Twenty-two Birds

July 10, 2007 By

On Sunday, I finished up the bird list Alec sent me, and I added a total of 22 birds to my lifelist. On the road to achieving #37 – 500 birds on my lifelist, this puts me at an unusually round 300.

While that sounds impressive, nearly half were added from my two trips with Alec in South America. Granted, Argentina alone has more species than all of North America, which is a huge reason birding in South America was on this list. But, still, I feel a little cheap that two days can get me nearly a third of my entire goal. Maybe I’ll have to up the number to 750.

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Otamendi

July 2, 2007 By

What a difference a day makes.

Woke up at 6am to meet Alec in front of the building for our trip to Otamendi National Wildlife Preserve. Though a bit exhausted, I was glad to see him again and very excited to do more birding in Argentina.

After an hour’s drive, we arrived at Otamendi just as the sun was rising. The trees and irrigation ditches were covered in an ethereal mist that limited visibility to about 30 meters. Though not great for spotting birds, it was a great way to see the countryside.

Birding was slow, and though Alec was disappointed in our lack of progress, I was just happy to be able to bird in a real ecosystem, something that wasn’t completely sculpted by man. We saw several kingfishers, great kiskadees, horneros and spinetails. We drove up and down the main access road, eating media lunas and drinking coffee to keep out the morning chill.

For lunch, we drove into the main area at Otamendi, staffed by young men and women who served as guides and park rangers. Over turkey sandwiches, Alec told me about his work with Aves Argentinas and how he had recently given a talk about the genetic makeup of furnarids, a bird family unique to South America. He had recently led a group from the Max Planck Institute who had done genetic testing and discovered that some of the previous notions about species were incorrect, which led to the reclassification of an entire genus of creepers.

After lunch, Esteban led us and a small group of Argentinians on a 5k walk to the lagoon at the center of Otamendi. One of the people recognized Alec from his work with Aves Argentinas, and it began to dawn on me how pivotal his role might be in the Argentine environmental movement.

When we first arrived at the park, all of the rangers and guides greeted him by name, and though I understood very little of what was said, I could tell that they all shared the same concerns about diminishing habitat. These young people were doing a job they loved and thought was important, and Alec was regularly taking people through this area on tours. He explained to me during the walk, while pointing at a distant fire, that farmers here regularly use fire to clear land, and there is almost no environmental regulation. People can do whatever they want with their own land, even when it adjoins a wildlife sanctuary.

The walk we were taking was marked as “high difficulty” though it was mostly through flat grass and wetlands. Alec said this is because most Argentines see vacations as a time to go to the beach, and there is very little interest in the outdoors. Alec, and the people working at Otamendi, were trying to change this. At the end of the walk, Esteban asked everyone to make sure to recommend Otamendi to their friends, which Alec said was important, for if people stopped coming, it could lead officials to question the need for such a place.

In the car on the way home, while sitting in some really badly designed traffic patterns, I saw Alec as a modern day John Muir type, photographing and painting what he finds in the places no one else goes, and evangelizing the natural world through his work with Aves Argentinas. I was witnessing the birth of a movement, and I was quite humbled.

Now is the time when science and sensibilities can finally meet, and the result can take hold all over the world simultaneously. Unfortunately, I also saw at Otamendi major impediments to such a movement. In the ranger station’s office was an old television, locked behind wrought iron bars. Apparently, the same people who work hard to save these places don’t trust each other enough to work together to achieve their common goals. Alec confirmed this, and said that everyone, though they all see the same end, can only see their own way of getting there.

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Day 3, Entre Rios

October 22, 2006 By

I am not a very good birder. I don’t study the guidebooks in my spare time, I never travel specifically to look for birds, and I couldn’t tell you the difference between Falconiformes and Passeriformes to save my life. In fact, it’s pretty safe to say that I am a wretched birder. But, since I started about 5 or 6 years ago, I have always wanted to bird in South America, so much so that it made my list, #39 – Go birding in South America. So when we decided to go to BA, I immediately looked into hiring a guide to take me to a bird hotspot.

The man I hired, Alec, works with Aves Argentinas, and comes from a long line of birders. The guidebook I had purchased was first translated into English by his uncle, who was known to be able to identify any bird in Argentina solely by its call. I called him yesterday to firm up our plans, and was a bit surprised to hear a perfect British accent. (His grandfather was a UK citizen, and Alec lived in England for several years.) We agreed on a time and a place, and at 4:30am, he and his son Nick picked me up at the Guest House.

We drove up to Entre Rios, a province northwest of BA and on the northern edge of the pampas. Nick served us coffee and pastries while the sun rose and I shook the sleep out of my head. At about 6:00, we pulled in to a small village called Ceibas, named after the Argentine national tree, the ceibo. People in the village were already up and about, and waved to us as we drove through. Alec explained to me that we would be visiting several different habitats, from woodland to grassland to wetland. Our first stop was on a road just outside the village and on the edge of the woodland. The first bird I spotted was one of those birds that I had seen in my North America guidebook and always joked about seeing, due to its rarity in the north. But there, not 30 yards away from me as I stepped out of the car, was the Southern Crested Caracara. I would be in for a lot of moments like that today.

As we walked through the woodlands, I began to feel a little out of my depth. Alec and Nick were so expert at both call and sight identification, I felt like a useless appendage. They were very focused on spotting as many birds as possible, as they were doing what’s called in the States, a Big Day. (A Big Day is when local birders try to count as many species by either sight or call in a 24 hour period. They are usually done as a way to assess the long term health of species over many years. They can also be quite competitive.) They were also focused, however, on making certain I could spot and ID any bird that they saw. This worked better in theory than in practice, as birding in another hemisphere isn’t quite as easy as birding in your own backyard. But, after a while I started to get the hang of it. We saw flickers, horñeros, martins, a great horned owl, spinetails (a bird family unique to South America), parakeets, and woodcreepers.

After the woodlands, as we were driving towards the wetlands, we came upon a group of greater rheas fenced in on a small farm. None of us had ever been that close to a rhea (which looks like a small ostrich), so we decided to stop and get some pictures. The male came right up to us and started demonstrating by spreading his wings and issuing this very deep bellow that resonated in its enormous belly and was almost sub-aural. Soon, the rancher came out, and just as I thought he was going to tell us to scram, he handed us some stale bread and let us feed his flock.

At the wetlands, the temperature really started to pick up, and we walked out to the end of a long embankent, through spiny palms and all sorts of other flora I didn’t recognize. In the lagoons surrounding the dike, I saw, among others, the southern screamer, a duck that looks and acts like a raptor, tyrannulets, flycatchers (including the stunning vermillion and fork-tailed), ducks, and shorebirds. Each time one would come into view, Alec and Nick would make certain I got a good look at it, and point out the field marks that allowed me to ID it.

After the walk back from the end of the embankment, we had lunch in a grove of eucalyptus trees, under a colony of monk parakeets. Alec showed me his amplified MP3 player that allows him to bring up the call of just about any bird in the area, and it works amazingly well. When he played a call, almost immediately he would get a call in response from another bird, and oftentimes get the bird to fly out of the bush to see who was encroaching on his territory. This device upped the bird count of the day by probably 20-30 birds.

On to the grasslands, and by this time the sun was scorching. I became a little lazy and got out of the car a little less often, but it was really only for about a half-hour or so that I felt exhausted. After some water (and shade), I started feeling much better, and actually started contributing to the count. Blackbirds, cowbirds, finches, sparrows, and cuckoos abounded, and we even got to see a pair of burrowing owls perched on a fence post. We drove up the road a bit further and pulled off to see some wild rheas grazing in a field next to some cattle, and some wood and maguari storks wading next to tiger herons.

We got back on the highway and headed to Perdices, a village so named because European settlers thought that the native birds were like their own partridges, or perdices in spanish. I had a chance to see the legendary Argentine cow up close, and all in all, it’s not that impressive. They actually look a little skinny and mangy. But maybe that’s why they are so delicious, not all buffed up with steroids and Cow Chow like in the states. Also got to see a real gaucho, riding his horse up the road, with his son on a smaller horse bringing up the rear.

As the daylight started to wane, Alec gave me a Quilmes and we sat and watched the sunset. I counted the birds we had seen and heard. Alec and Nick had around 140, while I had 121, only about 10 of which I had ever seen before. Another item on my list, #54 – Spot 100 bird species in a single day, had been accomplished, which was quite a surprise to me this early in my birding “career.”

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