We had several opportunities to see another spectacular cotinga, the Guianan Cock-of-the-Rock. Not only is this one of the most startlingly colored birds in the world, but it inhabits some of the most beautiful scenery anywhere; even had we missed the bird, the short hike in to our first site, on the Prince Charles Trail, [...]

The very word “cotinga” evokes the tropics like no other. I haven’t seen a great number of species in this group, but those I have been fortunate enough to encounter have certainly made an impression, especially the large, colorful species known as fruitcrows.
Purple-throated Fruitcrow has a wide range in southern Central and South America, and [...]

If there is any mammal I am more eager to see than the giant anteater, it would have to be jaguar. Living and birding here in southeast Arizona, of course, I have a chance, remote as it is, every time I am out, and I was fortunate enough this past year to visit several areas [...]

Like so many other young readers of the last century, my imaginings of tropical grasslands were formed almost entirely by my readings of W.H. Hudson, whose Naturalist on the Rio Plata remains one of my favorite books. Hudson didn’t have a whole lot to say about birds (though the accounts of hunting Emus with bolos, [...]

I’ve always loved swallows, and increasingly I think of that group as an exemplary one for the purposes of “birder education”: the family Hirundinidae shows a good diversity in habits and behavior, and provides excellent illustrations of a variety of identification features, from plumage characters to flight habit. Name a topic birders are interested in, [...]