Neotropical Birdwatching | Birdwatching in the Neotropics

Birdwatching in the Neotropics

For any birdwatcher, even a well-travelled one, the first dawn’s birding in the neotropics is likely to be a bit of an eye-opener, and something that will stay in the memory for years. Of course there is a lot of birdsong as the sky starts to lighten, with tweets, whistles and chirrups coming from most directions, and soon you start to pick up your first bird in your binoculars. Probably a flycatcher, sitting out in the open. But which one? You turn to the plates in your field guide and find three or four pages of flycatchers, tyrants, tyrannulets and elaenias, most of which look, at first sight anyway, just like the one in front of you. Better skip that one. Some parakeets arrive and busy themselves noisily in a tree: bright greens, blues and yellows flashing. This should be easier. Yes! They must be Brown-throated Parakeets—a lovely brash and busy bird. More birds appear, a pair of different parrots, some little doves. A hawk! A great bold vicious-looking beast flaps down to the ground thirty metres away and starts tearing at something with a hooked beak almost as big as its head. A little fumbling in the book shows it to be a Crested Caracara—not strictly a hawk, but there we are. Birds leave and more appear, in a constantly changing collection all around you. Soon, with help from your guide, your list of neotropical sightings runs to 30 species, an hour later it could be 40. Within a few days you’ve seen more species than an avid twitcher can expect to see in a lifetime in the British Isles. You have become a neotropical birdwatcher.

At first you are delighted just to see so many birds, and to keep seeing more. Then you might start to have favourite families. The tanagers, for example, or hummingbirds. Hold on, perhaps the cotingas, trogons, toucans, manakins, or antbirds. Or maybe the parrots ...

There are the ‘spectacular’ birds to see: harpy eagle, curassows, screamers, cock-of-the-rock, quetzals, umbrellabirds, fruit crows, hoatzin, sunbittern, and more. Some sites are simply must-sees for any birder: scores of macaws at a clay-lick in Peru, Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos, mixed flocks of tanagers foraging in the Ecuadorian cloud forest, scarlet ibis coming to roost in Venezuela’s Llanos, ten thousand oilbirds pouring out of Humboldt’s Cave at dusk, or condors soaring above Andean passes.

If it’s rarities you’re after there is more than enough for a lifetime’s searching, and new species are being discovered every year. Or you may find yourself fascinated by a special habitat—cloud forest, lowland rain forest, high sierras. Or you might fall in love with a country—Costa Rica, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela. Or maybe just the whole darned thing.

Neotropical birding is quite likely to become an obsession. Tucked up at home you start having dreams in which you sit on a verandah after lunch as a succession of glittering hummingbirds buzz and zoom and whizz around feeders dangling a few feet from your chair. Or you are perched in a small boat on a river with your binoculars trained into the roots of an overhanging tree when you find yourself staring straight into the watchful eye of an agami heron. Looking up, the sky is filled with several thousand swallow-tail kites, soaring elegantly at an impossible height on thermals way above the forest. You follow a path through the trees and find a dozen wire-tailed manakins cavorting frantically on their own little dance floors, fussily cleared of leaf litter, desperate for the favours of a single lady manakin who sits to one side, her head cocked, seemingly non-plussed until her mind is made up and her mate chosen.

There is so much other wildlife to see, turtles nesting on empty beaches, giant anteaters pawing and snuffling at three-foot high termite mounds, river otters careering around sun-lit ponds, howler monkeys roaring at the morning sky, armadillos scuttling into their burrows, capybara mothers nonchalantly grazing as their young play around their feet, and many many more. Butterflies too—their species numbered in thousands, not the few score that we see at home—some comfortably larger than your hand.

Then there are the places you see along the way. Machu Picchu—the lost city of the Incas, Rio de Janeiro and the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema, Angel Falls and Iguassu Falls, the Galapagos Islands, the Amazon rain forest, the high Andes, snow-capped volcanoes, sleepy little villages, dusty ranches where quietly spoken hard-working cowboys live and breathe the real machismo, mansions built with fortunes made from rubber or quinine, churches smothered in gold, markets where behatted ladies sell the textiles that their families wove by hand, long long beaches backed by palm trees and coral islands bleached in the sun, quirkily painted buses that blare out salsa, merengue, or rumba for their passengers, the collective passions of futebol or carnival, the stern lives of farmers in the mountains, or tumbling streams cascading beneath bromeliad-festooned trees in the cloud forest.

When you go birdwatching in the neotropics you are collecting memories too.