February 1-9, 2025 with Dan Lane & Roger Rodriguez
Colombia is the Bird Country. It has nearly 2000 species (that’s approximately 20% of all the world’s birds!). This is largely thanks to it being a tropical country with both an Atlantic (=Caribbean) and Pacific coast, a complex series of mountain ranges, and other means of isolating patches of both humid and dry habitats. These disjunct features sitting in the relative stasis of tropical climates have resulted in a high level of endemism… and no where in Colombia is the endemism rate as high as it is in the isolated Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the northeast corner of the country! And what do you know? That’s where we went on this very tour! And was it ever a successful visit! (Too long didn’t read: it was!). In about a week, we observed around 320 species, including 21 endemic species, and multiple other endemic subspecies (some of which may be best split off as species themselves). Not a bad haul!
The tour started and ended in the coastal city of Barranquilla, which owes its existence to its position at the mouth of the great Magdelena River. This river allows for extensive wetlands on its banks, and nearby the coast has extensive mangrove swamps. The fragments of upland habitats still remaining within the city and nearby along the highway headed east are surprisingly arid deciduous woodland, becoming more so as we entered the northeastern-most department of La Guajira. Here, the habitat becomes desert scrub reminiscent of what one might see in west Texas or Arizona, although here, it is within a stone’s throw of the Caribbean Sea! We spent a day birding this habitat from our base in the town of Camarrones, which itself sits at the mouth of an estuary. This geographic juxtaposition allowed us to see several specialties of the arid scrub and then shorebirds, waders, and gulls and terns in a morning! Once we’d had our fill of the deserts of the Guajira, we headed back west into the slightly wetter foothills of the Santa Martas, and then upslope to the village of Minca, a tourist destination which seems particularly popular to those seeking a hike to waterfalls and riverbeds teeming with other hikers! Luckily, our goals removed us from some of this. Finally, from Minca, we headed farther upslope to the cloudforests of the El Dorado reserve, a privately-owned area operated by ProAves, a Colombian NGO that has been spearheading conservation in many parts of the country, and also the operator of the El Dorado lodge where we stayed. We spent several days here, visiting different elevations, with a particular emphasis on the higher ridge above the lodge called la Cuchilla de San Lorenzo (or San Lorenzo Knife Ridge). This is home to a suite of endemics unavailable to us elsewhere. But this also makes it a popular place for other birding groups to visit, as we saw! Luckily, we seemed to have hit the ridge at a good time and managed to encounter just about everything we wanted there! On our last day, we birded the area around Minca one more time, then headed back to our hotel in Barranquilla, enjoying a delicious dinner at the restaurant nearby as we said our goodbyes.
It's hard to isolate a concise list of highlights from the tour, as there were a LOT of great birds and experiences we had! Things that made the Top Three list were: experiences such as the morning spent birding the Guajira scrub, where we managed to see a good cross-section of the specialties of the area such as White-whiskered Spinetail, Bare-eyed Pigeon, Tocuyo Sparrow, Chestnut Piculet, and more. Another birding morning that captivated us was the experience at the San Lorenzo Ridge, where we saw a lot of endemics, many of which had a name starting with “Santa Marta”: Santa Marta Antpitta, Santa Marta Parakeet, and a little lower down, the Santa Marta Bush-Tyrant and White-tailed Starfrontlet. A few of the highlights were not endemics, including the pair of Solitary Eagles that Roger spotted from Mountain House, the Bicolored Wrens we encountered at many localities, or the diminutive Long-billed Gnatwrens that skulked in vine tangles of the foothills. Some lower-elevation endemics we enjoyed included the recently-described Santa Marta Screech-Owl and the recently-split Santa Marta Antbird. A few non-endemics, but still local specialties, made the list such as Rosy Thrush-Tanager, which was a great last bird of the tour, the stunning Golden-winged Sparrow that gave us stellar looks around Minca, and the Orange-crowned Orioles, which was not a bird that was on my radar until we saw them near the magic toll booth in the Guajira. And finally, some rare boreal migrants made the cut as well, with the surprise female Golden-winged and Mourning warblers our last day being stand-outs! But other birds such as the American Flamingos at Camarrones, as well as the feeder birds there, the garden at Mountain House, and the friendly folks and good food we enjoyed at all of our spots will also remain in our minds!
I want to give my sincere thanks to Roger for his hard work and good spirits, which made a huge difference in how much enjoyment we got from the tour, to Nature Colombia for their efforts, and to the staff of the lodges, of course. This tour was seamless and a genuine pleasure! I hope you all will think of it fondly!
Mammals:
Gray-legged Night Monkey (Aotus griseimembra)
Colombian Red Howler (Alouatta seniculus)
Red-tailed Squirrel (Sciurus granatensis)
Herps:
Green Iguana (Iguana iguana)
Gladiator Tree Frog (Boana sp.): these were the bathroom frogs at Camarones
Serranobatrachus santaemartae: the frog that Roger caught on the San Lorenzo ridge
Thanks for joining Roger and me on this wonderful trip! Hope to see y'all again in the future somewhere else with binos around your necks and a gleam in your eyes!
Good birding to all!
You can see my complete trip report on eBird at this link: https://ebird.org/tripreport/329547
You can download a combined PDF of this page and the eBird report at this link: https://fieldguides.com/triplists/cms25TRIPLIST.pdf
-- Dan (the Barbet)