Hi Niels, thanks for posting.
My wife and I visited Chile in 2008 - but we cheated and did it the easy way (with Birdseekers)!
Throughout our years of birding, we've mostly concentrated on the Holarctic region - we've never been great fans of the tropics with its overwhelming numbers of mostly sedentary species. But running out of new places to bird in the north, it seemed a good idea to spend a few years instead focusing on an alternative temperate zone (the Southern Cone), and Chile was our first destination there.
We found it fascinating to experience this upside-down world for the first time, where despite similarities in climate, equivalent niches are often occupied by completely different families: tinamous vs galliforms, penguins & diving petrels vs alcids, seedsnipes vs sandgrouse, chimangos vs corvids, miners vs larks, ground tyrants vs wheatears, etc; with even the most familiar families represented by dramatically different species - wildfowl, waders, gulls & terns...
Your report brought back some great memories of a beautiful country - but we're very envious of your King Penguins! We hope to visit again some day by ourselves to catch up with a few missed species, and to take time to enjoy some of the best areas at a slightly more relaxed pace...
Richard
PS. In your list, you've attributed all records of Variable Hawk to
Buteo poecilochrous. But my understanding is that even if recognised as a species,
poecilochrous is largely restricted to c3500m+, and in Chile is usually considered to occur only in the north (eg, Bierregaard 1994 (
HBW2), Ferguson-Lees & Christie 2001) - so probably only your Lauca sightings would be candidates. [See
this thread for discussion and links.] I'm sure that Alvaro ('Scelorchilus') could clarify...