Crested Guan

How to find it

Start with your ears, because the loud honking makes the guan easy to locate. Then look up into the middle and upper canopy rather than on the ground, since it is rarely seen on the ground and avoids open spaces. It forages mostly early in the morning or at dusk, in pairs or groups of up to 8. Fruiting trees are a good place to wait, such as those near the administration buildings at La Selva. Where there is no hunting, the birds can be quite approachable. When you find one, look for a second bird nearby.

How to recognise it

Think of a turkey that has taken up life in the treetops. Look for these marks:

Very large size, about 86 cm in body length.

Mostly brown plumage.

A shaggy crest.

White streaking on the breast.

A bare red throat flap.

Red eyes, a blackish bill and dull coral-colored legs.

Males and females look alike, so you do not need to sort the sexes. Young birds differ: they have no red throat flap, or only a small one, with brown eyes and reduced white streaking.

What it sounds like

Recording: dylancamachoguzman10, CC0 1.0, source, read 4 Nov 2026.

Behaviour and diet

Crested Guans usually move in pairs or family groups. They feed on fruit and new leaves in the forest canopy and move very nimbly there, even eating upside down on slender branches. They sometimes drop to the ground for fallen fruit and seeds. Guans in a flock tend to follow the leader's flight path from tree to tree, one by one. Breeding in Costa Rica runs from March to June. The nest is a bulky cup of twigs lined with leaves, built in a tree, and the clutch is 2 to 3 whitish eggs.

Where it lives

The guan lives on both slopes of Costa Rica, from sea level up to about 1,800 m. It once ranged from the lowlands up to 1,200 m on the Caribbean slope in places, and up to 1,850 m on the Pacific slope. It prefers mature forest, old secondary forest and gallery forest. It also lives in dry forest: in Santa Rosa National Park it favored forest patches with dense cover and used streamside vegetation as refuge in the dry season. It is absent from deforested areas.

When to see it

Males call loudly at dawn and dusk at the start of the breeding season, which in Costa Rica is given as February or March to June.

Similar birds

Costa Rica has five cracids: Great Curassow, two chachalacas (Plain and Gray-headed), Black Guan and this species. Black Guan is found mainly above 1,200 m and is endemic to Costa Rica and western Panama. It is quiet, calls hardly at all and stays calmer than the Crested Guan when you walk beneath it. At Arenal the Great Curassow is the other big bird, but the guan flies a lot and spends as much time in trees as on the ground, so it is much easier to see.

Names and lore in Costa Rica

In Costa Rica the bird is called pava crestada, pava granadera, or simply "pava" in everyday Tico Spanish. The word pava also means turkey, though guans are not closely related to turkeys.

Status and conservation

It is a resident (R) on the AOCR list, and the IUCN rates it Near Threatened with a decreasing population.

Photography tips

Guans are often watched in pairs or small family groups, so look for a second bird when you find one. In a flock they tend to follow the leader's flight path from tree to tree, one by one. One photographer waited for the lead bird to move, then set up to catch the followers.