Peru 2024 - Part 4 - Upper Amazon - Birds, Birds, Birds!

Sunday, 22 September through Sunday, 29 September 2024

Birds are plentiful. Some are easy to see. Some are well-hidden. Some are noisy. Some are silent. All are interesting!

I’ll start with the birds most commonly and easily seen.

Cormorants

Cormorants were everywhere. Flying over the rivers, standing on sandbars and beaches, floating on the water, diving into the water, standing on snags. They hold out their wings to dry their feathers.

I loved the way they ran along the top of the water when taking off.

This cormorant caught and ate a piranha while we watched.

Wading Birds

Great Egret on a muddy ledge.

A Jabiru (stork) flies over a Great Egret.

A Cocoi Heron in flight. They look almost identical to our Great Blue Heron and were quite common.

Wattled Jacana (also called a Chestnut-backed Jacana) on a giant lily pad.

Jacanas show their true beauty in flight.

Limpkin

Birds of Prey

Great Black Hawk - among the most commonly seen bird of prey. They liked to pose!

This defiant Great Black Hawk had caught a snake. A turkey vulture was hoping to take it away, to no avail.

Another posing Great Black Hawk.

Swallow-tailed Kite.

Yellow-headed Caracara. Another fairly common large bird - a relative of the falcons.

Macaws & Parakeets

Chestnut-fronted Macaw

Blue-and-yellow Macaw

Scarlet Macaw

White-winged Parakeets coming into a tree. These noisy birds congregate in large groups (hundreds of birds) in trees every evening. Just follow the noise!

Just a few of the hundreds of parakeets in the tree.

Hoatzin

In a category all its own (literally!), the vaguely prehistoric-looking Hoatzin is a striking bird.

Smaller Birds

Small birds abounded, most went unidentified. They are even more difficult to photograph than the larger birds. This is a White-rumped Swallow taking off from a perch.

Brown-chested Martins.

Oriole Blackbird. I couldn’t figure which pose I like best, so kept them both!

Ringed Kingfisher. One of several kingfisher species along our way.

The large and striking Crimson-crested Woodpecker.

Hidden Birds

While these Sand-colored Nighthawk eggs look exposed, they really do blend into the sand. The parents were very upset with us walking through their beach, dive-bombing us and trying to distract us from their nests.

Most of the eggs had hatched, and there were quite a few chicks laying in the sand. They looked so vulnerable, but they were fairly-well camouflaged.

Two chicks blending into the sand. The parents were overhead.

Look carefully to find two Bluish-fronted Jacamars sitting on the branch in the middle of the photo.

If I were better at using HTML in Blogger, I could make this appear as a roll-over rather than a second photo.

Enlarging and cropping show the birds much more clearly.

One more “Where’s Waldo” photo. Can you find four small owls (two different species) in this photo? Even once they were pointed out, I had trouble finding them in binoculars. (But viewing them through binoculars was much easier than trying to photograph them!) This is why we go out with guides rather than just walk through the forest ourselves.

The “answer”.

A closer view of the three Tropical Screech Owls.