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If you have been contemplating a first birding trip to Brazil, this is perhaps the best one to take. Why? Because the habitats are especially "birder-friendly" and relatively open, allowing birds to be seen easily and repeatedly. This helps you enjoy and assimilate one part of the complex and incredible birdlife gigantic Brazil has to offer. What if you have already been to Brazil a time or two (we offer a dozen or so different tours annually)? Safari Brazil is sure to complement your experience with a rich variety of birds restricted to the southwest or the Central Plateau, while showing you another beautiful part of the South American continent. Birders who have already birded all around the margins of our tour route usually see around 40 life birds. Traveling around in this region of Brazil is fun--it's sort of like the "Brazilian Outback." People are super-friendly, the food is fabulous, and getting thirsty because you were so busy seeing lifers that you forgot to drink any water (we'll remind you!) makes those ice-cold beers, lemonades, and caipirinhas (beware, but again we'll warn you) slide down deliciously at the end of the day. Furthermore, we stay at some delightful accommodations right in the midst of good birding. Our visit is timed to coincide with the normal end of the long dry season--hopefully, just after some of the first rains have moistened the parched cerrado and Pantanal, catalyzing a veritable explosion of wildflowers, insects, and birds.

Central Brazil is a melting pot of habitats and avifaunas--with some unique spectacles unsurpassed elsewhere. It's hard to equal the sheer excitement of watching a flock of deep-blue Hyacinth Macaws, the world's largest parrot, circling over the wilds of Mato Grosso do Sul, or the impressive numbers of big birds--waterbirds, raptors, cracids, parrots, Guira Cuckoos--in the Pantanal, the world's largest freshwater wetland.. And what of the immense stretches of hip-high grassland dotted with the world's highest density of terrestrial termitaria--and hence of Giant Anteaters? At Emas National Park on the Central Plateau, these huge anteaters with the funnel-shaped snouts wander among foraging Greater Rheas and herds of Pampas Deer, while male Cock-tailed Tyrants, the most sprightly of all flycatchers, hover in courtship over the grass like toy helicopters, their tails cocked vertically over their backs. Each of our groups has enjoyed stunning encounters with the elegant and endangered Maned Wolf, a large rufous wolf with black stilt-like legs, a black mane, and white chin and tail; it stalks tinamous and other prey in the tall-grass savannas and even slips quietly up the rock stairway of the ancient monastery at Caraça for food scraps supplied by the monks. We see around twenty species of mammals on the tour, often including Brazilian Tapir, and photographic opportunities abound. In fact, the abundance and conspicuousness of large birds and mammals in Central Brazil have been likened to those of East Africa and are unequaled elsewhere in the Neotropics.

Our tour is designed to sample the avian highlights of Brazil's Central Plateau (Planalto Central) and of the vast Pantanal, the low-lying drainage of the upper Paraguay River. We also visit the magnificent Serra do Cipo and Serra do Caraça, isolated ranges in central Minas Gerais state that support several restricted endemics as well as a more widespread avifauna characteristic of the humid Atlantic-coast forests which here spill over westward toward the plateau. The itinerary includes several parks rarely visited by other organized birding tours and harboring such rarities and specialties as Lesser Nothura, Bare-faced Curassow, White-winged Nightjar, Horned Sungem, Hyacinth Visorbearer, the recently described Cipo Canastero, Serra Antwren, the recently described Rock Tapaculo, Gray-backed Tachuri, Swallow-tailed Cotinga, Helmeted Manakin, Gray-eyed Greenlet, White-striped Warbler, Yellow-billed Blue Finch, Pale-throated Pampa-Finch, Cinereous Warbling-Finch, and a host of rare and brightly colored seedeaters.

Select the KEY INFO tab or click here for our itinerary plus space requests, status, fees, limits, and guides for any departure.

Client comment
"Marcelo Padua and Dan Lane were an exceptional team. The logistics behind organizing and running this tour must have been very demanding. I have nothing but good things to say about Marcelo's and Dan's abilities and personable interactions with my wife and myself and our traveling companions. We had a wonderful group experience. Your office service was top-notch!" D.C., SAFARI BRAZIL: THE PANTANAL & MORE