Random birds from Colombia

It's been several days since I last created a blog entry about my trip to Colombia.  What's up?  Have I run out of things to say?

Maybe!  Now that I've been back in Canada for more than a week, the experiences that I had on my trip are beginning to fade into the past. But I think it's more that I felt I needed to say something about birding in Colombia (the whole reason for our trip!), but when I started writing and looking for supporting pictures it quickly devolved into a list of cool birds. That didn't make for a very inspiring blog entry.

So I'll just say that the birding and the wildlife that we saw incredible. For context, when I said in my first Colombia post that we'd spotted 421 species in Colombia, you should know that my (eBird) total for Canada currently stands at 286 species. 

Not that maximizing the number of bird species that we saw was the point of the trip.  Our goal was to see cool birds (and cool things), and the trip delivered in spades. We saw and did incredible things every single day.  At the end of each day I'd ask the group "what was your bird of the day?", and each of us found it hard to narrow things down to 5 options each.

So, how about some pictures?

Brown Jacamar. Jacamars look like giant hummingbirds but eat insects instead. 

Horned Screamer. Turkey-sized bird that makes a ruckous. It also has a horn on its forehead (not so visible in this photo). 

Rufous-collared sparrow.  The only sparrow we saw in Colombia, and it's apparently technically not even a sparrow (it's a brushfinch).  Interesting that the ground-feeding bird niche is not filled by sparrows here.

Gold-ringed Tanager. Endemic to a small region of Colombia (which means that this colourful mid-sized bird exists only here, in the upper-mid elevations of the Colombian Andes.) Highly sought out by listers.

The super-cute Cinnamon Flycatcher.

One of the many different species of Toucan that we saw (Lettered Aracari)

Lacrimose Mountain Tanager on a feeder. (So named because the yellow spot by the eye reminded someone of a teardrop)

Chestnut-fronted Macaw (one of many parrot, parrakeet, and macaw species that we saw. Often poorly!)

Scarlet Ibis, with bonus out-of-focus snail kite at the end of the video.

Juvenile and Adult Tropical Screech Owls

Juvenile Rufescent Tiger Heron (you can't tell how they got the name if you happen to spot an adult.)

Andean Cock-of-the-Rock. Yes, this bird has a bill, which you can see if you look closely. (But only because this is a young bird. On the older males the face feathers are much denser, making the bill essentially impossible to see)

And I'll leave this post here!  Even though I've only reviewed perhaps 1000 of our 5400 Colombia photos, and have selected at random just a few of the bird photos that Harvey took. (Keep in mind that that we saw many more birds that we didn't get good photos of, for one reason or another).  I'll follow up with a post about other cool non-bird things that we saw later.