiles and Alexander Skutch. Plate No. 27. Bird No. 15.  

I rushed forward to catch a glimpse through the eyepiece. Looking back at us was a collared aracari, with a long, toucan-like bill, edges serrated for cutting fruit. He was perched on a moss-covered branch high above; a bright yellow spot in a sea of green leaves.

“A nice start to the morning,” declared Bogarín, who was already on the move.

“There’s a 31-2 crawling up that dead tree.”

A good bird watcher identifies birds by their plumage. A great one does so by chip notes and song alone. It is hard to say where Bogarín fits in — since he has mastered the latter and now has the page, plate and number of each bird in the book memorized.

His explanation for this seemingly superhuman feat seemed logical enough — even if his memory defies belief.

“Birders would come to me, I mean, good birders from all over the world, and say, ‘I want to see 60 species in four hours,’ ” he said. “Then they would spend half the time flipping through their bird books, trying to find the right page.”  So he memorized the entire book (some 850 species) to save them the trouble. 

Bogarín, 45, has been a nature guide in La Fortuna, a small but growing tourist town on the flank of the stunning Arenal Volcano, for 18 years. We met him on a cool, cloudy July morning near Bosque del Silencio, a private forest reserve close to the volcano. I had a less ambitious goal of identifying a few new species, part of a yearlong quest to see 300 birds by the following May. Between spats of calling out plate numbers and the roar of boulders hurtling unseen down the volcano’s slopes, Bogarín told us his story.

Bogarín was born in Monterrey, a farming town located two rickety, wood-planked bridges and a long, rutted road north of La Fortuna. When he was 5 years old, the volcano erupted for the first time in 400 years, burying three nearby villages in lava. The resulting cloud of ash smothered the family farm. The crops died. The cattle choked. “We had no choice but to move,” Bogarín said. “We packed our cattle on the bus and went north, to cut sugar cane for a living.” As he reminisced, a bird glided, dipped, then bobbed into the jungle alongside a dirt path. Bogarín put down his scope, kicking the legs into a tripod, and called us to attention. In the viewfinder was a 46-2: a red-legged honeycreeper, with crimson legs, a radiant purple-black body and a turquoise cap that glowed like an infrared bulb. “One of Costa Rica’s most beautiful birds,” he said.

One day, on a rare trip to the city, he and his mother had overheard a group of fair-skinned foreigners chatting. “What are they saying, Mom?” he recalled asking. She said she didn’t know. They were speaking English, a language neither of them had learned. She told him that their family was poor, and he had no education. “Donkeys don’t learn to speak English,” his father said.

But Bogarín persisted. Tired of cutting cane — brutal work under the tropical sun — he decided, in 1990, to move back to the volcano, a place he had not seen in decades. “I told my father I would make the volcano pay for what it had done to us,” he said.

The area near Arenal Volcano has a thriving tourist industry.

At the time, he recalled, there were only three guides in La Fortuna, and only a handful of hotels. Today, there may be 10 times that, plus a Burger King and a disco. Someday, he felt sure, tourists would come to see lava simmering from the volcano’s picture-perfect cone. But Bogarín spoke no English and knew nothing of birds. While he had grown up in the jungle, he had never studied ecology.

“Twenty-seven-9,” he said, interrupting himself. “Do you hear him? He’s calling from a tree just inside the forest.”

“Awnk, awnk, awnk,” Bogarín croaked back, perfectly imitating the bird. We saw something flitter among the leaves, which were the size of doormats. A broad-billed motmot appeared, perched on a tree branch just a few feet from us. It had a reddish-orange head, a black eye patch and a slender tail with a pompom plume that swung like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. “This almost never happens,” Bogarín said, shaking his head and beaming. I marked it down on my list — No. 39 of the morning — and we moved on.

Bogarín eventually learned English from a Peace Corps volunteer. He then began memorizing bird plumages, song and the guide book. 

In little more than a decade, Arenal’s stunning views, nighttime lava flows and hot springs wound up attracting hundreds of thousands of tourists a year. His prediction proved correct. In time, Bogarín saved enough to build his mother and father a home, to replace the one they had been forced to sell in 1968. He kept it a secret from his parents, who had fallen ill but continued to work in the cane fields. But one day he welcomed them to their new home, surprising his father at the doorstep.

“See Dad?” he remembered saying. “The volcano finally paid.”

Tours with Geovani Bogarin can be arranged through Leaves and Lizards Arenal Volcano Cabin Retreat