Aug 6--Garden of Amazon to Piuval (250 miles)

Thursday,  August 6, 2015
Garden of Amazon to Piuval  (250 miles)

Breakfast this morning was at a more relaxed 6 am, allowing us time to pack our bags and set them outside the door to be loaded on the bus. After breakfast, we birded along the exit road seeing more tapir tracks and several birds: the Lettered(1), Chestnut-eared (2), and Red-necked Aracari (3), as well as Gould’s Toucanet (4), as well as the  White-collared Puffbird (5) that Marcelo digiscoped for me.

Marcelo worked and worked at calling in a Fawn-breasted Wren (above 6). Like most wrens, it was quick and difficult to pin down. It would fly pretty high up in a close tree and then immediately fly to another behind us trying to locate the intruder. We did get looks at it but fleeting ones and generally from underneath as in the Internet pic here. Not a spectacular S.A. bird but a little brown bird quite similar to our wrens but for its streaked head.

After morning birding, Luis arrived with the bus and we returned to Cuiabá along the same route we took to get to Garden of the Amazon. I counted 6 Burrowing Owls at different spots along the route, as well as their burrows in the banks bordering the fields. When we got to a mid-sized town, we stopped for gas at a station/convenience store located at a busy intersection. Across the intersection, on a concrete fence post in what appeared to be an abandoned factory, sat a burrowing owl and another was on a concrete curb at its feet—both seemingly unperturbed by the people, noise, dust, and wind created by the trucks and traffic that rumbled by.

On the way we saw Savannah (1), Black-collared (2), Great Black (3), Roadside (4), and White-tailed Hawks (5), and Snail Kites (6) on the telephone poles, posts, or in tall trees. We saw all of these hawks at other times during our tour, also.

In Cuiabá we stopped again for lunch at the restaurant across from the airport where one loaded one’s plate and then it was weighed to determine the price. After lunch it was back on the bus to watch the roadsides for fields of small, white cebu cattle (Brazil has the second largest herd in the world, surpassed only by India). We also passed vast fields of termite mounds, looking like cemeteries; and trees full of jabiru, neotropical cormorants, egrets, herons, storks and other birds. 

We drove through Poconé the gateway to the northern Pantanal. On a fence was a large banner with a mosquito on it warning against Chikungunya. I did not see a mosquito on the whole trip. It had not rained for three months in the Pantanal though there was plenty of water in the rivers and vast areas that were still wet. I am not sure why there were no mosquitoes unless all the birds and bats keep them in check.

Shortly after we left Poconé we were on the Transpantaneira, a 95-mile elevated dirt road to Porto Jofre on the Quiabá River nearly at the Bolivian border. At mile 7 we hung a left and drove down a side dirt road to Pousada Piuval, arriving about 4 pm. 

After checking into our rooms, we quickly washed up and then re-boarded the bus and birded a lovely area that in the wet season can be navigated only by boat. Our big bus, thinking itself a safari vehicle, bumped across tiny bridges, wallowed through rutted fields, and detoured around flooded and deeply muddy areas. No American bus driver would ever attempt to bring a city-sized bus over the terrain we traveled, but Luis handled the bus as though it was a sedan.

Eventually the bus stopped at a vast, water hyacinth-clogged lake and a small dock. Two Piuval boat pilots were waiting for us. We divided into two boats and birded the lake until dark, seeing many caiman, a Least Bittern that looked darker and a bit different than its north American counterpart, an Orange-headed Tanager (1) two Yellow-billed Cardinals (3), and several others that I cannot now remember. The yellow-billed Cardinals are attractive birds. We would see many more at the various lodge feeders before trip’s end.

Internet pic of what our boats were like. I never got a photo of ours.

We also saw numerous water birds—Herons, Black-necked Stilts, Neotropical Cormorants, Jabiru building their nests, Snowy and Cattle Egrets, Least Grebes, Brazilian Teal, etc.

We had dinner this evening at 7:30. There were many tourists from different countries in the dining hall. The first time for us because we had Garden of the Amazon nearly to ourselves.