Bolivia Day 1; Riberalta

  Very quickly after one adventure ends, another begins! After leaving Colombia I flew to Santa Cruz de la Sierra in my bucket-list country of Bolivia to meet up with Spurn birders Graham Speight and Rich Swales, to do another four weeks birding in South America. Thanks to flight delays, I arrived at midnight the previous day, so getting up at six in the morning was a challenge but manageable in the end. Fortunately, it was a relatively relaxed day, as we had a flight to catch around midday from Santa Cruz to the small Amazonian town of Riberalta, where we would spend a couple of days birding and searching for a couple of key targets.

  Once we had selected a hotel, Hotel Colonial in the town centre, we organised transport and headed off to a small patch of rainforest just to the southwest. Here we wanted to search for the beautiful Masked Antpitta which is only found here. But in the two and a half hours that we searched, we heard only one individual and although it was close, we never saw it, and the bird went silent very quickly afterward. The rest of the afternoon produced nothing.

  Still we persevered with birding and got a few nice targets in the bag. The first of these was the unspectacular Fawn-breasted Wren, and the equally unspectacular Joahnnes Tody-Tyrant. The only other new bird for me was Tui Parrot, which was a small green parrot and nothing to be excited about. Still, it was an exciting first experience of Amazonia for me, and although general birding was slow, the riverine forest and the humidity was nice to experience for the first time. The afternoon was capped off very nicely with a distant Long-tailed Harrier flying over the town.

 

-Tui Parakeet

-Fawn-breasted Wren

-Johannes Tody-Tyrant

-Long-winged Harrier

Species List:
Riberalta: Undulated Tinamou, Horned Screamer, Speckled Chachalaca, Ruddy Ground Dove, Smooth-billed Ani, Dark-billed Cuckoo, Black Vulture, Turkey Vulture, Long-winged Harrier, Roadside Hawk, Crimson-crested Woodpecker, Tui Parakeet, Blue-headed Parrot, Yellow-crowned Amazon, Great Antshrike, Johannes's Tody-Tyrant, Euler's Flycatcher, Scarlet Flycatcher, Social Flycatcher, Tropical Kingbird, Fawn-breasted Wren,