BirdForum

It can be difficult to get children that live over 500km from the nearest coastline to connect with waders and shorebirds! It is however rewarding when they realise that the loud and raucous Southern Lapwings on their local football field are also waders.
They also were intrigued to find that we ventured still further into the interior of Brazil in search of the Pied Lapwing. The fact that we had visited the capital of their country was equally as intriguing as none of them had ever been...

Rick and Elis

Pied lapwing was always going to be a bit of a long shot as far as Wader Quest was concerned. We were just about going to be on the edge of their range, where they are rare, only once. From where we are staying in Minas Gerais visiting family we took to the road this morning and drove for 5 hours in the direction of Brasilia, the country's capital city. We were heading for a place called Pirapora where we had seen this species once before, but many years ago when we had visited the site to look...

Rick and Elis

We met with mixed success in the high part of the Andes in the Puna valleys. The first day we headed up to a place called Huachupampa in the Santa Eulalia Valley. We didn't see any waders at all, but then we hardly expected to, this first stop was to get us acclimatised to the altitude before heading to the top at over 4,000m!
So the next morning we drove along precipitous roads until we reached the high peaks and the bogs in Puna grassland. It was here that we were set loose to look for...

Rick and Elis

Slightly disappointing start to our trip to Peru when we dipped on Peruvian Thick-knee, we did manage to open our Peruvian wader account though with some old favourites; American Oystercatcher and Killdeer, plus some small groups of Hudsonian Whimbrels.
We are being looked after our good friend Renzo Zeppelli during our stay in Peru. Renzo is a fantastic bird guide and knows many places off the beaten track that visiting guides are not be aware of, being local his knowledge of the birdlife...

Rick and Elis

We predicted that the first wader we would see in Brazil would be Southern Lapwing and probably at the airport before we even left the plane. However we had forgotten that it would be dark at 5:30 in S.E. Brazil at this time of year. Although we did look for them in the airport lights we were unlucky, but soon caught up with them along the approach road to the airport.
We then drove down to our favourite swamp at the side of the road on Mogi das Cruzes and there we saw some more Southern...

Rick and Elis