Costa Rica has an incredible diversity of habitats, including dry forest, montane cloud forest, lowland rain forest, high altitude oak forests and the páramo environment that is above the timberline.  Each area has it’s own fauna and flora. Our talk will focus first on hummingbirds, then on other groups such as mot-mots, trogons, and toucans. We want to thank Brian Schultz, who first took us to Costa Rica, and Bart's cousins Steve and Debbie Bouricius, well-known hummingbird experts who visited us there and toured the country with us.

As a bonus, we will reveal a secret birding spot in New England.

Connie is a lifelong birder and photographer who eventually got Bart to focus on birds as much as he had on arthropods and trees. They are longtime members of Hampshire Bird Club who had the good fortune to live in Costa Rica for six years following Connie’s retirement. While there, they belonged to the Birding Club of Costa Rica, which gave them opportunities to see places infrequently visited by tourists. 

After graduating together from Goddard College, they did graduate studies at the University of Stockholm in Sweden. Bart’s masters thesis focused on the northern boreal forests in Sweden. Connie later earned a masters degree in Botany from the University of North Carolina, before entering medical school at the University of Buffalo. They came to the valley for Connie’s residency in Internal Medicine. She practiced for 25 years at the Umass Student Health Services before retiring.  After pursuing his many interests in natural history and operating a tree maintenance business, Bart founded a collective focused on building forest canopy walkways for accessing the treetops around the world. His work took him to the tropics of Latin America, Borneo and Samoa. They first went to Costa Rica with a tropical ecology class that Bart was co-teaching and subsequently visited many times before finding a home in a small coffee growing village in the mountains at the edge of the Central Valley.

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