Tapirs and Caiman on the Rio Cristalino

July 2019: A Short Stay at the Legendary Rio Cristalino Lodge in Mato Grosso

Back in 1995, I went to Brazil for the first time.  I flew to São Paulo, changed planes and flew on to Cuiaba, then spent a week birding in the Pantanal and in the nearby cerado habitat.  It was a low budget trip, we stayed in very basic accommodation and I could only afford to take part in the first week of what for others was a two week trip.  I saw 273 species of birds, most of them new for me, and I saw my first Giant River Otters and Giant Anteaters.  Despite the trip being so short I was quite simply entranced with the country and figured that I'd be back.  Indeed, since that trip I've made more than a dozen trips to Brazil, ten of them specifically for birding.

After I left Brazil that first time, the group of birders I was with went on to Alta Floresta and spent a week at the Rio Cristalino Jungle Lodge, where they saw a ton more birds and several Brazilian Tapirs.  Not to worry I thought, I'll probably get there before too long ... then 24 years passed by in a flash ... and I never did get round to going Rio Cristalino (and never saw a tapir of any sort).

In the meantime, two of my good birding friends, Carlos Sanchez and Rich Hoyer, both worked as guides at the Cristalino so I kept being reminded that I really ought to go, and yet somehow I just couldn't get organized to fit a visit into my schedule.  I knew it would happen someday though and it turns out that 2019 was the lucky year.  This year my Summer unexpectedly opened up and I decided to expand a long-planned  NorthEast Brazil trip,  grabbing the opportunity, and a room at the lodge at short notice.  Game on ...

Sunday, June 23 - Thursday, June 27 - Cristalino Jungle Lodge

A long travel weekend.  On Saturday I'd flown from New York to Bogotá and then on to São Paulo (sacrificing time for a cheap business class seat on Avianca).  I'd spent Saturday night at the airport Marriott at Guarulhos then taken an early Sunday morning flight to Cuiaba and, despite a delay, just made a connecting flight to Alta Floresta.  From there, my fellow lodge guests and I were met and driven an hour or so to a boat, then had a nice quick ride up the river to the lodge.  Made it ... finally.

Once we got oriented I, and two fellow birders who I did not know beforehand, got assigned a birding guide.  I wasn't thrilled to be lumped with other birders who, although they turned out to be delightful people and charming company, didn't initially strike me as 'hard core' birders.  However, I was happy to be assigned Sidnei Dantas as a guide ... another talented young ornithologist and a good friend of a friend.  And everything worked out in the end.

Pompadour Continga 

Once settled in, the routine for the next few days was set.  Up before dawn for a delicious breakfast, birding until lunch time, a huge and scrumptious Brazilian meal for lunch, siesta, more birding in the later afternoon until just after dark, shower, bar time, more mouthwatering Brazilian food for dinner, then collapse into bed.  I would quite happily spend the rest of my life doing exactly just that, at least in a place like Cristalino with amazing food, a great wine list, and awesome birds.  Perhaps the perfect vacation and so very different from the logging camp I'd stayed in the last time I made it to the Amazon.

A Pai da Mata made with fresh local herbs.  The lodge had a full bar and a good
wine list ... I only allow myself one cocktail every now and then, this was the one
and it was worth it.

Over the next 4 days we birded steadily and accumulated a list of nearly 250 species (or put another way, more species than I saw in the UK during the entirety of my childhood).  Of these, around 30 were lifers for me, nothing super rare, but some good birds.

Red-throated Piping Guan

Perhaps the best birds we saw were some local forest specialties like Alta Floresta Antpitta along with a good selection of antbirds, antshrikes, antwrens, woodcreepers, foliage-gleaners, and the many other mixed flock species from the forest interior.   Some of the ant swarms we saw were quite active and we were able to get to grips with a few ant-followers like Bare-eyed Antbird (although no ground-cuckoos unfortunately) plus there was always the comedic relief (for others) of seeing me high-stepping down the trail to get through a swarm of angry ants (army ants are one of the few things on earth that can persuade me to break into a brief run).

The time on the trails was mixed in with quite civilized boat rides along the rivers.  The birds here weren't quite so special but there were lots of big, photogenic things to keep us interested.  On the big charismatic bird front, I also finally caught up with Razor-billed Curasow, an amazing cracid that I'd long wanted to see.

Hoatzin and Sunbittern

Beyond the river-bank birds, the boat trips offered the best chances for other types of life and we did manage to see quite a few good things.  Spectacled Caiman were not uncommon on the river but one night we also managed to spot-light a Cuvier's Dwarf-Caiman in the fading light, a life crocodilian for me. These small heavily armored little crocs have large numbers of bony plates in their skin, which has protected them from the handbag trade, although being small and shy they are still rarely seen.

Cuvier's Dwarf Caiman

On the mammal front we did see five species of primate - including Red-handed Howler Monkey, Red-nosed Bearded Saki-Monkey, and White-whiskered Spider-Monkey - two species of peccary, some bats,  and several Neotropical River Otters (who doesn't love encounters with otters?).

Neotropical River Otter

The absolute highlight of the trip for me though came one morning as we motored upstream in the boat and I noticed a large brown lump in the morning mist a few hundred yards ahead of us.  I couldn't quite make out what it was but my brain slowly processed the shape and saw that it was moving ... it looked a bit like a horse.  I got my bins on it as it sank low into the water so I could just see the top of it's head and ears ... and it raised it's trunk (!).   "Anta!" I shouted.  One of the few moments where I actually remembered the Portuguese word for an animal but couldn't for the life of me remember the English word.  So I kept shouting "Anta! Anta!" and gave directions as best I could as the Brazilian Tapir made it's way to the river bank and vanished into the dense undergrowth.  Finally my first tapir, after many, many years of wanting to see one.  I was ecstatic but had to quickly reign in my excitement when I realized that, while the guide and the boatman had both seen the animal, my American birding companions had somehow managed to miss it.  Guilty feelings all around ...  but I was quietly smiling to myself for the rest of the day.

Gray-headed Kite

By contrast, the best bird of the week was one that we never saw.  The others had opted to take an afternoon off so Sidnei and I were happily off up a trail working an ant-swarm and hoping for ground-cuckoos when he pointed out a distinctive trill.  The bird was loud and close but we couldn't see it, and it did sound awfully familiar.  Sidnei's theory was that it was a Peruvian Recurvebill,  a very good bird for this location and one rarely seen here in recent years.  Playing a recording confirmed the ID but, although we worked on it for quite a while, we never did get a glimpse.  Such is forest birding unfortunately, but still a good record.

Great Black Hawk

Night walks were also a great experience, being out in the forest after dark is always a treat.  Although we didn't see any large nocturnal mammals we did see lots of nightjars of several species, a Great Potoo and several owls.  Then there were always the cool smaller things like trapdoor spiders and whip-scorpions to make the night interesting, or odd tree-frogs, bats, spiny-rats, centipedes and giant crickets.  A great variety of life right outside our doors.

Blackish Nightjar roosting on one of the cabins

On the last full day, for a change of scenery, we went down to the main river and birded some of the sand islands there.  Pied Lapwings really do look a lot like Egyptian Plovers (I can say that now that I've seen the plover) and we spent a fair amount of time attempting to lure a Glossy Antshrike within range of the camera.  This was the place we were told to look out for Harpy Eagles but alas, none came to see us, although we did see two different Ornate Hawk-Eagles during our stay there.  Next time ... for me with Harpy Eagle, it's always next time ...

Pied Lapwing and Glossy Antshrike 

All too soon though it was time for me to head back to the real world.  I really could have stayed at least an extra few days but my plans were set, so back to Alta Floresta then Cuiaba and on to São Paulo.  I did bring a souvenir with me though ... on the flight to Cuiaba my ankles and lower legs were itching uncontrollably, and it only got worse during the day ... Chiggers!  Not my favorite invertebrate and I had 'gotten them good' so for the entire duration of my stay in São Paulo I had something to remember the Amazon.  Still, it was worth it, and I'm already plotting my next trip to the Amazon ....

Red Cliffs, Blue Macaws.

July 2019: A Long Road Trip to Northern Bahia in Search of a Bird Named after a Victorian Poet

Growing up in Wales, my image of Brazil was pretty simple.  The Amazon rainforest, literally bursting with Jaguars, Tapirs, monkeys and tropical birds of all sorts, started a block inland from Copacabana Beach and stretched across the whole country.  It's laughable now, but maybe not so different from what a lot of people still explicitly expect Brazil to be.  The forests, the beaches, and the cities still pretty much represent almost everything we see of Brazil in the media in the North and, while we might now know that the forest is being cut down and assume that there's more farmland out there somewhere, we still almost never see anything of the other wild habitats that comprise a lot of the interior of the country.

The movie Rio (and it's sequel) portrayed a very similar version of Brazil.  The rare macaw "Blue" was presumably a Spix's Macaw but most of the action takes place in Rio de Janeiro or in the Amazon rainforest, which in the movie seems to be quite close by.  In reality though, if you want to see a blue macaw, you have to go to quite different habitats.

There were once four species of blue macaws.  The Hyacinth Macaw is perhaps the easiest one to see, and lives in the vast wetlands of the Pantanal where it's regularly seen by eco-tourists and birders (I saw them in 1995).  The Glaucous Macaw is long extinct, and the  Spix's Macaw is extinct in the wild (like the movie though, there are plans to re-introduce them from captive bred stock and to re-create some of the riverine gallery forest they once inhabited, now mostly cut down).  The last one of the group, the Lear's Macaw barely survived it's own recent brush with extinction, being reduced to as few as 60 individuals at one point.  Today it lives in a few sites in the State of Bahia where it clings on in the last few stands of native palm trees scattered across dry country largely deforested for agriculture.  The species is heavily protected and slowly bouncing back from the brink but still very much at risk.

Where the Lear's Macaws are ... not the Amazon.

There's something about Lear's Macaws that makes them special.  Partly because it captured the attention of so many interesting people.  The species was first described by Charles Lucien Bonaparte (yes, a relative of *that* Bonaparte) in 1856 and discovered in the wild by Helmut Sick (another famous ornithologist).  Bonaparte named it after the poet, writer and artist Edward Lear who's famous painting of the species was done from life in a zoo rather than from the more usual dead model favored by his contemporaries (insert Norwegian Blue Parrot jokes here).  Lear was a polymath and a 'character' who might have been happier in the 1960s than his own era, now best remembered for his published 'nonsense' poetry for children (The Owl and the Pussycat, etc.) but turned his hand successfully to almost every art form - painter, illustrator, poet, composer, author - in his day.  His bird paintings, many done while working as a 'paid' illustrator for John Gould (John Gould did not paint the 'Gould' prints that you see in every antique print shop) are among the best bird art produced during the Victorian era.  Taken together, the history of this species is just, well .... fascinating.

From Wikipedia - the Lear's Macaw
by Edward Lear (it wasn't called that
when he painted it)

More recently, there's a trend towards trying to eliminate the 'non-descriptive' names of many bird species and the powers-that-be have officially re-named this species the more neutral 'Indigo Macaw' to avoid any connection to the Victorian era and colonialism I suppose.  I'm personally not a fan of historical revision in ornithology especially when the name here honors such an interesting person (and perhaps one of the only, if not the only, historical LGBT figure with a species named after them).  Losing Lear's Macaw would be a shame, so I'm going to stubbornly carry on using that name.  Call it whatever you want in other languages (ironically the Brazilians rather sensibly call it Arara de Lear in Portuguese) and leave the history alone please.

So after that long introduction, and rare trip to the soap box, you've probably guessed that I've long wanted to see a Lear's Macaw.  So how does one do that?

Thursday, July 4 - Canudos, Bahia

Today was a long drive.  Pablo Viera Cerqueira and I started the day at Sítio Pau Preto in Ceará State and basically drove South all day across dry, dusty Caatinga habitat that had all the charm and variety of West Texas cow country.  This was not the Brazil of the Amazon, these huge expanses of thorn scrub dotted with rough-and-tumble little cow-towns cover a huge swathe of the interior of the country.  We drove for basically 12 hours straight South through the states of Ceará, Pernambuco and Bahia and saw very little variety save for the odd river (with riverine gallery forest long since cut down) or cow-tank.  Sometimes it takes a while to get to where the birds are.

Our goal for the day was the famous macaw reserve at Canudos, established to protect a nesting and roosting site for the Lear's Macaws at a place once famous for poaching the few remaining birds.  Each night the macaws fly in to roost on the red cliffs before heading out again at dawn in search of scattered stands of native palm trees where they feed.  We arrived in the evening, settled in to the basic but well maintained rooms at the visitor center, made a quick side-trip into town for pizza, then crashed exhausted planning to be rested and ready for a pre-dawn date with the macaws.  The stars that night were truly spectacular, something this city dweller is constantly shocked by when I manage to get away from ambient light.  I fell asleep watching them through the gap between the walls and the roof of my room ... another reminder that birding takes you to the most amazing places.

Friday, July 5 - Canudos

A 4am start and a meeting with two local guides who had coffee and a four-wheel-drive vehicle ready for us.  The drive in to the macaw site was long, slow, bumpy and very dark, and when we arrived there still wasn't enough light to see very much so we sat on a log and waited.  After a while the first signs of life started to stir; a calling Small-billed Tinamou, chipping Rufous-collared Sparrows and a singing Black-throated Saltator out there somewhere in the graying darkness.  Then, as the sun broke the horizon behind distant clouds, the screeching of Blue-crowned Parakeets and Cactus Parakeets on the wing unseen in the gloom, followed by the heavier squawking of macaws.

Lear's Macaws

More like Middle Earth than Brazil 

The Macaws were eventually visible as silhouettes, noisily flying around in small groups or perching on distant cactus.  As it got lighter still, they morphed from black silhouettes into 'indigo' blue birds contrasting beautifully with the red rock and green vegetation.  They seemed to keep their distance though and I struggled to get any photos, which surprised and frustrated me as I've seen so many beautiful photos from this site.  Better, or more patient, photographers than I have captured some truly stunning images here and made this site a mecca for birders.  Still, photos aside, we got good looks and we had the magical experience of seeing this very special bird flying around in this amazing world of rugged red cliffs .... one of the truly iconic images of birding in Brazil.  Definitely an experience I'll long remember.

Not quite in focus ...

All too soon our allotted time was up and we made our way back to the reserve HQ and a wonderful local breakfast prepared by the reserve staff.  These folks really do have the macaw experience worked out, all very slick from start to finish.  Then, fed and happy, we started the long drive back North to Ceará hoping to arrive in Juazeiro do Norte in time for dinner, some rest and a 3am flight to São Paulo.  Somehow it seemed even longer driving back and we both agreed that this was an awful lot of driving for a single life bird.  Was it worth it?  Of course it was ....

Bat Falcon and Blue-crowned Parakeet
sharing the same red cliffs

P.S. on the subject of blue macaws, the Rainforest Trust is raising money to create safe habitat for the release of Spix's Macaw back into the wild.  The species has been extinct for some time but luckily, various zoos and other collectors were persuaded to loan birds to breed a captive population.  Releasing the birds requires safe habitat for them to live in so this part of the project is critical if we want a third species of blue macaw back in the wild.  Just something to consider.