The cattle of Costa Rica

Zubu cows with cattle egrets.

Most tourists probably don’t go to Costa Rica to photograph the cows but they are rather beautiful. With a country that has so much exotic wildlife, I feel a bit sorry for the creatures we take for granted here in the UK but are also in Costa Rica, such as cows, pigeons, cats and dogs (how can they compete with the resplendent quetzal?). But of course there are differences – in the case of cats and dogs, my relationship to them was completely opposite to what it is in the UK, where cats adore me and dogs ignore me. In Costa, cats ran away from me and dogs followed me around. With pigeons, well, I was convinced they were making squawking sounds when we returned to the capital, San Jose. It took me a while to realise the sound was actually parakeets, whose sound echoed through the streets in the late afternoon.

Anyway, the cattle with the humps at the base of their necks are called zebu, a breed of domestic cattle originating in parts of Europe as well as South Asia (see my pictures of similar beasts in Myanmar here, here and here) and thus at home in the tropics. Just about every cow has a white bird or two either on it or near it. This is a cattle egret, a short-legged white egret who eats insects, such as grasshoppers, the cows disrupt whilst walking and eating in the field. The egret also helps the cows out by removing ticks from their backs.

Hence cattle egrets are one of the few bird success stories in the age of modern intensive farming. They are the only species to have successfully spread from the Old to the New World, adapting to new animals as they go, from rhinos to cattle. Cattle egrets only began their expansion to Africa and the Americas as the start of the 20th century. Their first sighting in Costa Rica wasn’t until the mid-1950s.