Final birding "Big Day"

Rio was the last place we were going to stop on this trip and therefore the last place we could go birding. It also has a fairly unique habitat called Atlantic Forest which has some unique birds and due to deforestation in Brazil is under threat - now only 5% remains..

A few months ago I reached out to a great bird-guide and asked to do a days birding. He got the idea of our big year and planned a big day to finish off. So a couple of days ago we started at 5am with his twin brother, he took over about 9am and we went on til sunset.

In the day we saw 128 species of which 65 were lifers. This is the single best day of the whole trip and my whole life in fact. I also photographed 53 species of bird of which 43 were brand new.

It was a wonderful day. Highlights included the super rare and endemic White-Necked Hawk, Brown Tinamou (very lucky to see), the monstrous bill of the Black-Billed Scythebill, three different Manakin species, and the colourful (wine-red) endemic Brazilian Tanager along with the Green-Headed and Red-Necked Tanagers. See photos for some of these!

I ended the trip with 1425 species, well ahead of the 1,000 target I set at the start. Of these 1404 were for the first time (in other words I had only seen 21 of these birds before in Europe!). Suffice to say, it was quite a steep learning curve when we first arrived in Mexico. 50 species were confidently identified by sound only (not seen). I photographed 694 of these birds as well.

I log my sightings on a site/app called ebird which has 4.5million users of which 750k are classed as regular users. My trip took me to 38th in the world (the person in first has an amazing 2,689 bird species!) and 6th in western hemisphere (the person in first is a bit ahead with 1,602) on eBird this year.

Nature is wonderful and a real privilege to see so much of it. Much more on my blog www.wildscot.blogRead more