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Guyana: Mammal of the Year

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, are I suspect, still capturing the fantasies of elementary school boys around the world). But his experiences and encounters with the mammals of his adopted continent are classics.

A noon-time walk at Karanambu in November revealed large numbers of baked-clay pyramid sticking up from the sparsely grassed savannah floor: termites!

Hopes rose for the possibility of seeing one of my most-wanted mammals of all time, and the next morning the dream came true, when we jarred and jolted out in the ancient Land Rover to where a gaucho had discovered this amazing giant anteater.

The great creature came quite close to the horse, and then to us, moving at a speed certainly evolved for defense and not for feeding; termites don’t move nearly that fast, I’m sure!

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Guyana: White-winged Swallow

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, and the swallows provide an instructive example.

And besides that, they’re beautiful, as this White-winged Swallow shows.

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Guyana: Sandbar Birds

The rivers of Guyana left this boy from the prairies, one who has ended up in the desert, with his mouth agape and his eyes disbelieving. Our boat travel along the Essequibo took us to several stretches where the river was 5 kilometers or more across, the opposite shore a green blur on the horizon; a few of the islands in the river, I was told, are larger than Bermuda.

Sandbars and beaches provided great habitat for a number of really fine birds. Our landing strip at beautiful Rock View Lodge hosted a Collared Plover, and Pied Lapwings, beautiful creatures that in appearance bridge the gap between the “ringed” plovers and the larger lapwings, were familiar and confiding all along the river.

Black Skimmers were very common, too, and with them we found the occasional Large-billed Tern, a bird I had long dreamed of seeing.

There was a mild sense of vindication when I finally saw my first of this species. Many of you will no doubt remember the Memorial Day Large-billed Tern at New Jersey’s Kearney Marsh. I don’t remember where I was the day that that bird arrived, but I do know that I was not at home, and so my phone rang off the hook all day–and I didn’t find out about the bird until hours after it had departed. A shame: now that I have seen the tern, I really wish I hadn’t had to wait so long!

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Tucson to Casa Grande: Birding in the Cold

Well, all right, I suppose by some standards it wasn’t that bad, but 23 degrees Fahrenheit is cold for Tucson! It had warmed up nicely, approaching 60, by the time we hit Casa Grande at 3:00 this afternoon. But Katie, David, Graham, and I hardly noticed the weather all day: there were too many birds to distract us.

We started in the chilly dawn with a fluffed up Western Screech-Owl, and ended, 70 species later, with an actively diving female Long-tailed Duck, the biggest surprise of the day (and only the second I’d ever seen in Arizona). In between, we enjoyed such special targets as Mountain Plover and Northern Jacana, Ferruginous Hawk and White-tailed Kite, Burrowing Owl and Prairie Falcon, White-throated Swift and Bendire’s Thrasher, Crested Caracara and Oregon Junco…. It was a magical day on the lower Santa Cruz, as most of them are.

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