Aug 5--Garden of the Amazon

Wednesday, August 5, 2015
Garden of the Amazon

This is to be our last full day at Garden of the Amazon. Tomorrow we will walk up the exit dirt road for a mile or so birding in the early morning after breakfast, and then the bus will pick us up and we will head south, back through Cuiabá and then farther south to Posada Piuval in the northern Panatanal for the night. But I get ahead of myself.

Marcelo at the  beginning of Crunchy Trail; a tree that grows in columns that look like vines--the dark blob toward the top of the picture is a termite nest--very common sight on the trees; right: a tree with a couple of rooted vines hanging from it. This is the neck-breaking angle straight up that we must look sometimes, also.

This morning we enjoyed a 5:30 breakfast, and then birded crunchy trail again. We saw a Long-billed Gnat Wren (1) and a Black-bellied Cuckoo (2) among other species.
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After lunch this day we drove to a lake at the beginning of the exit road.
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Here we saw Blue-and-yellow Macaws (1) endangered Hyacinth Macaws (2); Brazilian Teal; White Woodpeckers (3), a Yellow-tufted  Woodpecker (4), a Red-stained Woodpecker (5), and a Point-tailed Palmcreeper, among others. There was an Osprey at this lake also. Kind of nice to see the home birds. 




The macaws perched in a nearby tree affording good shots, both macaw photos above by Pierre Henkart. The Point-tailed Palmcreeper, however, was halfway across the lake in a palm tree, but Marcello managed to digiscope it for me. Though the bird was too far away for a good pic, I inserted both an internet photo and my digiscoped photo below to show the limitations of a digiscoped cell iphone photo.
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The digiscoped White Woodpeckers to the left, their tongues comically seen as they scold. They were reacting to Marcelo's pygmy owl call I think. To the right the digiscoped Point-tailed Palmcreeper. The bird was quite a distance away.

It was dusk when we finished birding at the lake. Marcello asked for volunteers to owl the sides of the road and walk back to the lodge with him. He had only two takers. The rest of us were exhausted. Dinner was served when the owlers got back at 8 pm this night. The owlers had heard a screech owl and one other owl but had seen none.