Guyana 2007

If I’ve given the impression that Guyana is a place filled with “the mostest and the bestest,” it’s only because it’s true. This is Kaieteur Falls, the highest single-drop waterfall in the world, and a place to look for (and often to find, I’m told) Orange-breasted Falcon.
These b-log entries have been a little jumbled, but […]

Take a fistful of fluff, add a wicked bill, endless patience, and an insatiable hunger for fat insects, and you’ve got a puffbird. Puffbirds, though in the same order as woodpeckers, are perhaps more similar to kingfishers in their big-headed and neckless appearance, but they tend to be quieter and more retiring than either most […]

Not even Guyana, for all its avian riches, lets birders check off everything on their wish lists in a visit of just two weeks. Several of us had harbored great hopes for Sunbittern, that rainbow-winged shade-dweller of the jungle, but by our last day at Karanambu, it looked like we’d missed it for real.
Our last […]

Herons and egrets are always a bonus on any trip to the Neotropics; two species in particular were among my favorites on my November visit to Guyana. Both are closely related to familiar North American species, both, though, stunning in their own distinctive ways.

Striated Heron is the southern counterpart of “our” Green Heron, and in […]

There’s something fascinatingly prehistoric about storks, and Guyana offers a good selection of these huge wading birds.
We did not find the ominously decreasing Maguari, but Wood Storks were common and readily found, looking like pterodactyls as they flew over us everywhere from urban parks to wilderness swamps.

(This picture is especially for Alex, who discovered and […]