A Rainforest B&B Blog – Puerto Rico

I was just looking through the guest registry for the villa. Our guests write wonderful comments about their stay. Some even put drawings in the guest book. One drawing I’m including in this blog is of one of Laurie’s flower arrangements. This flower arrangement was on the breakfast table on the villa porch and one of our guests presented us with a watercolor of it.

We have many guests who come here for the bird watching. A recent guest made the following list of birds she confirmed siting while staying in our El Yunque hideaway. If you go out on the island, of course, you may see many more but these were birds that visited our bed and breakfast:

Red Tailed Hawk (Guaraguao)
Mangrove Cuckoo
Puerto Rican Lizard-Cuckoo (Coccyzus vieilloti)
Puerto Rican Woodpecker
Scaly-naped Pigeon (Patagioenas squamosa)
White-winged Dove (Zenaida asiatica)
Green Mango: [Anthracothorax viridis] hummingbird
Puerto Rican Emerald
Puerto Rican Tody (San Pedrito)
Gray Kingbird
Pearly-Eyed Thrasher
Red legged Thrush
Bananaquit (Coereba flaveola)
Cape May Warbler
Black Throated blue warbler
Black-Cowled Oriole
Shiny Cowbird
Striped Headed Tanager
Antillean Euphonea
Indigo Bunting
Black-faced Grassquit (Tiaris bicolor)
Black Whiskered Vireo

My favorite is the Lizard Cuckoo both for it’s long elegant striped tail and for the cool sound it makes. I also love listening to the Puerto Rican screech owls at night as their call added to the night sounds makes it seem like a Tarzan movie sound track.

This photo is of a green heron that one of guests saw hiking off of our property. We have a path that leads to an isolated pool at the top (right at the top with an incredible view) of the Espiritu Santo waterfall. We have this photo because none of us could identify it at the time so our guests emailed it to us for identification. I always thought of herons as sea coast birds.