albatross2:
Thanks very much (belatedly!) for the information. I cannot say is I will be going to any of those places, but, among them, they certainly do host many of the birds that I am looking for.
One question (for anyone, really): I cannot find any site on the web that gives me the location of the "Reserva estero Lampa". I can find the town of Lampa on a map, easily enough, but no indication of where the wetland is.
Hi Peter, the road heading east from Lampa towards ruta 5 bisects the marsh. It's fairly easy to park by the roadside and there's a couple of viewpoints. This is a well-known site for south american painted-snipe if you know exactly where to go and are prepared to wade into the marshes (there is also a site for black crake nearby apparently), but when i was there i had neither the time nor the inclination and didn't see much apart from a large flock of andean geese but they will be up in the mountains by the time you get there i imagine.
I found the nearby lago batuco much better to be honest. to get here if you are travelling from lampa turn left down a dirt track very shortly after crossing the rail road (follow the brown signpost to the lake), carry on past a brick factory and a charcoal factory then turn left down a very rutted track to a little parking area. The lake is ahead of you across a wide grassy area (you can see all of this pretty well on google maps, the ground around the charcoal factory is completely black). Amongst other commoner waterfowl i saw black-headed duck, rosybill, cocoi heron, collared plover, baird's sandpiper, plus cinereous harrier and correndera pipit, and there was also a pair of burrowing owl at a ranch on the west side of the dirt road near the charcoal factory.
This whole area is really very close to the airport (30-40 mins drive so is really worth a detour).
There are a couple of problems though, terrible heat haze once the sun gets going, and very territorial lapwings which make a stealthy approach to the lake pretty difficult!!
incidentally, if you do go to Altos de Lircay keep an eye out for Patagonian Forest Earthcreeper. This is described in the Jaramillo field guide as the saturiator subspecies of scale-throated earthcreeper, but is a very recent but now widely accepted split which relatively few birders have seen (i am currently the only person on bubo with it on my list :king: although to be fair i did not realise it was split at the time i saw it!).
i saw one perched in a tree (a good field-mark apparently) in between the park gates and the visitor centre at the reserve.
cheers,
James