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Toco Toucan (??Nick Athanas)
Tropical Birding tour report - Brazil June 2006
Tour
B: Brazilian Cerrado
11-18 June
Chuck and Nancy Bell, Steve Gast, Sonia Jupp, Noel Mann, Sally Wechsler
This
week-long tour was designed to be taken with one of the Atlantic Rainforest
tours, There's no reason why it couldn't be taken along, but no one did. This
was very much a tour to target rare and endemic species as overall numbers were
not very high, and we were pretty successful with that, finding most of our
targets.
Our
Varig flight to BH was over an hour late, but fortunately there wasn't any
birding planned for the afternoon anyway. We drove an hour and a half to our
hotel near the Serra de Cip?? mountain range and enjoyed a quiet night. Next
morning we drove to the mountain pass and started walking up. The grassy slopes
were interspersed with patches of dense scrub and rocky outcrops, a totally
different landscape to what we had before. The birds were totally different too,
and there were a lot fewer of them around. One of the first that we saw was a
beautiful endemic hummer called the Hyacinth Visorbearer. They turned out to be
pretty common, and later in the day we even found a female sitting on a nest.
Soon after we saw the first of several Gray-backed Tachuris, small endemic
flycatchers. A
male Rufous-winged Antshrike was also a nice find. Higher up we paused to look
at some Gray Monjitas and Yellow-rumped Marshbirds before searching in earnest
for our main quarry, the rare, endemic Cip?? Canastero. The wind had picked up
making it difficult, and we heard and glimpsed several before finally finding a
sheltered valley where we all enjoyed good views of this shy bird. After
lunch we birded some scrubby habitat lower down, where the highlight was a pair
of Cinereous Warbling-Finches, and the following morning, battling drizzle and
wind, we finally saw our last main target, a Pale-throated Serra-Finch, before
heading of to Cara??a. |
