Eastern Bolivia Jul 14—29, 2007
Posted by Steve Hilty
Steve Hilty
Steve Hilty is the senior author of A Guide to the Birds of Colombia, and the recently published Birds of Venezuela, both by Princeton University Press. Other credits inclu...Related Trips
Our Eastern Bolivia trip is always part birding, part adventure, and above all an opportunity to visit one of the world’s largest remaining intact wildernesses?some six-and-a-half-million acres at present?with hardly a single human inhabitant within the park. The centerpiece of the park is Serranía Huanchaca, a flat-topped, 75-mile-long escarpment rising some 2,000 feet above the surrounding lowlands. Noel Kempff and the Serranía Huanchaca are not Amazonian rainforest, however, despite the fact that the forests here are continuous with Amazonia. Rather, the flora and fauna of the park is influenced by several nearby areas including the Brazilian Cerrado, Paraguayan Chaco, and Brazilian Pantanal, as well as Amazonia. Most of the park is forested, but large savannas spread across the northern and southern ends of the park.
There is seasonality in Noel Kempff National Park with warm wet summers and cooler, drier winters. “Winters” here are influenced by southern weather fronts that move northward out of Argentina during June, July, and August. When these fronts appear they often bring days of jacket-wearing weather and sometimes rain. We experienced one of these fronts the day we arrived in the city of Trinidad and were promptly sent digging for jackets and sweaters, then forced to wait a day before starting our Trinidad activities. When we did, the countryside was mired in mud, and what passed for roads were mind-boggling wallows that stretched for endless miles. This is where four-wheel-drive vehicles are born, and the birding is among the best on the continent.
We began our trip in the lovely and peaceful site called Flor de Oro, at the northern end of the park. Arriving midday, we tumbled out of cramped little airplanes and limbered up following the three-hour trip, and headed immediately for a spectacular lunch prepared by the Brazilian cooking staff. It wasn’t difficult to find things to do for the next three days?trail walks, savanna exploration, quiet bays to explore by boat, howler monkeys grumbling at dawn, star-filled night skies, spotlights on sleeping birds, curassows and hoatzins along riverbanks, snail kites extracting snails, piping-guans rattling, King Vultures perched inside the forest, little mixed species flocks moving quietly and busily through the foliage, tanagers and antwrens on morning errands in the savanna, delicious predawn breakfasts, and refreshingly cool late afternoon boat trips.
At Los Fierros, our second site, at the southern end of the park, a team of people organized by our ground agent had done their best to spruce up the place, but it remained a work in progress, at once neglected, overgrown, hot, buggy, and strangely rich in diversity, but not in the way it would be were it located northward in Amazonia. More like a dry Amazon forest with pieces missing, mostly devoid of epiphytes, but vine-filled and with a dense understory partly caused by selective logging two decades ago. But it is a fascinating place and one that draws me back time and time again. The two roads leading from camp were so overgrown that our small trucks barely fit between the encroaching forest. Another year and these roads will be impassable?unless they are cleaned. We added many new birds here, but Los Fierros forests are less friendly and less welcoming than the sunny, open Flor de Oro site. Plagued with an insect biomass that rivals any tropical site on earth, less than optimal accommodations, and birds that often require patience and effort to see, Los Fierros takes time to appreciate. We had good luck here, seeing Ocellated Poorwill, Tawny-bellied Screech-Owl, Scissor-tailed and Rufous nightjars, many Pauraques, and a long list of flycatchers, manakins, tanagers, and antbirds. The savanna was, at times, spectacular with yellow-flowering Vochysia trees that attracted dozens of hummers. And who will forget the tapir, or the Crescent-chest, or the wonderful White-rumped Tanagers duetting?
Our flight out of Los Fierros was beautiful, and for the next hour-and-a-half there was hardly a road or house to be seen. Forest stretched to the horizon. Then with a storm ahead we descended low, flying beneath low dark clouds that blanketed the ranchland of the Beni Province. Looking down on this ruler-flat landscape, watching savannas and palm islands and treetops whiz past, we beheld a nearly drowned land of shallow lakes and water-logged pastures from recent torrential rains. Quickly, the question on everyone’s mind was?“Would we be able to get out of town?” Little did we know that our adventures were only beginning, and so was some of the most spectacular birding of the trip.