Survived the Swamps

And what a sight it was! Los Llanos, the vast, savannah-like plains that covers one-third of Venezuela, and contains such mighty rivers as the Orinoco and the Rio Apure, where we spent 4 days. Our guide, Hermes, had just gotten a new edition of the Venezuelan bird book: it is about the size of an encyclopedia. The page of hummingbirds alone is 6 pages, with about 30 hummers per page. I did not even look at the pages of herons, but there were more different kinds than I could ever have imagined, including the worlds largest heron, the white-neck.

We drove down from the cool, misty Andes into the hot, flat, Llanos, which are in the middle of the dry season right now. They call it "winter" which is pretty funny, since we could and did sweat all our bodily fluids out in about 2 hours. We had a base in a little fishing village on the river, very rustic by any standards, but the second night we boated up the river and camped out in hammocks, eating fresh beef cooked over a stick on a fire(Michael, not me. I know, I know, it is a travesty...). Now that is really getting back to the earth! We have never been so filthy (and we have known some backcountry dirt in our day), but it was an unbeatable experience, both for bird sightings and culturally. You could not turn your head one way or the other without innumerable, and I do not exaggerate, numbers of birds coming into view. Of course there were striped caimans (smaller crocodiles) everywhere as well. At night from our camp, we shone our flashilight down the river, and counted 14 little pairs of red caiman eyes looking back at us! It gave us a shiver, even though caimans are generally more afraid of us than we are of them (the giant caimans, which did eat people, are nearly extinct, of course, since we people generally do not tolerate things that eat us to linger for too long on this planet). In the morning we passed the riverbank where we had seen the eyes, and saw that they were all tiny baby caimans. Still.

We also drove through the plains on several bird-hunting expeditions, and saw a birdlovers cornucopia of wonderful creatures. The Brit on our tour wanted to know if we were "twitchers", which apparently is what Brits call serious birders. We said no, but we liked it enough to have nice binoculars (which were also a hit with the local kids). But by the end of the tour, when I was the only one left who was actually still excited to see yet another green kingfisher, tiger heron, woodstork, etc. I was beginning to wonder if we were twitchers after all. What a place! The photo above was taken early in the moring, and is a tree full of white egrets and the Llanos most beautiful bird, the scarlett ibis. The day-glo pink ibis might be more appropriate, as I have never seen such an other-wordly colored bird. They were almost hunted to extinction for French ladies hats, being the only animal of this color in the world, but fortunately some survived, French fashion changed, and they are still in the Llanos today. ras