Ever since the late nineties, when during the first three months of the year I began flying to the west out of LAX across the Pacific instead of to the south out of Miami and across the Caribbean to South America, I’ve grown to appreciate more and more the complex and stunning avifauna of southern Asia. Most of those flights across the Pacific were to lovely Thailand, but they were soon followed by regular visits to nearby Vietnam and Malaysia/Borneo, and then to the diverse archipelago of the Philippines.

Asia has a huge variety of birds to offer, so how do you choose where to go? Will it be Green-tailed Sunbird (Bhutan, India, Thailand, and Vietnam) or Banded Kingfisher (Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam)? Photos by guide Dave Stejskal.

For me, antbirds at that season were replaced by babblers, toucans by hornbills, motmots by bee-eaters.  It was quite a change, but one that I’ve thoroughly embraced and grown to love. I still get to show off those Neotropical lovelies to clients at other times of the year when I guide tours to Ecuador, Argentina, and other Neotropical destinations–I’ll never be able to give up my antbirds, toucans, and motmots entirely!

Elephant-back birding in Southern India. Photo by participant Margaret Hartman.

Since my first visit to Asia, Field Guides has offered more and more tours there, many of which I’ve been lucky enough to guide, and I’ve predictably started hearing an obvious question from clients: Where the heck do you start? A tough question indeed. The right answer really depends on what you want to get out of birding in Asia. If you want just to sample it once and never return, I’d have to recommend Thailand. A fun, comfortable tour with a particularly outstanding ground crew, a co-leader second to none, fantastic food, and loads of birds just about everywhere with representatives of nearly every Southeast Asian bird family that you could think of make this one, in my view, the obvious choice for the one-time Asia birding holiday.

But, if you take that one Thailand trip, you’re guaranteed to come back for more! Want the quintessential Himalayan experience? Jump on board for Bhutan. Got a hankering for Bengal Tiger, the incomparable Taj Mahal, a rich culture, and a boatload of birds and mammals, try Northern India. Are you looking for a trip that’s a bit more demanding physically but full of riveting endemics? Try the Philippines or our Borneo tour. And don’t forget Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Japan, Southern India, Cambodia–they’ve all got great birds, are a heck of a lot of fun, and are all culturally fascinating. Odds are that you’ll never be able to take just one and that you, like me, will fall in love with this incredible region of our diverse planet!

More choices. Ceylon Magpie (Sri Lanka) or Chestnut-tailed Minla (Bhutan, India, Thailand, and Vietnam). Photos by guides Mike Crewe and Richard Webster.

Our Field Guides Asia tours include:
Bhutan
Cambodia
Northern India: Tiger, Birds & the Taj Mahal
Southern India: Western Ghats Endemics
Winter Japan: Dancing Cranes & Spectacular Sea-Eagles
Borneo
Philippines
Sri Lanka
Thailand
Vietnam

You can also see guide Dave Stejskal‘s upcoming schedule on his guide page. 

I like canasteros. I like canasteros a lot. There are only five people in the world who like canasteros more than I do, and they ain’t admitting it. However, I have decided to break with the status quo (don’t voluntarily humiliate yourself in public) and admit my infatuation with these long wiry-tailed brown jobbies that live in brown places and probably eat brown things. Canasteros, to put it in terms my mom would understand, are neat. To put it in terms my brother would understand, canasteros are gettin’ jiggy with it.

Two canasteros, the more grassland Scribble-tailed (Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru) and the higher-elevation Streak-throated (Bolivia and Peru). Photos by guide George Armistead.

The Spanish word canastero means simply “basket-maker.” Canasteros make baskets, sort of. Their nests, which are made of fine grasses or small twigs, resemble baskets. Canasteros belong in the family Furnariidae, and are classed in one of two genera: Asthenes and Pseudasthenes. The genus Asthenes also includes Itatiaia Spinetail and 8 species of thistletail, which are, for all intents and purposes, also canasteros.

Junin Canastero, a species endemic to Peru which may be seen on Jesse Fagan's Machu Picchu & Abra Malaga, Peru tour. Photo by guide Dan Lane.

If you read a description of the habitat or location of canasteros, you will find a repetition of the words “arid” and  ”Andes.”  So, though technically many canasteros are found well within the New World tropics, you may be wearing a warm jacket when you see one; there could be snow on the ground and quite possibly no trees in sight.  If you read about their songs (if you can call what comes out of their syrinx a song), then you will find clarifying tidbits like “repetition,” “trill,” “descending,” “sometimes ascending,” or “strident.” These birds are loud vocalists, but their voices are not necessarily their endearing marks. Or, at least no one is describing them as accomplished songsters. Now then, what does one look for visually to distinguish them, that is, what are their field marks? Streaking (presence or absence; above or below). Chin patch (presence of ?). Any rufous on the tail? Any rufous on the wing? Oh boy, this sounds like a bit of a challenge. Hey, look at that Mountain Caracara! Wowwwwww.

Canasteros can be a bit of a mystery. While we were distracted by a flicker or that caracara, it has snuck in like a mouse, making its way through the bunchgrass, popping its little head up, sitting up to take a peek, moving closer, until just a few feet from our group its up on a rock, head held high, tail cocked, and singing. Okay, maybe just trilling, but it’s loud and we are still shocked. How did it get here so quietly and without our noticing?! Now, of course, this doesn’t happen every time. Sometimes it just pokes around in the grass or rocks, calls a few times, and we never see it. This frustrates us no end. It’s partly because in the field guide description on distribution it states many canasteros are “local and rare” or “local and uncommon” and always punctuated with “hard to see.” True, but that’s part of the allure.

A canastero quest will surely include a good deal of birding in high Andean habitat like this, as roughly 50% of these birds occur only above 8000 feet in elevation. Photo by guide Dan Lane.

Wish me luck. I am now on a Canastero Quest. You all are the first to know. Forget warblers, hummingbirds, and who needs those Tangara tanagers, anyway? I want brown, streaky, loudly trilling, local, and difficult to see. I want behavioral problems. I want color without the color.

Guide Jesse Fagan (a.k.a. theMotmot) still has a bunch of canasteros to see.  And where can you hope to see a canastero? Certainly on either of Jesse’s MACHU PICCHU & ABRA MALAGA, PERU tours, or on many of our Andean tours, a sampling of which includes:

Peru’s Magnetic North: Spatuletails, Owlet Lodge & More
Montane Ecuador: Cloudforests of the Andes
Ecuador: Rainforest & Andes
Chile
Bolivia’s Avian Riches
Northwestern Argentina: The Chaco, Cordoba & Northern Andes 

Yes, Field Guides offers an extraordinary tour across northern Peru that is no doubt already high on your shortlist of must-do-before-you-die tours. Yes, we have been offering our “Endemics Galore” tour annually since the last century, so we are no first-timers pleasurably leading you astray. Yes, and nobody does it with more experience, expertise, and enthusiasm than Richard Webster and Rose Ann Rowlett.

The once-mythical Long-whiskered Owlet photographed by guide Richard Webster.

Yes…, I could go on, but the long and the short of it is that for those of you with a detectable pulse who are wondering if you’ll live until you can find three weeks off your demanding schedules, rest assured that you can–without in any way preempting the longer possibility–make an enriching down payment, securing some third of those endemics outright, by taking our “Magnetic North” tour, a safe, working stiff’s 11-day-resolution to an anxiety dream.

Our abbreviated version of northern Peru is becoming better known as the “Long-whiskered Owlet/Marvelous Spatuletail Tour” because of the powerful attraction of these two marquee species–the long and the short of it–that are now possible since the construction of the fabulous “Owlet Lodge” at Abra Patricia and the development of the Huembo Spatuletail Reserve below the pass at Florida de Pomacochas.

It's hard not to marvel at a Marvelous Spatuletail. Photo by guide Richard Webster.

The miniscule owl with the long whiskers, a creature of mythic proportions that had not been observed outside a net when we began guiding tours to northern Peru, is the smallest owl in the world, no longer (if much bulkier) than an adult male Spatuletail, bereft of its marvelous, extravagantly long, spatula tail. The owlet is now being seen with regularity on the lodge property (our groups–both short and long–had sensational views of an adult perched a mere 15 feet away in 2011, as captured by Richard’s photo). And the Spatuletail—a hit-or-miss encounter when we began running the tour years ago–is now a virtual certainty, along with a dozen or so other hummers–at feeders regularly maintained at the reserve.

A couple of other hummers from the tour, a Many-spotted on a nest and a Collared Inca at Owlet Lodge. Photos by participants Dale Zimmerman and David Disher.

Yet our short sortie is also notable for another 15 or so possible endemics and specialties seldom seen away from the forest-clad knife-ridges that transect and make up the starkly beautiful east-slope habitat of the Abra Patricia area in the departments of Amazonas and San Martin. Our birding, some of the best to be had on the east slope of the Andes, begins and ends in Tarapoto, as the tour makes an electrifying short circuit from tropical lowlands of the Rio Huallaga, up the drainage of the Rio Mayo through Moyobamba and on upslope to the lodge at Abra Patricia, our base for six splendid nights of birding subtropical cloud forest and the drier Rio Chido drainage, before retracing our steps to Tarapoto for one last morning of birding in the upper tropical zone. In July of 2012 Field Guides will operate our seventh iteration of this short-and-sweet attraction, and each exciting year has led to greater logistical and pacing know-how and to a keener knowledge of the birds and their whereabouts.

Two of the many tanagers we could see, a White-capped and a Grass-green. Photos by guide John Rowlett and participant Johnny Powell.

So all you overworked dreamers, whether drawn more to the specialties or to the thrill of birding mixed-species flocks of tanagers, fruiteaters, quetzals, and barbets (did I mention the Grallaricula, Ochre-fronted Antpitta, or the Grallaria, Pale-billed Antpitta [one of several endemic species of antpittas to be seen], or the lovely Yellow-scarfed Tanager, Johnson’s Tody-Tyrant, Bar-winged Wood-Wren, or White-faced Nunbird?); whether drawn more to scoring scores of Oilbirds or to finally winning a prize look at that furtive Chestnut-crowned Gnateater or that elusive Lanceolated Monklet that has always just slipped your view, take it from me: you are ensured immeasurable benefits from the long-lasting dividends of going short.

Our next Peru’s Magnetic North: Spatuletails, Owlet Lodge & More tour is scheduled for June 30-July 10, 2012 with John Rowlett and Pepe Rojas.  Dates for the longer Northern Peru: Endemics Galore tour are  November 4-24, 2012 with Richard Webster and Mitch Lysinger.  For complete tour schedules for all our guides, visit our guide page.

When it comes to bird spectacles, the bustling breeding cliffs of Northern Hemisphere seabirds are in a class of their own. And my favorite such cliff is on the Pribilofs on Saint Paul Island–a tiny flyspeck of land in the middle of the vast Bering Sea. It’s one of the first places we visit on our Alaska tour, and the combination of frenetic activity and arm’s length birding makes for a truly unforgettable experience.

Black-legged Kittiwake carrying nesting material. Photo by guide Dave Stejskal.

The rocky headland of Ridge Wall juts out into the cold sea like the prow of a very tall ship. We leave the warmth of the bus and walk a narrow track toward the water, weaving through colorful patches of emerging Arctic wildflowers. Ahead of us, birds stream back and forth along the edge of the cliff, wings churning. As we reach the headland, the scene expands. All around us, birds flash like flakes in a giant snow globe. Hundreds more dot the surface of the water below. Even when they dive, we can still see them, “flying” through the clear green water in pursuit of prey. A cacophony of sound rises from the colony: the onomatopoeic “kittiwake” of Black-legged Kittiwakes, the high, excited trills of Least Auklets, the throaty, nasal laughter of murres, and the occasional sputtering roar of a distant Northern Fur Seal. The fishy smell of guano hangs heavy in the air. “Smells like birds,”someone quips

Below us, bunched on crowded ledges, Common and Thick-billed murres jostle for position, their beaks pointed skyward. Pairs of Parakeet Auklets squabble over turf. Crested Auklets preen and wag their crests at each other. Red-faced Cormorants add giant mouthfuls of damp vegetation to growing nests. Horned and Tufted puffins doze at burrow entrances, their bright beaks glowing against the dark volcanic rock. Pairs of Northern Fulmars gently nibble each other’s neck feathers. In every direction, birds are doing the things birds do–and our clifftop perch gives us the perfect location from which to watch and photograph.

Two cliff-nesters, Tufted Puffin and Parakeet Auklet, photographed on St. Paul Island by guide Dave Stejskal.

Once everyone’s gotten a good look at all possible lifers, we can settle down to learning more: about how the various species divvy up the cliff so that each gets its preferred nest site, about the courtship and nesting strategies of the cliff ’s inhabitants, of the subtle differences between Red legged and Black-legged kittiwakes in flight, the best ways to distinguish Common Murres from Thick-billed Murres at a distance, the key field marks for identifying auklets on the water. By the time we leave the island, we’ll have had multiple hours in which to practice and hone our skills.

And we’ll have had multiple hours of enjoying thousands of birds going about their busy lives–feeding, courting, preening, resting–within mere yards of where we stood. In the world of bird spectacles, that’s mighty hard to beat!

The fabulous Ridge Wall on St. Paul Island allows birders to get up close and personal with a great variety of nesting seabirds. Photo by guide Megan Crewe.

Check out our 2012 Alaska tour dates (two departures, each in two parts) by visiting our Alaska tour page. And if you can’t make it to Alaska in June? We have a few other tours that also feature breeding seabird cliffs. Try Scotland: Famous Grouse in the Land of Whisky in April, Ireland in Spring in May, Newfoundland & Nova Scotia in late June, or Spitsbergen & Svalbard Archipelago: A Cruise to the Norwegian Arctic in late June.

In addition to being spectacular, the avifauna of Northern Peru is a threatened one. As a rough count, we encountered one Critically Endangered, eight Endangered, 16 Vulnerable, and 13 Near Threatened species, based on the designations of BirdLife International.

A few of the standouts of Northern Peru on a tour that's loaded with them: from left, Chapman's Antshrike, Marvelous Spatuletail, Rufous-eared Brush-Finch, and Gray-breasted Mountain-Toucan. Photos by guide Richard Webster.

Our first birding in the Maranon basin was around Jaen, where we saw “Chinchipe” and Maranon spinetails, Maranon Crescentchest, and Little Inca-Finch, the first of three inca-finches.  Starting up the Rio Utcubamba, we found a Fasciated Tiger-Heron before (thank you for forgetting so quickly) scrubbing our Long-whiskered Owlet attempt at Yambrasbamba. The next morning started with a formidable hike that struck lucky gold in the form of Pale-billed Antpitta, with some bonuses such as Trilling Tapaculo and Peruvian Wren.  We then joined those who had not made the hike at the Huembo Spatuletail Visitor Center, where the feeders were doing wonderfully well, with multiple adult male spatuletails returning regularly, along with a nice variety of other Andean hummingbirds.

The recently discovered—and smallest of all owls—Long-whiskered Owlet, photographed by guide Richard Webster.

With five nights at Owlet Lodge we had time (but never enough time, like a lifetime) to enjoy the east slope.  Foremost good fortune was our success with Long-whiskered Owlet; fabulous! Around the lodge, a new antpitta feeding program produced great views of Undulated, while Ochre-fronted and Rusty-tinged were heard at close range. The stunted forest down the road produced Royal Sunangel and Bar-winged Wood-Wren. Birding the wet forest patches lengthened the list greatly, especially with tanagers, including Yellow-crested, Golden-eared, and Black-bellied.

The Utcubamba Valley took us past Peruvian Pigeons to Leimebamba, where a forested gorge had Graybreasted Mountain-Toucan, Golden-headed Quetzal, and White-collared Jay.  The higher slopes of Abra Barro Negro had more specialties, including Coppery Metaltail, Rufous and Rusty-breasted antpittas, and Russet-mantled Softtail at first light after Swallow-tailed Nightjar. Crossing into the Maranon Valley took us down to the steep desert slopes above Balsas, where we had luck with the scarce Yellow-faced Parrotlet and the more predictable Buff-bridled Inca-Finch.

Emerald-bellied Puffleg was fairly common at the Owlet Lodge. Photo by guide Richard Webster.

Leaving our scenic camp the next morning, we ascended the western Andes past Gray-winged Inca-Finch, White-tailed Shrike-Tyrant, and Black-crested Tit-Tyrant to find the lovely Rufous-eared Brush-Finch near Celendin.  We managed to find another type of Rufous Antpitta and Andean Hillstar before hurrying on to the Rio Chonta and the one endangered Gray-bellied Comet we could find, fortunately a wonderfully cooperative comet.

There is much, much more; to read Richard and Rose Ann’s complete report, visit our tour page where you may download the triplist for this year as well as a tour itinerary.  Our next Northern Peru: Endemics Galore tour is scheduled for November 4-24, 2012 with Richard Webster and Mitch Lysinger. If a three-week birding holiday is not feasible for you, we also have Peru’s Magnetic North: Spatuletails, Owlet Lodge & More, a shorter tour which visits some of the same areas; it’s scheduled for June 30-July 10, 2012 with John Rowlett and Pepe Rojas. For complete tour schedules for all our guides, visit our guide page.

A scenic lunch stop at Estancia Chillo. Photo by guide Rose Ann Rowlett.

Our January 2012 Field Guides newsletter is online in PDF format…Fresh From The Field includes some great photos from recent tours, and we’ve got articles on Alaska seabirds, Asia, Northern Peru, and Suriname, plus more…click below to read on! (If you are on our mailing list, you should be receiving your own copy soon.)

January Field Guides newsletter

Our January e-mailing is now posted! It includes recent photos from our tours to Madagascar, Brazil, Guatemala, Peru, and Argentina, tour updates for Best of the Pacific Northwest, Honduras: Land of the Emeralds, Southeast Ontario: Winter Birds, and Jaguar Spotting, two new slideshows (Oman/UAE and Northern Peru), and last spaces on tours from January through June. Also noted: links to recently posted itineraries and triplists. You can see it all by clicking on the link or image below—enjoy!

January 2012 E-mailing

With the prospects for some good winter owling in southern Ontario, based on early reports, we’ve tentatively scheduled a Southeast Ontario: Winter Birds tour, now moved to February 21-25 since winter has been so late in arriving.

This distracted us a little from the birding on our 2011 Jaguar Spotting tour...! (Photo by guide Marcelo Padua)

We’ll now accept bookings for the Ontario tour with no obligation until January 23, when we’ll decide whether to run the tour based on an updated evaluation of the birding prospects. (As of this update on January 6, there is one space still open on the tour.)

We’ve had a lot of interest in our originally scheduled Jaguar Spotting tour to Brazil with guide Marcelo Padua (Jul 21-Aug 1, 2012; it is now waitlisted), and so we’ve added a second departure for Jul 7-18, 2012 (moved one day later than originally announced), also to be guided by Marcelo.

Lots of great birds to be seen (of course!), and then there’s that big cat… Contact our office if you would like to hold a space, or visit our web page at the link above to see more about the tour, including a complete itinerary.

There are not many places left nowadays where you can go to “escape it all.” There is internet even at many remote lodges on the Amazon–lodges that didn’t have electricity until a few years ago–and guests can log on to find out the latest news, stock prices, and football scores. You can be in the middle of nowhere and yet not miss a step.

It's hard to imagine seeing trumpeters—here a Gray-winged—any better than you can in Suriname. Photo by guide Dan Lane.

But wait a second–what about visiting a place where you can leave the outside world behind, where the ups and downs of politics and the bad news that never seems to end simply melt away and you instead find yourself in the midst of vast stretches of pristine wilderness and incredible wildlife (including birds, of course!), with two full weeks to totally immerse yourself in this truly wild and wonderful place? If that’s what you’re looking for, think Suriname.

Suriname is South America’s smallest sovereign nation with a population under half-a-million people of a dozen tongues, the vast majority of whom live near the Caribbean coast. This immediately translates to “tens of thousands of square miles of undisturbed habitats with no people and no tongues,” definitely a wild & wonderful thing. Consider next that there are few roads anywhere into the interior, which means you have to take wild & wonderful charter flights into dirt airstrips in the middle of nowhere. As the porters scramble up to unload the plane at Foengoe Island and it hits you that the friendly pilot will now be leaving for…how many days was it?…you are overcome with the strangest mix of trepidation and excitement (after all, two hours in a big turbo-prop covers a good piece of ground) that, amazingly, vanishes instantly as a troop of earnestly prayed-for Red-fan Parrots squeals into the trees to check us out; yes, another w & w thing! One hour and nine lifers later, at the lodge down by the river, still trying to wrap your head around those macaws, you’re pleasantly surprised to see that the rooms are really neat and as you lather up in the shower, you find yourself smiling so much that you catch a mouthful of soap. Nothing like a frosty drink to reset the palate and, as we wrap up the daily list, it smells like there’s something tasty coming out of the kitchen. When it gets there, no one can identify it but heck, this is Suriname, and as you dig in, it actually turns out to be one of the best meals you ve had in forever.

More Wild & Wonderful, from left: Ornate Hawk-Eagle, Bronzy Jacamar, Crested Bobwhite, and Rose-breasted Chat. Photos by guide Dave Stejskal & participant Paul Thomas.

In this world where we can Skype from one side of the globe to the other, it’s nice to experience what it was like to travel just a few decades ago. If you are interested in refreshing your memory, come join us in Suriname!

Dan Lane, who, while he admits that it may sound a bit old-fashioned, says, “This is the way I like to spend time on a tour, enjoying the antics of Gray-winged Trumpeters or listening for the mooing call of a Capuchinbird high in the canopy, rather than checking on stocks at the end of the day…” will be taking a small group this March 2-17 to Suriname. For full details visit our tour page where you may download a detailed tour itinerary. You may also check out Dan’s bio and upcoming schedule at this link.

Guide Bret Whitney and his group enjoying looks at a riverside Zigzag Heron. Photo by guide Dan Lane.

Our November e-mailing is now posted! It includes recent photos from Kenya, Louisiana, Australia, and Cape May by our participants and guides, guide Jesse Fagan on Honduras, an added tour for Ontario’s owls and other great winter birds (January 2012), and last spaces on tours from December into the spring. Also noted: links to recently posted itineraries and triplists. You can see it all by clicking on the link or image below—enjoy!

November 2011 E-mailing