For an informative overview of all our Brazil birding tours, see Brazil: Field Guides Tours.

Do you think cotingas are, shall we say, alluring? Would you describe hummers as some of the most fabulously brilliant and inspiring jewels in the natural world? Are you easily thrilled by birding's simpler pleasures, like walking down a misty mountain trail at dawn having no idea whether you're going to see a bamboowren, a bristlefront, or a streamcreeper next...or by the idea of a picnic dinner attended by owls and nightjars? And do you occasionally dream of being under a warm, tropical forest canopy after about the third hard freeze of the "fall" has numbed your neighborhood? If you answered "yes" to more than one of these, then you are likely to have the tropical birding time of your life on our SPECTACULAR SOUTHEAST BRAZIL tours!

Southeast Brazil is an especially exciting place to bird because it has such a wealth of unusual endemics, many of which are among the rarest birds on the continent; some are on the lists of the most critically endangered species in the world. The northern-hemisphere fall is springtime in Brazil, and these tours leave few bromeliads unscrutinized as we immerse ourselves in the Atlantic Forest in search of the approximately 170 species of birds that live only there (we regularly see over 160 of them). That's far more endemics within this one region than are found in any other South American country! Part of the fun, for sure, is meeting the enormous challenge of finding and seeing well all of these incredible birds--indeed, we'll cover a lot of eastern Brazil. There are, of course, many species of more widespread distribution as well, and we'll enjoy plenty of these as we go. And along the way, we'll stay in some charming places, revel in the beauty of mossy mountain forests, and eat like kings. We've done our traditional 26-day adventure each of the past nineteen years, and our guides are, shall we say, pretty "in-touch" with things down there; nobody else has our local network or depth of experience.

From 2009 forward, we're splitting the epoch into two slightly expanded tours at the Tropic of Capricorn (about 23 degrees South latitude), the official division between the Tropics and the South Temperate Zone. These tours are perfectly complementary whether taken separately or in tandem. NORTH OF THE TROPIC, at 17 days (including travel to and from Rio), takes you through the tiny but mighty (birdy, that is!) states of Espirito Santo and Rio de Janeiro plus far northern Sao Paulo. SOUTH OF THE CAPRICORN picks up from Sao Paulo and runs for two weeks south through the gaucho country of Rio Grande do Sul, a region settled by Italian and German immigrants so culturally different from the north that you may wonder if we are truly still in Brazil! Thus, you can keep the legend alive with nearly a month in the field. So be sure your seat back's up and tray table stowed, and come on down to Rio! Oh, and if you're wondering why we didn't list a ton of bird names, we decided to put them in the detailed day-by-day itinerary so you'll have time to read something else today.

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