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Guyana: Close, Very Close!

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 where that most dramatic of wild cats is said to be common.

My early November trip to Guyana took us to several sites where the locals had seen jaguars occasionally, and we kept our eyes peeled for any sign of the king of the forest. On our way out from Iwokrama one day, our sharp-eyed driver spied drag marks across the road. We stopped to investigate, and a little bit of forensic reconstruction led us to an astonishing scene.

A giant armadillo, still bleeding and just a few feet away from the large mounded hole it had attempted to escape into. The locals decided that the jaguar, whose tracks were plainly visible on the roadside, had seized the armadillo and dragged it across the road, where it broke free and sought shelter in a hole; the cat managed to grab it again and dispatch it, leaving the carcass probably when we got out of the vehicles. The consensus was that the jaguar was still in the area, no doubt watching its cache–and thus watching us.

I thought for a moment that that last bit was added only for the frisson, a bit of spice thrown into the adventure for the tourists. But as we got back to the vehicles, there was an unpleasant aroma in the air, a musty, stale smell that I couldn’t place. “The jaguar,” our driver said, and off we drove. Close, very close!

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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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