Back in late 2019 I had no idea of the impending storm brewing in China and couldn’t imagine that within five months international travel and indeed most travel, would be banned for a year or more.
I was looking for a bird tour in late February/March and whittled down the possibilities to two; either remote and little visited areas of Borneo or Guyana and Suriname in northern South America. In the end I went for the latter which was a good idea, because as far as I can tell the Borneo trip didn’t go, whether that was from lack of bookings or cancellation due to the pandemic I don’t know.
So what’s this to do with Florida? I have paid a number of visits to the USA but my only time in Florida was limited to a few hours on the way to and way back from my first trip to Costa Rica in 1981. Florida has a number of bird species found nowhere else in the ABA area (USA, Canada and Greenland as defined by the American Birding Association) but all but one, the Florida Scrub-jay can be easily found in the Neotropics. But although I don’t make a habit of visiting the ABA area just to up my ABA list, whilst I was there I thought I might as well target the ABA ticks as well.
But the question was when to go, there were two bird species and one mammal, the bizarre Manatee, that I really wanted to see. If I went in the summer I could see Antillean Nighthawk, a bird that I have missed on all my trips to the Caribbean (as it doesn’t arrive on the breeding grounds until late April) and the Scrub-jay – but the Manatees would be well offshore in the warmer weather. If I went in the winter I could see Manatees and the Scrub-jay but not the Nighthawk. Margaret had no interest in going as she had lived in Florida for several years in her previous life, so I couldn’t turn it into a family holiday.
In the end I decided the best thing to do was to visit Florida for a few days on my way to Guyana this February and hope I could see the Nighthawk on a future visit to the Caribbean, so I planned for three and a half days birding in southern Florida.
The direct flight from Heathrow arrived in the late afternoon, which was of course, late evening UK time. All of the eastern cost of Florida encloses the Intracoastal Waterway. In fact this sheltered waterway can be navigated from Brownsville in Texas all the way up to Baltimore. When Margaret first visited the USA she lived on a 33ft yacht in which she journeyed all the way from Fort Lauderdale to Baltimore.
Accommodation on these islands and on the outer banks of the lagoon is reserved for the ultra-rich. Initial driving in the USA is always problematic as you adjust to driving on the right (or is it wrong?) side of the road. But exiting the airport at dusk into a multilane highway system in the rush hour was always going to be a bit of a nightmare, but I soon found my rather shabby motel. I was later told this was the type of motel that you could book by the hour for whatever nefarious deeds that you had in mind, but that didn’t matter, it was a convenient place to rest. Due to the time difference it was only 2030 when I went to bed but I was away by 0430 the next day and on the road north.
I drove 88 miles north to Jonathon Dickinson State Park, which I had been told was a good site for the jay, but I arrived far too early. Whilst waiting for it to open I birded along the road seeing species like Palm Warbler (above), Pine Warbler and Myrtle Warbler – a species I’ve seen on Scilly in the UK in the distant past.
Another common species was Northern Mockingbird. Amazingly one of these turned up in Devon in the UK this February but we were in the middle of a Covid lockdown at the time. Some chose to break the rules but I stayed put until they were relaxed and visited just before Easter. This was the third British record of this species (almost certainly ship-assisted) but the other two weren’t twitchable and so it has generated a lot of interest. Unlike the individual in the photo the one in Devon had a normal shaped upper mandible! Postscript – after writing this earlier today I heard that the Mockingbird has left Devon and has been relocated an equal distance to the east of me in West Sussex!
Once in the park it only took about 30 minutes to find a pair of Florida Scrub-jays.
Originally considered one species the ‘Scrub Jay’, it has now been split into four with Island Scrub-jay only on Santa Cruz Island off California, California Scrub-jay in the westernmost Lower 48 and Baja California, Woodhouse’s Scrub-jay in interior western USA and central Mexico and this species which is confined to south-central Florida. Clearly there is a research program going on here as both birds were colour-ringed.
I spent some time looking around the rest of the park hoping to see a variety of birds, I had some success eg with this Anhinga but I was later to regret that I didn’t drive back south and go for the Manatees at West Palm Beach.
I had booked a boat ride on Lake Kissimmee, a few hours drive to the north, for 1500 so to allow plenty of time I set off early. I arrived with loads of time to spare and birded along the access road and around the dock for a couple of hours.
Eastern Meadowlarks and …
… Loggerhead Shrikes were easily seen along the access road …
… and lots of American Kestrels.
Along the shore of Kissimmee Swamp I saw …
… Great Blue Heron …
… and Wood Stork bathing in the hot sunshine. The former of these two birds is common throughout the Nearctic region but the Wood Stork is (outside of Florida and southernmost California) almost entirely Neotropical. However I already had the species on my ABA list as many years ago, circling over Miami after a trip to the Caribbean, I saw a flock out of the plane window!
It wasn’t just the herons and storks that were sunbathing in the hot temperatures, a flock of Ring-billed Gulls had all turned to face the sun and were panting in the high temperatures, either that or I had chanced on a Ring-billed Gull choral group! This species has turned up so regularly in the UK in recent years that it has been dropped as an official rarity. I’ve seen 22 in the UK and it could have been a lot more if I’d have put the effort in.
A Forster’s Tern perched on sign, another species I’ve seen in the UK but only four times.
White Ibis fed around the margins of the lake.
This is a widespread species in Central America and Mexico, the Caribbean and northern South America but in the ABA area its confined to the Gulf Coast, Florida and the coast north to the Carolinas.
The related Glossy Ibis is more widespread being found in many parts of the Old World from Europe to Australia, including these days, occasionally in the UK.
However in the Americas it is largely confined to a narrow strip from Maine to eastern Texas. As there is another closely related species, White-faced Ibis further west then it may be that Glossy Ibis is a relatively recent colonist of the New World.
Ubiquitous throughout the whole of the Americas is the rather ugly Turkey Vulture.
One of my first big twitches in the UK occurred in 1979 when I went down to Cornwall to see the UK’s first Belted Kingfisher which over wintered on the River Camel. This species can be sexed by presence (female) or absence (male) on a chestnut belt on the breast, which isn’t much help here as the breast is hidden.
There are four species in the family Anhingidae, the ones in Africa, the Orient and Australasia use those geographic terms along with the name Darter, however the one in the Americas takes its name from Brazilian Amerindian for ‘snake-bird’ – Anhinga. This group of birds differs from cormorants by their long necks which can be shot forwards at great speed to spear rather than grab fish.
Soon it was time to head out onto the water …
… earlier there had been a question as to whether the boat would go or not as I was the only person interested, but another couple had booked, so it was ok. The boat, a sort of hovercraft with a huge fan at the rear, could skim over all the marsh vegetation in a way no normal boat could, but it was mega-noisy hence the ear protection.
With my lifer (the jay) under-the-belt it was time to look for some of the species that makes visiting Florida essential for ABA birders, starting with Purple Gallinule.
Not to be confused with what used to be called ‘purple gallinule’ in the Old World and which is now treated as six species of ‘swamphen’, this bird is a colourful cousin of our Common Moorhen. I’ve seen it before in Texas and many times in the Neotropics but these were the best views I’ve ever had of it.
Another widespread bird that is only found in Florida outside of the Neotropics is the Limpkin. Limpkins have an unusual flight style in which the wing is usually held above the horizontal and the up-stroke is faster than the down-stroke.
Perhaps one of Florida’s most iconic birds is the Snail Kite, (once known in the States as Everglades Kite, but as it occurs as far south as Argentina it’s not a very appropriate name).
The kites were visible almost constantly whilst I was at the lake.
Males have this slate grey plumage – note the thin and highly curved bill …
… that has evolved to winkle apple snails out of their shells.
This Snail Kite with a very broad supercillium and spotted breast is a juvenile. Females are similar but with a narrower supercillium and heavily streaked breast.
Other species commonly seen included Great Blue Heron …
… and Snowy Egret which differs from our Little Egret by its bright yellow iris and lores, yellow on the feet extending up the tarsus and even (as can be seen here) the tibia and more but shorter plumes on the head. There has been one record of the species in the UK, in Scotland in 2002, whilst there has been two records of Great Blue Heron both on Scilly (2007 and 2015) …
… however a most unexpected fact is that the ‘type specimen’ of American Bittern (ie the first one to be collected for scientific reasons) was shot in 1804 at Puddletown in Dorset, UK, just 15 miles from where I live.
I had the most wonderful views of American Bittern from the boat, I have seen this species before in the ABA area and the UK but never this close.
Another heron seen from the boat was Little Blue Heron, again this has been seen in Britain and Ireland, just the once in Co Galway in 2008. Of all the five American heron species seen in the UK and Ireland I’ve only seen two back home; Green Heron and American Bittern.
There were also a good number of Great Egrets on the lake. Whilst widespread throughout much of the world its only been the last 15 or so years that they have become regular in the UK. So far there’s no evidence that a New World Great Egret has made it to Britain but they are separable on bare part colouration and plumes during the breeding season and are probably a different species from the Old World ones (with the Australasian ones being a third species.)
There were other raptors around the lake, I usually have difficulty in identifying all the mid-sized American raptors because I mainly see them briefly when driving but here in the south the commonest species is Red-shouldered Hawk. This is an immature.
But there was no difficulty identifying this magnificent bird …
… I tend to associate Bald Eagles with boreal forests, so it was a bit of a surprise seeing two breeding pairs just a few degrees north of the tropics. I have previously seen them on the Oklahoma/Texas border but that was in winter.
I saw lots of other species from the boat from the ubiquitous Boat-tailed Grackle …
… to a terrapin with the wonderful name of Florida Red-bellied Cooter.
Of course no visit to a Florida wetland would be complete without views of Alligators, big ones …
… baby ones …
… and some very close views indeed.
There were a number of small waders out in the marsh. When I pointed them out to the boatman he replied that he ‘didn’t do peeps’ but closer views revealed them as Least Sandpipers mainly on account of the yellow legs.
One of the highlights of the boat trip was really close views of a nesting Sandhill Crane. This species is migratory over most of its range, wintering in southern USA and Mexico and breeding in the north from eastern Canada to eastern Siberia. However there is a resident population in Florida and Cuba.
The boatman convinced me that this sitting bird was used to the boats and didn’t move at all as we passed by.
Back on dry land there were a couple of Limpkin in a paddock close to the dock.
This ibis-like bird isn’t related to the ibises at all but to the cranes, rails and gallinules, thus its taxonomically closer to the Purple Gallinule above that to the White Ibis and Glossy Ibis shown earlier in this post.
After leaving the lake I stopped a few times along the access road seeing a range of species, Eastern Phoebe …
… Savannah Sparrow (I once saw an ‘Ipswich Sparrow’ a localised race of Savannah Sparrow, at Portland Bill in Dorset – first record for the UK) …
There were also a good number of Sandhill Cranes feeding in the fields.
Back in 2015 we went to Kearney in Nebraska to see the huge gathering of migrating Sandhill Cranes on the Platte River. In Florida I saw about 40 Sandhills, in Nebraska we saw 150,000!
From time to time I mention that this bird or the other has been ‘split’ ie is now treated as a full species when formerly it was treated as a subspecies. Of course the opposite happens, sometimes two species are found out to be a single species and are merged or ‘lumped’. This has happened since I went to Florida with the Northern and Southern Caracaras being lumped into Crested Caracara. The two former species were separated by the Amazon rainforest but as deforestation continues the two ‘species’ met and interbred. It’s likely this is a case of incomplete speciation, given another few tens of thousand years of continuous separation perhaps the speciation of the two forms would have been complete.
I headed back south, I didn’t find any motels in the area, indeed the one I had planned to stay at was in ruins after having been hit by a truck a few months earlier. I asked about motels at a gas station but was told I was ‘in the middle of nowhere’ and not to expect such things. I continued back south on the turnpike until tiredness and hunger took over so I stopped just outside Fort Pierce. The first motel I tried was mind-numbingly expensive but I found another at a more reasonable cost. Whilst checking in I told the receptionist I was heading down to West Palm Beach the following day to look for manatees when a guy queuing behind me said ‘no need to go all that way, there’s some just down the road from here, I saw them this morning’.
So what happened the next day and the two days after that will be the subject of my next post.
This is the fourth blog post from my island hopping tour of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean. I had intended to include the four remaining islands St Lucia, St Vincent, Barbados and Grenada in this post but inevitably there were too many photos so I have just written about the first two of these islands.
The first European power to settle St Lucia were the French who signed a treaty with the local Carib Indians in 1660. From then until 1814 the island changed hands many times between the French and British. In 1979 it was granted independence as a member of the Commonwealth. In the case of St Vincent the Carib Indians and escaped African slaves vigorously opposed European settlement and it was not colonised until 1719, first by the French then by the British. Like St Lucia power switched between these countries several times. Attempts by the British to affiliate St Vincent and the Grenadines with other nearby islands failed, but in October 1979 they became the last Caribbean Island to gain independence.
Apart from our flight to and from Montserrat and between Guadeloupe and Martinique, all the remaining eight ‘internal’ flights on this trip were with the local carrier LIAT. This stands for Leeward Island Air Transport, but it has also been interpreted as ‘Leaves Island Any Time’ or Luggage In Another Terminal’. That said we had no trouble with LIAT at all, they always left on time, sometimes early and never lost a single bag.
We stayed at a lovely hotel in St Lucia right by the harbour.
There was an egret colony in the grounds and I was lucky to get a room on the 1st floor with a grandstand view. I was able to observe the Cattle and Snowy Egrets from the balcony on several occasions, even as here whilst sheltering from heavy downpours.
There were a few Snowy Egrets in the colony ….
…. but by far the majority were Cattle Egrets.
There even appeared to be Cattle and Snowy Egret chicks in the same nest, presumably the older and more mobile Snowy Egret chick had gone ‘walkabout’ from its own nest.
There was a puzzling degree of variation in the Cattle Egrets, some like this one were in bog standard breeding plumage ….
…. others had bright red bills and/or had no chestnut in the plumage at all (even though they were breeding) and the bill colour of the chicks seemed to vary from yellow to black almost at random.
This individual, who had one of the closest nests to my balcony, sported and strangely swollen and elongated bill.
I don’t know if any Black-crowned Night Herons were nesting deep in the colony but one or two could be seen skulking around on the ground at the base of the tree.
A Green Heron quietly stalked its prey from the giant lily pads
Among the lily pads was a pair of Common Gallinules, recently split from the Old World Common Moorhen. Interestingly, here we can see a juvenile from an earlier brood feeding its younger sibling along with one of the parents.
Just outside my room was this large ornamental plant, if you look at the right hand fronds you will see ….
…. an Antillean Crested Hummingbird’s nest with two tiny chicks. Joseph waited in the corridor (and even skipped some outings for endemic birds) in order to get video of the parents coming to the nest.
Most of our time in St Lucia was spent in the interior searching for the four endemic species. There used to be five but Semper’s Warbler has not been seen since for certain since 1961, it was probably driven to extinction by introduced mongooses.
The endemic St Lucia Amazon was seen several times, but only in flight, St Lucia Oriole was seen but not well enough for photos ….
…. but the beautiful St Lucia Warbler put on a great show, We also saw two endemic subspecies that could be split in the future, St Lucia House Wren and St Lucia Pewee
We saw Grey Trembler on Martinique, but not well enough for photos, so it was great to get good views here, the only other island where it occurs.
As we are now in the southern Lesser Antilles there is a greater influence from South America. Examples include this Short-tailed Swift ….
…. and this female Shiny Cowbird.
In the afternoon of our first full day we headed for the southern most point of the island
…. and the lighthouse at Moule de Pique.
Strange barrel cacti grew on the precipitous cliffs.
In spite of the strong wind Keith, Mark and I tried some seawatching and added a few distant Bridled and Sooty Terns to the trip list, but Joseph had the right idea ….
…. he was videoing Red-billed Tropicbirds just below us.
St Lucia was also pretty good for other forms of wildlife, I don’t know the name of this butterfly ….
…. but this is the highly migratory Monarch (migratory in North America at least) which is capable of crossing the Atlantic and which I have seen on Scilly and Portland in the UK.
Bizarre caterpillars and ….
…. bizarre crabs were the order of the day. One of our group (perhaps unadvisedly) picked up a Hermit Crab in its borrowed seashell. It probably climbed out of the shell and scuttled away ‘butt naked’.
Well three endemics had fallen easy enough but the fourth remained a problem. However on our last morning we connected with the St Lucia Black Finch on a trail where forest meets farmland. Views were quite brief, light was poor and so were my photos. Here’s pic of the little fella from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website taken by Marcel Holyoak see https://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/Species-Account/nb/species/slbfin1/overview
We were staying at the capital Castries in the northwest but on the final afternoon some of us persuaded Mark to drive us down to the viewpoint overlooking the town of Soufriere to see the St Lucia’s most famous landmark, the Grand Pitons.
So it was ‘job done’ for St Lucia with all the endemics ‘under the belt’ ….
…. and time to fly on to St Vincent. Our journey time was quite long as we had to fly all the way west to Barbados before flying back east to St Vincent.
Our hotel in the capital Kingstown was fine ….
… and boasted one of the tallest cheese plants I have ever seen ….
…. but the streets in the town outside lacked a certain sparkle ….
…. and the same could be said for the residential areas.
Mind you the weather didn’t help. It had been dry on Antigua, Barbuda, Montserrat and Guadeloupe, cloudy with some rain in Martinique and St Lucia but on St Vincent it rained most of the time.
Nearly all our birding was done on the Vermont trail ….
…. but we had to shelter by the water works building during the worst of the rain.
There was a good forest trail alongside a stream ….
…. with some impressive mature fig trees, but with the poor weather we struggled with the birding. We did see Lesser Antillean Tanager, the local race of House Wren (like all the other island forms of House Wren it deserves to be split) and Grenada Flycatcher (found only here and on Grenada) but the delightful Whistling Warbler was a ‘heard only’. This undoubtedly the disappointment of the trip as it looks a stunner in the field guide.
On the positive side we had good prolonged scope views of a flock of the endangered St Vincent Amazon but as with the other parrots they were too distant for photos so again I have used a pic of a captive individual from the Internet Bird Collection taken by Mikka Pyhala. https://www.hbw.com/ibc/species/st-vincent-amazon-amazona-guildingii
One afternoon we birded the Botanical Gardens in Kingstown but again we were thwarted by rain.
A juvenile Broad-winged Hawk called noisily from a nearby tree ….
…. and whilst sheltering from the heaviest rain under this shelter ….
…. we had great views of the endemic race of Antillean Crested Hummingbird.
So that was it for St Vincent. We flew east the following morning to Barbados (we were getting heartily sick of emigration and immigration forms and airport security checks by this stage) which will be the subject of the next post.
This is the final post about the Central Peru tour I did in November 2016 and deals with the pelagic boat trip on the final day.
Over the last 17 days we had followed this route clockwise from Lima. Now we were back at the capital for a final day of birding – not onshore but at sea on a pelagic trip 35 nautical miles (65 km) offshore.
So early on the final day it was down to the docks ….
…. to set off on our little open boat past the Peruvian Navy’s submarine ….
and head out to sea ….
As we passed the breakwater we saw a Hudsonian Whimbrel ….
…. as well as several Surfbirds, a bird with one of the strangest non-breeding distributions on the planet, after leaving their Alaska/Yukon breeding grounds the entire population occupies a narrow intertidal band a few metres wide and 17,500 km long from Alaska to the Straits of Magellan. I wasn’t quick enough to get a photo as the boat sped by so I used this shot by Marlin Harms from Wikipedia.
Leaving the coast behind we headed towards the Islas Palominas ….
…. passing sizeable flocks of Inca terns …
…. and rocks covered with Peruvian Boobies.
We spent some time at the Islas Palominas ….
…. that held truly impressive numbers of South American Sea Lions.
Many were hauled out on the rocks. The darker ones are still wet from their last swim.
A small number of impressive bull sea lions were present.
A boat load of people were in the water …
…. swimming with the sea lions ….
…. whilst undoubtedly a great experience for the swimmers, I’m sure it disturbs the sea lions, all the individuals on shore are alert and moving up the rocks (our boat is much further away and the photo was taken with a 1000mm telephoto setting) ….
…. in addition taking swimmers into such heavy surf close to the rocks is the height of folly (I was H&S man at work and can’t help doing ‘risk assessments’, even now).
Many other birds were seen including Peruvian Boobies, now much reduced in numbers compared to 30 years ago ….
…. although still providing a spectacle as they fly back to the rocks …
Once very common the boobies, like several other birds of the Humboldt Current, have seen catastrophic declines due to over fishing and climate change have all had an impact.
Three species of cormorant were seen, the elegant Red-legged ….
….Neotropic, which is more usually seen on freshwater lakes and the Guanay Cormorant, which although the commonest, was never seen close enough to photograph.
Another ‘guanay’ bird is the Peruvian Pelican, a larger version of the more familiar Brown Pelican.
For a centuries the droppings (guano) of all those cormorants and boobies was harvested for fertiliser apparently without harmful effects. However recently these ‘guanay’ birds particularly Guanay Cormorant have dropped markedly. On a similar trip in 1989 I recorded over 6000 Guanay Cormorants, this time we saw less than 1000. The major factors driving this decline seem to be the El Nino phenomena, climate change and overfishing. Here the loading platform and associated warehouses of the guano collectors can be seen.
Other birds seen included the elegant Inca Tern ….
… often seen in large tightly knit flocks.
This lovely shot was taken by my friend and room-mate Steve Lowe.
The cold waters of the Humboldt Current which flows up from the Antarctic has allowed a separate species of penguin to evolve off the coast of central South America, named (perhaps unsurprisingly) Humboldt Penguin.
On the rocks were a number of Blackish Oystercatchers ….
…. and the only passerine of the boat trip, Peruvian Seaside Cinclodes.
Leaving the islands we headed out to deeper waters.
On an earlier post I described Belcher’s Gull as being ‘inappropriately’ named. A friend pointed out that it wasn’t inappropriate as the species was named after an Mr Belcher, so perhaps I should have said ‘unfortunately’ named. The original Band-tailed Gull was split into two – the Atlantic Olrog’s Gull and the Pacific Belcher’s Gull. I suppose we should be grateful the Atlantic species wasn’t named after any other bodily function!
We only saw a pair of the delicately plumaged and ‘appropriately’ named Grey Gull.
Further out under the persistent grey clouds we saw our first Swallow-tailed Gulls.
Swallow-tailed Gull breeds only on the Galapagos Islands (a location I have never visited). There are just two species of gull breeding on the Galapagos, the other – Lava Gull is one just of two gull species worldwide that I have never seen. The unusually large eyes must mean that it is adapted to foraging at night.
The upper-winged pattern makes Swallow-tailed look like a large version of Sabine’s Gull (an Arctic breeding species that also winters in the Humboldt current). We also saw Sabine’s on the pelagic but due to the rocking motion of the boat the photos were too poor to use.
Another gull we saw was Franklin’s Gull, named after legendary Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin whose expedition to discover the North-west Passage ended in such tragedy. The species breeds in the prairies of North America and winters in the Humboldt Current.
The species occasionally turns up in the UK as a vagrant and I have seen it six times at home, all in Dorset or neighbouring Devon and Hampshire.
A migrant from the opposite direction was this Chilean Skua which breeds in the far south of South America.
Another migrant from the south was this White-chinned Petrel, the nearest breeding colonies are in the Falklands and South Georgia. Possibly not the best name for the species as the ‘white chin’ can be as little as a single white feather and can even be absent.
But one of the highlights of this pelagic was the storm-petrels. We saw no fewer than six species, four of which were life birds for me. These are Elliots (or White-vented Storm Petrels). The only known breeding grounds of this bird are the Galapagos and some islets off north Chile.
The diagnostic white vent and lower belly can be seen here, the pale panel in the underwing secondaries is best seen in the top photo.
Wilson’s Storm-petrel is similar but much more widespread (the commonest seabird and possibly the commonest wild bird in the entire world, but we saw very few on this trip). It differs from Elliot’s by the lack of a white vent and a different flight action. I took this photo in the subantarctic in April 2016.
I’ve been unable to conclusively identify the storm-petrel in this picture. It is in moult which the Elliot’s weren’t. I suppose it is a Wilson’s but I have never seen them looking this long-winged. The other four species we saw can be easily excluded by rump colouration/shape.
From the small and crowded boat, and not having my DSLR with me, I found photographing fast-moving stormies to be very hard. The following three pictures (all of life birds) have been taken from external sources. Wedge-rumped Storm-petrel breeds mainly on the Galapagos but also along the coasts of Peru and Chile. Photo (taken from Wikipedia) by Brian Gratwicke
Another life bird was Markham’s Storm-petrel, a large and dark stormie. Until recently its breeding grounds were unknown but colonies (underground burrows) have been found several Km inland in the Atacama Desert of Peru and Chile. This photo by Cock Reijnders was taken from Internet Bird Collection. I also saw the northern hemisphere Black Storm-petrel which is very like Markham’s but is smaller with a different flight action.
The most striking stormie was Hornby’s (or Ringed Storm-petrel). Its breeding grounds have never been discovered but are thought to be in the Atacama Desert. Photo by Cock Reijnders taken from Internet Bird Collection.
But the best bird of the day and one of the top five birds of the trip was this Waved Albatross ….
This magnificent bird breeds only on the Galapagos and is one of four albatross species confined to the northern and central Pacific.
Waved Albatross is the new last albatross species that I will ever see. I hope to do a blog post on my observations of the world’s albatrosses soon but I need to assemble the photos, some of which are on 35mm slides.
After our return to Lima we had a quick look at this lagoon near the port.
As well as expected species like this Snowy Egret ….
…. Grey-hooded Gull….
…. and this adult Belcher’s Gull ….
…. there were thousands upon thousands of Franklin’s Gulls. Our estimates varied from 20,000 to 100,000 but I made do with the lower estimate.
Franklin’s Gull can be distinguished from the similar but larger Laughing Gull in winter by the partial black hood and prominent eye crescents.
The gulls were easily spooked by people getting to close ….
…. but the resultant clouds were quite spectacular.
Franklin’s Gulls are unusual in that they have a complete moult after breeding ( as most gulls do ) and then again in the wintering grounds (a moult strategy shared as far as I know only by Willow Warbler). That said most of these individuals don’t seem to have started the moult yet.
This lad seems oblivious to spectacle behind him.
–
From here is was just a short drive to a hotel for a wash and brush up and then to the airport for the flight home. All my foreign trips are interesting and rewarding experiences but this trip was exceptional in many respects. Peru is one of the most interesting of all Neotropical countries and I hope to return for a fourth visit sometime in the future.
gryllosblog 