Our guide on my Kolibri Expeditions tour was Alex Durand, one of the most knowledgeable birders–and two of the keenest eyes and ears–I’ve ever met in South America.

Along with six of his brothers, Alex is also catering to the physical needs of visiting birders by building a new eco-lodge on land they own together.

Right now, the Durand Brothers Lodge is still a basic place, hosting chiefly backpacking birders whose simple expectations are likely to be happily exceeded by the showers and flush toilet already installed.

But the spacious new dining room is a sign of greater things to come.

Alex and his brothers are hoping to have the new lodge complete by May 2011, offering comfortable accommodations and hot food to birders who would otherwise have to commute from Puerto Maldonado (as we did) or even farther.

And are there birds?

Oh yes.

We spent two full days birding the rich forests around the lodge, concentrating largely on such bamboo stunners as Rufous-headed Woodpecker and Bamboo Antshrike, both of which we saw remarkably well. Red-throated Caracaras announced our passage through the forest, and at one point we were surrounded by a herd of white-lipped peccaries–the only time during the entire tour when I felt the least bit nervous about my safety!

Fortunately they left us pretty much alone, crashing and gnashing their way through the undergrowth, as did the several monkey species flashing through the treetops overhead.

The construction of Peru’s Interoceanica Highway has brought with it mitigation funds for the development of the communities affected by the construction of the road, and some are taking advantage of it to attract eco-tourists.

This is the new Mendez Family Restaurant, housed in one of the most attractive buildings we saw anywhere in the Peruvian countryside. The menu comprises a selection of excellent local specialties.

And best of all, there’s post-prandial birding right behind the restaurant.

This was where we say the only Dull-capped Attila of the tour, a noisy beast indeed, and though we had to wait another day for our first Point-tailed Palmcreeper, the palms here would almost certainly have produced that bizarre and dramatic bird at a more suitable time of day.

Peru’s new Interoceanica Highway–when it isn’t closed for a rock slide!–passes through some incredibly beautiful forest, and as it descends the eastern slope of the cordillera, it hugs the mountainsides to give great views into the canopy, otherwise so tantalizingly inaccessible.

The roadside turns out to be a great “canopy tower,” and we enjoyed spectacular views of birds as colorful as Spangled Cotinga and as unassuming as Red-billed Tyrannulet. One of my favorite sights came over a breakfast on the shoulder, when Alex called us over to look down on just about the cutest bird I’d ever seen, a Short-tailed Pygmy-Tyrant, aptly named in all its parts.

As we came down the eastern slope, we began to encounter more typically lowland species, including a number of my “most wanted.” A Horned  Screamer–representative of a new family for me, and the first of four individuals we’d see during our tour–perched in a clearing, preening and generally looking unconcerned on its ludicrously slender treetop perch.

Even more exciting was finding two jacamar species on the same stretch of road. First up was a fantastic White-throated Jacamar, a weird-looking bird with a needle nose; right across the dusty road was a pair of enormous, chunky, dagger-billed Purus Jacamars, which we watched engage in some sort of earnest dispute with a third.

I really like jacamars, and with the addition of Bluish-fronted Jacamar in the days to come, I more than doubled the number of species I’ve encountered.

Jacamars may be the epitome of the tropical for me, but there was one bird I wanted to see even more. Gunnar had been with me a few years ago in Guyana when I  came close, but this time we pulled it off: a Sunbittern, in all its sunburst-winged glory, lurked at a shaded creek crossing. It was flushed by one of our group members in a hurry, but paused not far away to let us admire its odd and intricate plumage before it flew off again and around the bend, where we were able to pick it out again in the dimness and wonder at the amazingly effective camouflage generated by all that color and pattern.

We ended the day in a weedy field just around the corner from that blessed creekside, watching Yellow-browed Sparrows, Chestnut-eared Aracaris, and some friends from home: Stilt, Pectoral, and Upland Sandpipers, Lesser Yellowlegs, and Wilson’s Phalaropes fed on the edges of a small pond, blissfully unaware of just how exotic their surroundings felt to their watchers.

Our night in Quincemil had been quiet, nothing but Uniform Crake and the occasional outburst from a  Speckled Chachalaca to trouble our sleep. Our pre-breakfast walk on a cool, clear morning produced great views of Fine-barred Piculet, Pectoral Sparrow, and singing Chestnut-bellied Seed-Finches, a voice of willow-warbler-like sweetness, as Gunnar pointed out.

Fortified by exciting birding and a good breakfast, we piled back into the birdmobile and hit the road for the east. We stopped many times for many birds, taking advantage of the canopy views provided by the road as it hugged the steep slopes. And once we stopped against our will.

A dramatic rock slide at a construction site closed the road ahead of us for nearly four hours as trickles of debris and boulders the size of cars crashed down onto the pavement. Many of the drivers took advantage of the forced break to catch a little shut-eye, while ours stayed open to watch such fine birds as Black-billed Thrush and Plumbeous Kite.

Finally we were on our way again, and we made it to the hustling, bustling town of Mankuzo with time to take a walk in the forest behind our hotel.

Among the batrachians singing in the gathering dusk were numbers of cute little poison arrow frogs, the first I’d ever seen. The only birds we saw were a hooting Rufous Motmot and two Tawny-bellied Screech-Owls, the first a fluffy silhouette, the second caught briefly in Alex’s flashlight beam. But what really caught my eye was the lightning bugs, several species on the leaves and floating through the air; one was the most startling I’d ever seen, huge and orange-yellow, given to flying a slow, straight course through the forest, like someone carrying a lit match through the trees. We’re in the tropics now!

Dinner was followed by a remarkably short night. Our neighbor came home under the influence of some powerful stimulant about 3:45 am, and shouted and slammed and stumbled to wake the whole place up. I lay there for a few minutes thinking how satisfying it would be when we woke him up ourselves when we got up at 4:30–then finally, about 4:25, figured out that he wasn’t going to stop. We left him still ranting at 5:00, happy to have some quiet time in the birdmobile.

International travel nowadays seems to be equal parts running and flying, the mix bound together with a big helping of anxiety whether one will be able to do enough of the former to carry on with the latter.

I could, and I did, from a drizzly Vancouver to a sultry Houston to a surprisingly sedate Mexico City to a foggy Lima and finally on to a cool and bright Cusco, where I was as happy to see my friend Gunnar again as to find myself greeted by a small cloud of Andean Gulls, my first bird in a new country.

Our able driver, Julio, soon picked us up and we set off for Huacarpay, where the earlier arrivals already awaited us.

The extensive ruins here at Piquillacta are the traces not of the Inca but of the Wari, who lived here (and across much of present-day Peru) 1,300 to 1,100 years ago; the dry stonework is dazzling, and the sight of the palace walls almost drew our attention from the birds. Almost: it’s hard to be distracted by anything from the endemic Bearded Mountaineer, or from Puna Snipe and Plumbeous Rails walking around in the open!

There’s something as comforting as it is exciting about birding high elevations in South America. Almost everything is novel at the species level–but especially around ponds and lakes, even the new birds represent familiar families. We birded our way up, up, up over the Andes in good sun and some strong breezes, stopping at puna ponds for Andean Geese and White-fronted Ground-Tyrants.

It was dusk when we arrived at Quincemil for the night, with Gray-necked Wood-Rail and an invisible Uniform Crake singing from the forest edge at our lodge.

A sunset, a meal, and a good night’s sleep had us ready for another day of birding the next morning.