yet another corner of Nicaragua - the Indio Maíz Reserve

After so many weeks away I was entitled to a little compensatory leave, and joined up with a birding trip to a very remote corner of Nicaragua.  The Indio Maíz Reserve is on the Caribbean side of the country, just north of Costa Rica.  Nobody really goes there apart from a few fishermen (and perhaps the drug smugglers who are rumoured to use this sparsely populated coast to get their drugs from Costa Rica to Honduras, on the way up to the US), and there is only a small population of indigenous people, who are remote enough from the main part of the country that they speak English creole rather than Spanish.  Even the settlements that had been there were fading away.

If you can't read that (even in extra large size the writing is small and faint) it concludes with a note that the British cemetery was used until the 1980's.  This is what it looks like now:

In this state partly through neglect, but partly because of Hurricane Otto that hit last November - the southernmost hurricane on record in Central America which made landfall right where the lodge is located.

Unfortunately the company I was travelling with had not heard about the hurricane.  So the itinerary I read in late March, with its references to 8km of trails around the lodge in pristine rainforest, and much more primary rainforest to view mostly from a small boat, where we could see all kinds of rainforest birds not to mention otters, tapirs and perhaps even manatees, still reflected the situation pre-hurricane and was, frankly, a load of rubbish.  There was only a 1km trail that was passable, and even that just passed through a post-apocalyptic landscape of broken vegetation.  This is a view from the river.

Hardly a dense, pristine rainforest.

However it was quite fascinating to see the effects - how powerful nature can be - as this forest will surely take decades to regenerate.  We all tried to make the most of it and our poor guide, as well as predicting that we will get sizeable refunds, made superhuman efforts to find us birds so I was able to add Great Green Macaw, Nicaraguan Seed-finch, Masked Duck and Least Bittern to my life list - all of which are pretty difficult to see.  The green basilisks and the green and black poison dart frogs were pretty cool too!