The feeder birds are as easy in Colombia as anywhere else. But maybe you came for the tough birds--the 'birder's birds.'
Well if you read the previous post, then you’ve already seen
examples from one of the most notorious of mossy undergrowth skulkers, the
Antpittas.
Unless you go someplace where
they’ve been conditioned Pavlov-style to associate humans with free worms
they’re near impossible to get a good look at, even when blasting obnoxious
amounts of playback. We found one exception to this rule in the paramo where Tawny Antpittas apparently sit up on fence posts
to sing!
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| Tawny Antpitta, Los Nevados National park |
Oddly, the normally invisible Sedge Wren (though this flavor will almost certainly be split out eventually), exhibits similar behavior in this area.
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| Sedge Wren, Los Nevados National Park |
In addition to the aforementioned antpittas, other birds that come to feeders have relatives who do not and can be really tough to see. Even the bright and in-your-face tanager family contains some timid undergrowth species.
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| Black-backed Bush Tanager, Los Nevados National Park |
This
Black-backed Bush Tanager (aka Black-backed Bush Finch, the only member of the
genus Urothraupis) was unusually cooperative. Usually they stay hidden.
And hummingbirds, when they aren't after nectar, hide ocassionally as well…
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| Greenish Puffleg nest, Tatama National Park |
…like when they’re sitting on eggs!
But the point of this point is introduce some of the tougher
brownish and blackish birds that exist only in the neotropics and often get
outshown by the colorful and conspicuous.
Two large groups comprise the bulk of the diversity: 1) the thamnophilids,
popularly known as Antbirds (or “ant-things,” as Will likes to call them since
they include antbirds, antwrens and antshrikes); and 2) the Furnariids,
sometimes called “ovenbirds,” despite the fact that only one small subgroup
actually constructs ovens.
We saw 13 species of Antbirds, but unfortunately the most
cooperative one was also the most boring, the well-named Uniform Antshrike.
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| Uniform Antshrike, Chestnut-capped Piha Reserve |
The rest stayed true to form and avoided camera lenses and
sunshine.
Summing all our woodcreepers, spinetails, foliage-gleaners,
treerunners, et al. yields 29 furnariid species for the trip. The foliage-gleaners usually aren’t much higher than eye
level, but this Buff-fronted sat out in the sub-canopy where it went to work on
some sort of insect larva.
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| Buff-fronted Foliage-Gleaner, Chestnut-capped Piha Reserve |
Spinetails are generally hard to see at all, but we got a
few great looks at these Azara’s.
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| Azara's Spinetails, Valle de Cauca |
Once again up at 3500 meters altitude in the paramo where
the vegetation gets sparse some of these birds get a lot easier.
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| Stout-billed Cinclodes, Los Nevados National Park |
This Stout-billed Cinclodes didn’t seem to
care about much of anything but sitting on this fence post.
Another difficult group familiar to us northerners are, of
course, the owls. Normally I have
terrible luck with tropical owls, but on this trip we had some of the best
owling I’ve ever experiences anywhere.
As a group we saw (yes, with our eyes!) five owl species: Tropical Screech-owl,
White-throated Screech-Owl, Colombian Screech-Owl…
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| Stygian Owl, Chetnut-capped Piha Reserve |
…and this Stygian Owl, which was among our favorite encounters
of the trip.
The Stygian Owl was right outside the lodge at the Chestnut-capped
Piha Reserve, unfortunately Mark was sequestered away laundering his
socks. We couldn’t find him and so he
missed it—tragic, given his love for owls, as demonstrated by his owl
conservation work in North Carolina for New Hope Audubon Society.
Not 15 minutes after getting over Stygian Owl euphoria, we
stumbled upon this Mottled Owl…
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| Mottled Owl, Chestnut-capped Piha Reserve |
…which I was thrilled to be able to remove from my ‘heard-only’
list.
We’ll end this post and this Colombia series with a bird group that in the
modal human consciousness is probably most-associated with the tropics: parrots!
“But wait!” you’re thinking. “Parrots are brightly colored
and don’t skulk and hide.” Yes, but they’re brightly colored green. It isn’t an accident that green is also the
color of leaves! So they are either: 1) surprisingly well camouflaged in the canopy, or 2) silhouettes
screeching and flying high overhead identifiable only to genus level unless you
can sort out their screech notes. While
we recorded perhaps a dozen psittacid species, the number that gave soul-satisfying
views could almost fit on one hand.
We were lucky in that among the handful that cooperated were
some real gems:
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| Golden-Plumed Parakeet, Vulnerable Colombian endemic, Rio Blanco Reserve |
Golden-plumed Parakeets are notoriously difficult and this
was a lifer even for Natalia who has spent extensive time in appropriate Andean
habitat.
Another parrot, the Rufous-fronted Parakeet, a Vulnerable Colombian endemic, was
one of our primary targets for our trip to the paramo of Los Nevados. After an unsuccessful morning of searching we
were ready to call it a miss. Fortunately Jacob had gotten into the habit of skipping lunch to beat
for the bush for extra birds and in this instance his fast paid off for the whole
group. When he came sprinted up the road screaming about parrots
everybody ditched their café y huevos con pancito and tore after him.
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| Rufous-fronted Parakeet, Los Nevados National Park |
It was well worth letting breakfast and coffee get cold to see a flock of nine of these odd, cute parakeets!
This will be my last Colombia post until the next trip (in
case you missed the last two: part 1 and part 2) and I’ve still just scratched
the surface, really.
So many awesome things had to be left out, like the
Black-billed Mountain-Toucan; or the vagrant Near-Threatened Orinoco Goose that
we found at the Sonso wetland two Andean cordilleras west of its expected
range; or this awesome skulking Tody Motmot that Jacob finally found for us
after an hour of unsuccessful searching for the source of the
vocalization.
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| Tody Motmot, Antioquia |
Well I guess that last one made it in!
It’s been a few weeks now, but I’m still feeling the effects of withdrawal. Hopefully some fall migrants
this weekend can shake off the post-neotropical birding funk.
