Bird Bolivia News

15MAY13

The year has filled up pretty quickly. Our last tour with space is the Macaw tour 30 June to 15 July. Please let us know soon if you are interested. Please let us know early about interest in tours in 2014.

Macaw Tour
We will start by running two macaw trips each year, one for Parrot lovers and the other for Birdwatchers- you decide where you want to go. The Parrot Lovers trip will put more of an emphasis on long periods watching parrots, and more time specifically searching for parrots. The birders Macaw Tour will see the macaws and parrots, but also spend more time on the bird diversity of an area, working to make sure you see the rare little brown jobs as well.

Hardcore birdwatching tour
We will run this trip in Nov-Dec 2014. Let us know if you are interested. Given we live in Bolivia, where we know and see the constant changes that take place here, we really should be the ones to offer the best Bolivian Specialities tour. Our team sat down with the Bolivian Specialities list, reviewing the best place, best season and the probabilities for each species. We are missing four birds, two which we need to do some field truthing to assure we can offer them on a tour. Clearly the best season is in November-December when we will offer this tour. We are thinking of a 6 weeks trip, that you can buy complete, or in two parts. I hope by May we have this tour ready to sell. During this research we created the Beni Endemic Area bird list and the a list of Bolivian Specialities which we posted on the web for those of you who want to fly solo. We have come up with 71 Bolivian Specialities, birds that most birdwatchers never see out of Bolivia. Now we need to turn this into a feasible tour. Coming soon.

Recent Trips
You can read about our recent 35 day tour with Chris, Helena and birdgirl in June 2012 at this blog. In 2011, Paul Jones and Jodie van Dieen ran a test run of a potential future Bolivia tour. A big success, you can see the results with Paul Jones' photos and trip report. Both the Sadiri rainforest lodge and the Barba Azul Nature Reserve are now open and fantastic. The Humid tour and the Tranquilo tour visit these sites.

The only way to adequetly see all of Bolivia's key bird species is to have three tours, each within 12 days. We have put a lot of thought into this. You don't just want to see Bolivian endemics- but the birds you will most likely only ever see in Bolivia- the range-restricted, near endemics and country specialities (high abundance in Bolivia, or easier to see, or access to difficult habitats). By popular demand we have also added four new tours, Photography, Macaws, Hardcore birding, and Tranquilo birding. Soon we will have prices for everything. Pricing has been stalled becuase we are trying to work with a specific "very safe" pilot on prices for a route in order to visit the Barba azul Nature Reserve. Sorry about that.

Armonia is preparing the Barba Azul Nature Reserve to receive tourists in for 2013. Armonia has protected an important 11,000 acres of Beni grasslands, which also holds the world’s highest concentration of the Critically Endangered Blue-throated Macaw- around 90 individuals. Armonia has completed a field station on the reserve which can offer basic accomodations for 2012. But they also need to develop tourism services, and ideally in the long-term a lodge.

The other is a birding lodge in the foothill mountains of Madidi National Park, called Sadiri. This is a project by Pueblo Nuevo working with the community of San Jose de Uchupiamonas to protect over 80,000 acres of rainforest with the income from tourism. The lodge is in the cooler mountains, offering access to foothill and rainforest habitat.