The flight home was – as they always are, if one is lucky – completely uninteresting. It departed Santiago around 2145 (right on time) and got us into Toronto Pearson around 0600 the next morning. The parents-in-law were good enough to pick us up – and drive me right to my office, which happens to be very close to the Toronto airport. I was back at my desk by 0800, just like any other work day … oh, joy.
But, want to hear something really funny? The first thing we saw on the news, when we hit Toronto, was a story about the 7.1-magnitude earthquake that had hit “central Chile” the day before. We said: “what quake?” We’d been chasing Austral Thrushes around the airport when it hit, and hadn’t noticed it at all. (Apparently, the initial news reports had been a bit vague, geographically – it was centred quite a bit to the south, not in “central Chile” at all – nobody else in Santiago noticed it either.)
north carolina mountain real estate
To sum up: I need hardly say, after going on and on about it for pages and pages (19,622 words, up to the end of Jan 02 – I counted) that the trip was a success.
But, was it an unqualified success? Well, no; I have yet to see an earthcreeper of any kind, or a Huet-huet of any throat-colour. But, in light of what we
did see, it would be more than a little churlish to complain. (What’s better - three Andean Condors? … a pair of Stripe-backed Bitterns? An entire flock of Burrowing Parakeets? And, regarding that Giant Hummingbird, I am even starting to doubt myself – I feel a sort of kinship with those Air Force pilots who report seeing UFOs …)
I am not one who believes in numbers much – I don’t really think that the number of birds seen per day, or per kilometre driven, are a measure of the value of a birding trip. Even so, numbers
are something that I can unambiguously communicate, so they may be useful to somebody. Here they are: in about 7.5 days, we drove about 965 km, hiked roughly 22 km, and saw 97 species. Potentially a more useful thing to look at, if you want a number, is what I would call the “lifer ratio” – i.e. how many species were life birds, out of the total number we saw. By that measure, this was the best trip I’ve had in
many years – as evidenced by the fact that, when I went to work this out, I found that it was much easier to just count the
non-lifers, and subtract! Of the 97 birds positively identified, 69 were lifers, and four of those Chilean endemics. (Alert readers will have noticed that this does not match the numbering of the birds in this thread; that’s because I forgot to include a Black Vulture Back on day 2, and mistakenly used #37 twice on day 3.)
Strategically, there were some good decisions we made along the way, and some bad ones (I made all of the latter on my own, of course – but
Somebody should have tried to stop me!). Among the good decisions – to ask for, and carefully consider, advice from people on Birdforum; that’s how we ended up at staying at
Hosteria de Vilches, and I very much doubt if would have found it otherwise. Likewise, paying close attention to Tripadvisor reports (even though these have to be judged rather more sceptically), which is how I discovered both
Hacienda Laguna Torca, and the car hire company.
Another good judgment call was electing not to be too ambitious about how far we would travel once we were in Chile. I had originally planned to visit one destination in the Santiago area, and another in the Lakes district, inland from Puerto Montt. That would have an excessive amount of travel; even as it was, seemed like we spent too much time on the road.
Speaking of which, here’s an example of a really dumb decision I made: To go on that “mad dash” to the mountains on January 01. The scenery was lovely, and it was the only place we saw condors up close, but driving all the way up the Rio Teno was not worth the investment of time. It would have been a much better idea to have stayed in the lowlands that day, and just concentrated on finding the birds we still “needed” there. (As a “for instance” on last day at HLT, somebody – I won’t say who – mentioned that they have a resident Chilean Tinamou there. Ahhhhh!
Now you tell us!) That said, I would do the drive up the valley of the Teno, and the one up the Rio Maule, again - but only if I were staying overnight somewhere much closer by.
In effect, I would characterize this trip as a having been not so much a birding vacation, as a very successful scouting expedition – we have now acquired some idea of where the really good locations are, all we need is another (ideally, three-week-long) trip in order to see them properly….
Hasta luego,
Peter C.
