Station Spotlight: PUC-2211 Costa Rica, Columbia, and …Indiana?

Indiana couple Travis and Jacki had always been casual birders, but it was a trip to Costa Rica six years ago that inspired them to up their birding game to the “serious” category.

“During our first trip to Costa Rica,” Travis writes, “my wife and I had booked an AIrBnB in Santa Elena that was a shipping container converted to an apartment.  We could climb to the top of it, drink some coffee, and watch the early morning birds fly over the valley.”  After that, they were hooked, trying to identify species wherever they went and keeping track of lists on eBird.  Fans of birding vacations, the pair have been fortunate enough to witness a number of beautiful species in their travels.  These included a mottled owl in Costa Rica and both a chestnut-crowned antpitta and a rufous-crowned tody-flycatcher in Columbia.  As a bonus, they’ve been fortunate to encounter some amazing animals while birding, including porcupines, agouti, tayra, monkeys, and spectacled bears.

While it was the detections from their bird-based vacations that first got our attention here at BirdWeather, Travis and Jacki use their PUC at home, too.  They were  early PUC adopters from BirdWeather’s 2023 Kickstarter campaign, relating that, “It’s fun to have going in the yard even if we aren’t doing anything else with it.  Traveling, it’s great to hear sounds to match up against pictures of hard-to-ID birds.” 

When they’re not out roaming, Travis and Jacki deploy their  PUC as a home station under the name “Downtown Bird Shack” in downtown Lafayette, IN.  Despite the urban environment, they still have large, old-growth trees in their neighborhood, which is located near the Wabash River; this combination of natural features results in a microhabitat unique from the nearby birding hotspots.  As a result, they experience visits from a broader range of avian visitors over the course of a year despite the concentrated human population.