FW: Venezuela 2

Dear all Here is a short report on my latest birding tour. This time it was a VENT-tour to Venezuela, billed as ‘an easy and relaxed tour’ and led by the Venezuelan David Ascanio. This was a short tour, only a little more than a week, with basically only two places, Casa Maria in 2 nights and Hato Piñero in 4, in addition we spent the first and last night in two different hotels in Caracas, and as almost always when there is jet lag involved, I arrived one day early in Caracas. The group consisted of 8 people, all exept me Americans, plus leader David Ascanio, and his ‘samboer’, young Desiree Starke. David Ascanio, the guide (48 this week) was altogether excellent, both as a bird guide, as well as as guide to understand his country, which he clearly loved dearly and which is in considerable trouble nowadays. He told very openly and in detail about that; he disagreed with the present government (Maduro is a follower of the late Chavez, but without his charisma),but also thought that the present opposition had little to commend them. Chavez is still present in lots of billboards (hardly any of Madura), and everything is ‘Bolivarian’, from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’ to the ‘Bolivarian’ police and buses. There are surprisingly many well-armed soldiers along the roads (usually two at a time), but not all that many checkpoints and our bus was in addition waved through at most of them. Venezuela has 26 million inhabitants, of which far more than half live in the five largest cities (all near the coast) and 7 million in Caracas alone. That city is considered very dangerous and crime-ridden, but we noticed that only indirectly: when we the first day walked from the hotel to a nearby park (with macaws) David collected all ur field glasses in his backpack until we were in the park proper. Caracas is also a place where the traffic is almost constantly gridlocked, while the drivers try to get on every which way, never mind rules or traffic lights. The reason for the vast amount of cars on the road (with hordes of light motorcycles weaving among all the cars) is that petrol is almost free: David told me that he could drive a whole year for a few dollars, and when I was with a guy who filled his tank, I saw he paid the equivalent of 4 or 5 cents for a whole tank! The government had decided 17 years ago to make the petrol cheap, in order to help the poor, and since then the price had remained constant, even though there had been heavy inflation of the bolivar, now ca 100 to a dollar. We traveled in a roomy bus, about 3 hours to Casa Maria, another 4 hours to Hato Piñero and ca 8 hrs back from there to Caracas. I arrived in Caracas in the late afternoon, and was brought to a hotel in between many skyscrapers, a room on the 13th floor. When I looked out of the window, I was surprised to see many large macaws on a neighbouring roof. These were Blue-and-yellow Macaws, which I had first seen a few months ago in the Pantanal in Brazil. Here it turns out that they have been introduced. But the next morning, from the roof restaurant, we also saw some smaller macaws, Chestnut-fronted, fly over and these are indigenous and also life birds for me. David had offered an extra tour to me, and Richard and Regina, and this was up the steep sides of the Coastal cordillera, to about 2500m a.s.l.; these hillsides are entirely forested and constitute El Avila NP. The area turned out quite birdy and we had a fruitful day. As usual here tanagers were much to the fore, as were N. American migrant warblers. there were thrushes and vireos, various tyrants, among them the Venezuelan Tyrant, and as more spectacular elements an antpitta, a fruiteater, and the colourful and impressive Chestnut-capped Brush Finch, all birds we did not see later on the trip, when we never were at the same height. That day the rest of the group arrived, and the next morning our roomy bus brought us to our next destination, Casa Maria, again in the Coastal Cordillera, but at 1500m. Here it was often foggy or even drizzly, and less hot that elsewhere in Venezuela. This turned out to be an extremely hospitable ‘home away from home’. The owners, Germans Norbert and Gaby, with their adopted Yanomame Indian daughter, had made the place into a veritable little paradise (Norbert is very big on reforestation, among his many other passions). There were small chalets several places on the grounds (but I had a room high up in the main building), and there were various pets: Three frisky but friendly dogs, several Peacocks, a magnificent Yellow-knobbed Curassow, who whistled his ‘falling-bomb’ whistle all day (poor guy must have been lonely), and also a parrot. Also the wild chachalacas were so tame that they ate bananas from Norbert’s hand. Gaby delighted in cooking and trying out new things (the hosts ate with us), and she i.a. had also concocted new jams from the local fruits. In the garden there was a.o. a gauze contraption with a very strong light inside, built to attract insects (Norbert is primarily an entomologist), but which also attracted birds in the early morning, feeding on these insects. Here we saw several woodcreepers and tanagers, as well as various flycatchers. Walks through the forest, here and a few hundred meters higher up, yielded many more birds, i.a. an impressive Ornate Hawk Eagle high up in the air, the brilliant jacamars, and the funny Groove-billed Toucanets, in addition to various foliage gleaners, spinetails and tyrannulets. At the house banana feeders attracted colourful tanagers and euphonias, as well as the raucous chachalacas. A very special occasion one day was the observation of a ‘rolling front’ of army ants (animals that figured often in my boys’ books, but which I had never seen so well). David demonstrated courageouly that by standing stock still the ants would just move around him, while all around spiders and insects tried in panic to flee, in many cases only to be gobbled up by the attending birds (woodcreepers, antbirds, Grey-headed Tanager). We were two nights at Casa Maria (including one evening a show of Norbert’s most impressive 3D macrophotographs), but then reluctantly had to leave and drive into the llanos to our final and 4 nights destinaion, Hato Piñero. This is an enormous cattle ranch, started by a rich man, who wanted to keep it as much as possible in its original state (he earned his large amounts of money elesewhere), but which a few years after his death has been taken over by the government, in Venezuela a somewhat uncertain status. The area must be explored by vehicle, because jaguars and pumas do not make it advisable to go there on foot, and we did practically all of our birding from an open safari vehicle, usually with 3-4 hrs bouts both morning and afternoon, on two days till after dark. This is primarily a cattle ranch (Brahma cattle), so there are large amounts of grassland, but there is also much dry forest, and narrow fringes of woodland along the dirt roads connecting the patches of forest. Parts of all this is seasonally flooded in the wet, but now it was extra dry (El Niño year!) and there were only smaller and larger lagoons left. When these were in the forest, they invariably had numbers of the most peculiar Hoatzins, quite prehistoric-looking large lumbering birds. There also always were various herons and ibises, Grey-necked Wood Rails, and my particular favourite (and a main reason for coming on this trip), the super stylish Sun Bittern. This bird turned out to be quite common here (we saw at least ten in the end), but I am very happy to be able to report that I found the first one myself! This one even threatened a nearby dove with stretching out its sunburst-patterned wings suddenly (the dove flew away); the Sun Bitterns invariably walked on the banks of the lagoons and streamlets, but never in the water. Another constant feature of the lagoons were the large and dozy capybaras; one time we heard them bark shrilly in alarm—a sign a jaguar was nearby, said David—, and they all retreated to the middle of the lagoon, with only the heads sticking out. A large lagoon in more open grassland was framed by hundreds of Black-bellied Whistling Ducks (perusal of the flocks unearthed a few White-faced Whistling Ducks); here there were also Stilts and even two colourful Large-billed Terns, as well as a number of shorebirds and a pair of the queer Horned Screamers, one of my many life birds this trip. When we had our picnic dinner here at dusk, flocks of radiant Scarlet Ibises flew past, no doubt on their way to a roost, accompanied by a single White Ibis and a Roseate Spoonbill (There were many species of ibises her, with as the most impressive to me Green Ibises along a forest lagoon, glistening green in the sunlight). When dark fell, nightjars and nighthawks came out, and we also heard a Great Horned Owl hoot. The facilities at Hato Piñero were quite adequate, but with nothing of the special care we got at Casa Maria. The rooms had AC, but of an antiquated and very loud variety (Fortunately this is one of the few occasions where my hearing problems are of help). I had a large rooms with two beds, heavy mattresses on stone sockets. One night my bed was invaded by minuscule, but somewhat aggressive ants. I moved to the other bed, but was woken up a few hours later by being stung repeatedly—the ants had found me also there. In the end I took one of the mattresses and put it on the ground in the opposite corner, and amazingly , the ants stayed away for the rest of the night. They were somehow eradicated the next day by the hosts. As I said, we were generally not to come down from the vehicle. One day David asked us to come down, in order to try to find the diminutive, but cozy White-throated Spadebill. But no sooner had we found our places around him, or we heard an ominous growling, the Jaguar! David herded us as quickly as possible back onto the vehicle, and nobody got eaten. After 4 nights here we returned to Caracas, an 8 hrs drive, and ended the tour at still another hotel in town. Many people left for the airport in the morning, but Barb, Mary Ellen and me had our flights in the afternoon, and David decided to take us birding for a last fling in the vicinity of the Ecological Gardens (built around the former house of William Phelps, the grand old man of Venezuelan ornithology). While we walked around there—and saw still another Brush Finch, the Ochre-breasted–, David happened to meet his old friend and mentor Leo, who, it turned out, had access to these gardens (which were closed until later in the day). This was a great stroke of luck, as this way we got to see a.o. some impressive and heavily visited hummingbird feeders and a beautifully reconstructed cloud forest. Later that day I was brought to the airport, where I was at first suspected of being one of those Dutch drug smugglers, before Desiree succeeded in convincing the Guardia of my innocence But it all ended well, and even my suitcase arrived in Odijk with only half a day delay. Wim Vader, Tromsø Museum, 9037 Tromsø, Norway wim.vader@uit.no