June 25-July 4, 2025 with Dan Lane
Often considered one of the crown jewels of the pre-colonial Americas, the ruins of Machu Picchu are without a doubt one of the most awe-inspiring sites many of us will ever have the chance to visit! The scenery here is breathtaking, and one leaves wondering how the people of the time were able to found and build such an amazing achievement! The fact that the site was never discovered by the Spanish, who had a penchant for wrecking indigenous constructions, allows us to see a relatively unsullied expression of pre-Colombian architecture. It also doesn’t hurt that the region is also a great one for more modern cultural exploration and, of course, for birding! We were able to enjoy comfortable lodging, good food, and visits to the High Andean localities around Ollantaytambo and the Sacred Valley of the Rio Urubamba, and the marshes of Huacarpay. It’s a short tour that really gives you a flavor of the Cusco region and the avifauna of the surrounding Andes region.
Our tour took us from the new airport in Lima to Cusco, and thence quickly to Huacarpay, where we birded around the lakes and rush marshes and arid hillside scrub. From here, we descended the Sacred Valley of the Urubamba with a stop at the interesting Ensifera Camp hummingbird garden before arriving at our hotel in Ollantaytambo. The next morning we took the train to Aguas Calientes and a bus up to the ruins at Machu Picchu for a few hour tour of these magnificent structures. Back to Aguas Calientes for lunch and to settle into our luxurious hotel. The next day we embarked on a fairly easy, but somewhat long, walk down to the Mandor Valley and back to see the birds of this subtropical cloudforest, with a nice picnic lunch on the grounds of a small café at the turn-around point. Some ice cream upon reaching Aguas Calientes rallied us enough to get back to our rooms for some well-deserved rest! Finally, we spent a morning birding on our hotel grounds before checking out and taking the train back to Ollantaytambo. We birded the grounds of our hotel there before dinner. Our next two days were spent visiting the pass at Abra Malaga, both the “dry” near side and the more humid far side of the pass. Finally, our last birding morning was spent walking a trail up and over a ridge into a remnant patch of Polylepis woodland before we returned to the hotel, checked out, and headed back to Cusco with a few stops for lunch and at Laguna Piuray for some waterbirds. Once in Cusco, we had a morning free to explore the city and see the sights and markets before we flew back to Lima and ended the tour.
As always, we took away many memories from this tour! Some involved overall experiences such as our views from the Machu Picchu ruins or from Maxima’s restaurant down the valley toward the Urubamba. We also experienced the importance of microhabitats on birds, with an example being the specialist and endemic species we pulled out of the Chusquea bamboo at one stop on the humid side of Abra Malaga! Folks certainly enjoyed seeing local specialties and endemics such as Parodi’s Hemispingus, Cusco and Golden-crowned (formerly Tricolored) brushfinches, and Green-and-white Hummingbird. We certainly enjoyed some of the brightly-colored species we encountered such as Chilean Flamingo, Andean Cock-of-the-Rock, Andean Motmot, Many-colored Rush-Tyrant, and Violet-throated Starfrontlet. Then there are species that just simply have a style about them that some of us really appreciated, such as Slate-throated Redstart, Pearled Treerunner, White-capped Dipper, Andean Flicker, Andean Lapwing, Andean Ibis, Cinnamon Flycatcher, and Red-crested Cotinga. Then there were a couple of skulkers that performed well for us, particularly the very tame Undulated Antpittas at Ensifera Camp and the Diademed Tapaculo we called up at treeline at Abra Malaga!
Mammal list:
Guinea Pig (Cavia tschudii): around Huacarpay lakes.
Kalinowski's Agouti (Dasyprocta kalinowskii): this was the agouti we saw on the hotel grounds.
Common Mountain Viscacha (Lagidium viscacia): a couple lucky participants caught a glimpse of this rabbit-squirrel mix on the humid side of Abra Malaga above treeline.
So thanks for joining me on this short visit into the Inca homeland in the Cusco Andes! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, and perhaps we’ll meet again somewhere else on the trail primed for more birding in another gorgeous location!
You can see my complete trip report on eBird at this link: https://ebird.org/tripreport/392119
You can download a combined PDF of this page and the eBird report at this link: https://fieldguides.com/triplists/abm25TRIPLIST.pdf
-- Good birding! Dan (the Barbet)