Reviews

Guide to the Birds of Cocos Island: Three Feathery Gold Pieces

August 28, 2025 by Dragan No Comments

“Guide to the Birds of Cocos Island” by Arias & Montoya may technically be a book, but in reality, it is a treasure island map leading you to a certain spot in the Pacific Ocean, 550 km (342 mi) off the coast of Costa Rica. On my bookshelf, I have a sailing travelogue by a Croatian author Joza Horvat, who passed through the Panama Canal in the 1960s, when a con man offered him a map of pirates’ treasure on Cocos Island. Reputedly, the stories of buried treasure on this very island inspired Robert Louis Stevenson, yet hundreds of attempts to find it have failed. Unlike Horvat’s con man with a dream of Spanish doubloons, Serge Arias is offering something real and achievable: three feathery gold pieces.

Cocos Island is a volcanic island with an area of approximately 24 km2 (9.2 sq mi), in its entirety designated a Costa Rican National Park and shrouded in two main vegetation types: tropical rainforest and tropical cloud forest. Inhabited only by park rangers and, on and off, by 181 bird species: 167 are visitors (mostly seabirds), 13 are residents (plus 1 domestic species), of which 3 are found nowhere else on Earth.

The Author, Serge Arias

The three endemics are Cocos Finch (one of Darwin’s finches and the only member of its genus), Cocos Cuckoo, and Cocos Tyrannulet, further followed by a local subspecies of Galapagos Yellow Warbler (distinguished by its red crown, I wonder how AviList treats this one?). Once you land on the island, Finch and Tyrannulet are easy, but the Cuckoo requires some hard work.

The guide explores the natural history, behaviors, and key observation sites for each species (21 hotspot described), followed by over 500 reference photographs to aid in identification, plus several maps and landscape photos. Aiming to promote bird tourism and support nature conservation, the first photographic guide dedicated to the birds of Cocos Island and the surrounding marine conservation area is the result of a five-year collaborative effort of Serge Arias and Michel Montoya. Last but certainly not least, the gorgeous cover art was painted by Lisa Erb, whom many of you know as a charming proprietor of the Rancho Naturalista Birding Lodge.

And once you acquire the guide and start salivating over the lifers awaiting you at a certain spot in the Pacific, the next (and unanswered) question is, how to get there? Under the banner of Birdwatching Central America, a licensed local tour operator, Serge Arias already led 8 successful birding expeditions to this remote Island. The journey takes eleven days—seven days on the island and four at sea (when the only nocturnal gull in the world, Swallow-tailed Gull, often follows the vessel’s lights). The next one is planned for May 2026.


Guide to the Birds of Cocos Island. Guia de las aves de la Isla del Coco
by Serge Arias & Michel Montoya
in two languages: Spanish and English
with the support of the Costa Rica Birding Board and Costa Rica Birding
2025 / 238p. / paperbound / $25.00

Written by Dragan
Dragan Simic is obsessively passionate about two things – birding and travelling in search of birds, and that has taken him from his native Balkans to the far shores of Europe and the Mediterranean, southern Africa, India, Central and South America. His 10,000 Birds blog posts were Highly Commended in the International Category of the 2015 BBC Wildlife Blogger Awards. Birder by passion and environmental scientist by education, he is an ecotourism consultant, a field researcher and a bird blogger who always thinks that birding must be better behind that next bend in the road, and that the best bird ever is – the next lifer. Nowadays Dragan is looking for a book publisher, to choose from 10+ years of writing and 250+ posts.