BOLIVIA'S AVIAN RICHES
Blue-throated Macaw Extension

$3975; extension $1675 (2008 fees). 16 days plus extension
From Santa Cruz. Limit: 14
Good accommodations, easy to moderate terrain, gradual increase to high elevations, some long days. Our staff travel agents can book your air travel for this tour. Contact us at (800) 728-4953 for more information.

A spectacular Bolivian landscape at 16,000 feet, photographed by participant Jim Hannan

Bolivia is home to fewer than twenty endemic species of birds, but this figure is misleading because we regularly see another 100-plus species confined to a variety of rather limited ecosystems just overlapping political boundaries, species that may not be seen readily by birders elsewhere.  Indeed, our groups have been privileged to see well the Diademed Tapaculo, a distinctly marked species discovered by Bret Whitney while scouting for a previous tour.  A tyrannulet we usually see in the Santa Cruz area appears to be a species that is undescribed!  New discoveries still await us in Bolivia.

With aesthetic highlights varying from seeable tinamous and tapaculos to shy but responsive Slaty Gnateaters and Giant Antshrikes, incredible Hooded Mountain-Toucan, the must-see-to-believe Black-hooded Sunbeam, the superb Olive-crowned Crescentchest, dazzling and exhilarating flocks of Hooded and Scarlet-bellied mountain-tanagers to subtly beautiful Whistling Herons and Scissor-tailed Nightjars, our efforts will be rewarded.  We begin our birding in the lowlands at Santa Cruz and work our way slowly westward and northward before ascending the altiplano to end in La Paz.  En route we will visit both the Serranía de Siberia, cloaked in a lush cloud forest at elevations of 8000 to 9000 feet at the southern limit for numerous forms of Andean birds, including the endemic Rufous-faced Antpitta, and the arid valleys of the Rio Mizque, with its surrounding cliffs furnishing nesting sites to some of the remaining 3000 Red-fronted Macaws, surely among the most beautiful of the macaws.  In the nearby rain-shadow desert, the endemic Bolivian Earthcreeper scoots over rocks and cacti, while White-tipped Plantcutters grind the day away.  Between this lovely area and Cochabamba await such specialties as Iquico Canastero and the strange Bolivian Blackbird, both endemics.  We end in the moist Yungas forests of the north, with their varied temperate and subtropical avian beauties.  Bolivia’s Avian Riches is a tour that brings scenic and avian variety and surprises every day.

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