Keel-billed Toucan in Arenal

Ramphastos sulfuratus

Chance of an encounter
Very likely

Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Arenal, aggregated onto a 10 km grid. A cell is matched by its centre, which can sit up to 16 km outside the boundary, so this covers the surrounding country too.

Occurrence records measure where people looked and found something, which is not the same as where the animal is. This is a relative likelihood, not a probability.

When it has been recorded here

JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec

Records exist for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December, with the widest coverage in February, March and April. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.

The evidence here

Grid cells
26
Records
39,689
Cell size
10 km
Years covered
1980 to 2026

A grid cell is a square of the map, not a sighting: 26 squares of 10 km carry records for Keel-billed Toucan in and around Arenal, and the 39,689 records behind them were collected by other people and published openly. Nothing here counts animals, and a place with more records is not always a place with more animals.

About the Keel-billed Toucan

The keel-billed toucan wears the most improbable object in the rainforest on the front of its face: a banana-sized bill in green, orange, red and sky blue that weighs almost nothing, being a foam of keratin struts an engineer would sign. The bill is a fruit-picker's reach tool, a radiator for shedding heat, and a fencing foil in the toucan's frequent, faintly ridiculous bill-wrestling matches. Common through Caribbean-slope lowlands of Costa Rica, they cross gaps between trees in a flap-and-glide undulation, croaking like frogs, and a fruiting fig can collect half a dozen at once, tossing fruit back into their throats with a flick that never misses.

The full field guide entry, and everywhere else it is recorded

Before you go

Do not bait toucans to lodges with fruit platters near nests of other birds; toucans raid nests, and feeding stations can concentrate that pressure.