Guyana 2007

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 [...]

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, [...]