Ciblek Mania

This post is a continuation of Part 5: Trekking Up Turtle Mountain. Walking back down from Turtle Mountain, one might think, would be easier than walking up. However we took a different forest trail—one that was a tad rootier and rockier—winding through more giant trees and deeper shade. As it was already afternoon, the forest was growing quieter. The first recognizable sound I heard was a grunt, quickly followed by a bad word, emanating from my own mouth as a result of stepping awkwardly on a root and twisting my ankle.

This was to be the first solid evidence than I had made bad footwear choices for this trip. Feeling the pressure of the trip's weight limitations, I took the minimum footwear I thought necessary. I packed light hiking boots (Merrills, which always seem to be too small once you leave the shoe store), some Keen flip-flops, and a new pair of rugged Crocs. I was wearing the Merrills when I stumbled, and the ankle support was not enough, apparently. I did not break anything, but the ankle would remain tender throughout the trip.

If I were going back to Guyana today, I would take better, more supportive hikers, plus a pair of beater tennis shoes (ones I could leave behind at the end of the trip), and some regular Keen sandals. In the heat, humidity, rain, and rivers your feet are damp a lot of the time in Guyana. Blisters and sore spots make it necessary to give your feet a break by changing into alternative footwear. Once my hikers became uncomfy, my choices were the Crocs (which raised immediate blisters), and the Keen flip-flops, which were neither safe nor rugged enough for the trails we hiked.

Just as I was regaining my composure after a litany of whispered, banned-from-the-radio words, we began seeing birds. Simultaneously it began to rain buckets. We stepped in lively fashion down the trail to a clearing where some open-sided buildings gave us shelter from the storm. When the rain quit, the bird activity resumed. Parrots, macaws, toucans, tanagers, woodcreepers, and a range of other feathered wonders caught our eyes.

We scanned the treetops on the forest edge identifying the parrots and macaws that were preening after the shower. We shook the rain off our "plumage" too, and wiped lenses dry. Then back on the trail en route to the boat landing.

We did not get very far. One of our most interesting encounters was with a pair of waved woodpeckers. One of which—the male—stayed long enough for scope looks and photos. It was picking something off the bark of a huge tree and wiping it through its feathers. We could not tell if it was sap or ants or something else. But the bird was sufficiently engrossed in its ablutions that we got very close to it.

A small flock of painted parrots (above) was foraging in fruit trees next to the path and a pair of yellow-billed jacamars (below) was hawking insects in an adjacent clearing. We all stopped to admire these cooperative birds and our reverie was broken, not by the rain re-starting (which it did), but by the prodding voices of our leaders admonishing us to finish the hike back to the boats (which we did).

The boat ride back to Iwokrama gave us a chance to cool off after the intensely humid hike. The cooling air actually made the sun enjoyable. Had we been stationary, it would have been another story altogether.

Back on the friendly grounds of Iwokrama, we split into groups—some heading off for a siesta, some hoping the solar-powered wireless would be working, and the rest of us off for—what else—birding. Wally lead us along the Screaming Piha Trail in search of Guyana's weirdest bird: the capuchinbird, or calf bird. We heard them on their lek, high in the canopy, and we got modestly good looks at these cartoony creatures, but the daylight was fleeing and the show was soon over for the day. I'll tell more about a subsequent encounter with the capuchinbirds in a later post.

Moments after emerging from the trail, we took to the boats again, motoring across the river to a small island where there is a family-run bar.
We drank rum poured into cut coconuts, which is mandatory on any trip to the tropics, apparently.
When the coconuts were all gone, we had cold Banks Beer and watched the sun kiss the sky goodnight. Funny, my ankle felt fine at this point.

On our third day in Guyana, after a very warm night's sleep in our cabins at Iwokrama Eco Lodge, we headed out before dawn by boat to a landing from which we planned to hike up Turtle Mountain. As we were boarding the small watercraft at the lodge in the pre-dawn darkness, the birds were already active. On the lodge lawn a smattering of pied lapwings were scampering around, while orioles, tanagers, and caciques chattered and sang from the trees.


The birding along the river was good, and we added some new birds to the list, but our guides were eager for us to do our hiking in the relative cool of the early morning, so we did not linger over the large-billed terns and black skimmers we saw.
Once on land, and the trail head to Turtle Mountain, we could not help ourselves. A great jacamar pair was making themselves obvious and we spent a half hour admiring them and getting everyone good scope-filling looks at this handsome bird.

Hiking up into the forest rising above the river, we were accompanied every step of the way by the screams of the perfectly named screaming piha. This bird was everywhere we went in the forests of Guyana. It seemed to warn the other birds of our approach. I began to wonder if I lived here in this drippingly humid rain forest, if I would eventually tune out the piha's screams, or if I would run screaming into the forest, driven mad by their ceaseless keening.

We climbed higher and the trail got rougher. Passing into ancient forest, we enjoyed our first close encounters with the giant trees of the Iwokrama reserve. Our guide explained about the uses of the various trees for building, weapon making, and medicine.

Near the summit we had a run of birding that was dizzying. In quick succession we had great looks at the red-necked woodpecker (one of my most-wanted birds), black-tailed trogon, and flame-crested tanager (decent look but I'd welcome another one).

Following this rush of birds, a small storm of fruits, branches, and poop began raining down from the canopy as a troop of black spider monkeys began encouraging us to leave their forest. they were crashing at high speed through the tree tops, but I managed to get one in the scope long enough to grab a photo.


We took this group photo there.

And I just had to do my standard shout-out to my birding peeps in the Ohio Ornithological Society by showing the OOS colors at the Turtle Mountain overlook.



After lunching and cooling off with some cold water and fruit juice, it was time to begin the hot walk back down the mountain. Little did we know it, as we began the descent, we'd see even more amazing birds on the way down, but we'd pay for the privilege through the wrath of the weather gods.

In part 3 of my series of posts about birding in Guyana, I promised to show you some of the birds we saw on our six-hour drive along the road from Rock View Lodge to the Iwokrama Forest Reserve and Ecolodge.

My mind is back on Guyana for a couple of reasons. First of all there is just so much to share about my trip there. Secondly, the upcoming issue (July/August 2010) of Bird Watcher's Digest features Guyana in our regular travel column "Far Afield." Julie Zickefoose writes about her trip to Guyana in an article entitled "Journey to the Lungs of the Earth."

Thirdly, I've just finished the rough edits on a podcast about Guyana for "This Birding Life." That should be ready for listening within a few days.

In our last Guyana blog post, we left off just after a flight from Georgetown to the Annai airstrip in the interior. We lunched at Rock View Lodge and climbed aboard three 4 x 4 trucks for transport along the lone road in the interior of Guyana to Iwokrama. The road bed was red clay and very dusty. I felt lucky to be in the lead vehicle, which was also the lone truck with air conditioning. The day was as hot as the hinges of Hades, but even the delicious comfort of the cool truck cab could not keep us from leaping out each time we spotted a new bird.
King vultures mixed with blacks and turkeys overhead. Several species of caracara added themselves to our list, including a screaming family group of red-throated caracaras. Small clusters of swallow-tailed kites skimmed the tree tops. The landscape was changing from open savanna scrub to forest edge and then to proper forest. As it changed, so did the bird life.


Swallow-winged puffbirds sallied forth from snags. Macaws and parakeets whirred across the roadway opening. Roadside hawks lived up to their names.

Strange bird shapes appeared everywhere, causing excited shouts from our truck.

We'd get out, optics swinging onto targets and shout out names, or more likely families of birds, or even MORE likely things like "I have a large dark raptor with a long tail." Or "I've got some sort of jacamar on that snag on the left."
Or "Some tiny green thing is singing and hover-gleaning over here in this fruiting tree." Our guides helped call out the birds' names when they could.

The farther along the road we we, the deeper and older the forest got. Soon we passed through the gate into the Iwokrama Forest Reserve and it was here that we entered the true rain forest.


We continued driving and stopping for birds for the next few hours. When all the trucks in our convoy finally got together, our tour leaders told us we were running really behind schedule. Since we still had a long way to drive before reaching the Iwokrama River Lodge, we had to swear that we'd only stop for the rarest of the rare. Suggestions were made for what would qualify as a stop-worthy sighting: Jaguar, harpy eagle, and anaconda were all mentioned. I threw in "A Pittsburgh Pirates' World Championship" knowing full well that we'd be more likely to find the other three creatures together, playing poker in the middle of the road before I'd see the Pirates hoist the World Champion flag over their stadium.

We made better time the rest of the way, but still stopped a few times. Once for a long, bright green snake that had been killed in the road.


And a few times for new bird species. We arrived at Iwokrama well after dusk, dusty, hot, hungry, and tired—but happy for a great day of birding along the only read road in Guyana's interior.

Here are a few of the bird images I captured that day.

After a restful night's sleep in the air-conditioned comfort of the Hotel Pegasus in Georgetown, we staggered downstairs with all of our gear for our first full day of birding in Guyana.

And when I say "staggered downstairs" I mean it literally—at least for myself. The evening before I had gotten stuck in one of the hotel's two elevators for about 15 minutes, trying to descend from the fifth floor to the lobby. The doors closed, I pushed the L button and nothing happened. I pushed the button again—nada. I pushed the OPEN button. Nope. Within another three minutes I was trying to attract the attention of the hotel employee I'd seen cleaning the room opposite the elevators by pounding on the doors and screaming (politely) for help. She could not hear me. So I waited.

I figured someone would eventually notice that I was missing and would come looking. I purposely felt in my pocket for food, just in case. The granola bar I'd had with me since Ohio was some small comfort. After a period of minutes that seemed longer than it probably was, the elevator woke up and took me down to the lobby where exasperated looks from my fellow travelers greeted me.

Hence, on the following morning I (and all my gear) took the stairs.

Our morning destination was the Georgetown Botanical Gardens and Zoo, a place nearly everyone mentions when talking about birding in Guyana. The large trees of the gardens lure parrots, woodpeckers, toucans, and raptors while the various ponds and marshy areas host water birds. It's mostly open beneath the trees so it's easy to see the birds. And believe me there were birds in every direction we looked, including a distant peregrine falcon on a radio tower.


Great kiskadees screamed and whined from everywhere as they tussled with one another and hawked insects over the ponds.

One of the first true life birds for me was the cinereous becard, a small pale gray bird with a stout bill and a black cap. I got a good look and a decent digiscope shot of the male.


Snail kites are so numerous are Georgetown that we began saying things like "Oh it's just another snail kite..." This struck me as weird since it took me three special trips in the early 1990s to add this species to my life list in Florida. Of course once I saw one, the species no longer vexed me. No such worries in Georgetown, where every single citizen could add this species to their yard list every day of the year. Bad place to be a snail.


Just as the morning was beginning to get noticeably hot (which starts as soon as the sun rises above the trees) we had a run of great birds, starting with a very cooperative pair of little cuckoos in the brush along a wet ditch. Such neat little cinnamon birds with bright yellow bills! I struggled to find a vantage point for my scope so I could get a photo. And once I got the scope on the birds, I nearly missed the shot because my exclamation of "Holy mackerel!" formed an instant line of people behind me wanting a scope look. When that happens I cannot hog the scope to get my shots, so we all got good scope views, AND I got my shot of one of the cuckoos just before it jumped back into deep cover.



Lemon-chested greenlet, gray-breasted martin, southern house wren, tropical gnatcatcher, white-lined, blue-gray, and palm tanagers, yellow oriole, limpkin, spotted sandpiper, wattled jaçana, ruddy ground dove, pale-vented pigeon, golden-winged parakeet, smooth-billed ani, green kingfisher, and yellow-chinned spinetail are just some of the birds I remember seeing that morning in the botanical gardens.


The photographers among us got their first truly cooperative subject: a striated heron that walked calmly just a few feet away from a collection of whirring, beeping, clicking lenses.



Parrots, macaws, and their ilk filled the morning air with raucous cries. Flocks zoomed by overhead. Our guides called out IDs but I confess I did not get good looks at all of them. We did get great looks at several yellow-crowned parrots (called yellow-crowned amazon in the field guide)

A quartet of lineated woodpeckers was trying to work out territorial boundaries in the large trees of the gardens, which gave us thoroughly pleasing looks.

Aside from its great birding, the botanical gardens is also famous for its tame pod of manatees in the lake. Grab an handful of grass from the lawn and waggle it in the water and a manatee or two will come up to eat it from your hand. One of our leaders, Kirk, demonstrated this for us, but the water was a bit too shallow for the large aquatic mammal to get all the way to shore. For a breathless account of a more exciting manatee encounter from this spot, slip over to Julie Zickefoose's blog post from fall of 2008.

The final bit of birding excitement from out botanical garden adventure happened when one of our target birds, the toco toucan swooped across the blue sky and landed atop a palm tree. Kiskadees swarmed and swooped at the toucan (they are well-known nest robbers) but the giant-billed bird just sat there and looked around. So did we, except that our attention was focused solely on the toucan.

This moment of birding reverie was broken with the soon to be all-too-familiar cry of "OK folks, back on the bus! We've gotta move out!" I could have spent an entire day in this park, and at the end of our tour two of our most avid photographers did just that in order to take advantage of the photo ops offered by the acclimated birds.

For now we were off to the small airport to fly to the interior of Guyana where more wonders surely waited.

Next post: Puddle Jumper Over Rainforest.

A couple of years ago I was invited on a familiarization tour of Guyana. I was unable to go, but knew several of the people who DID go, including my wife Julie Zickefoose, and my British birding pal, and co-founder of The British Bird Fair, Tim Appleton. I'd heard plenty of stories about the birding, the climate, the vast expanses of rain forest, and the people of Guyana, so I eagerly agreed to be part of a trip in spring of 2010.

Guyana. Here in the United States the name Guyana does not generate immediate recognition. People ask where it is. "Is that in Africa or South America?" It's confused with its similarly named neighbors French Guiana and Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana). If Americans do recognize the name Guyana, it's probably the country's association with Jim Jones and his cult of followers who committed mass suicide in 1978 by drinking poison-laced juice.



I'll get more deeply into this aspect of the Guyana story as I go along. Over the next two months I hope to share some of my experiences from the Guyana trip. In the July/August 2010 issue of Bird Watcher's Digest a "Far Afield" article by Julie Zickefoose will recount her experiences in Guyana on a trip similar to mine. I hope to have some additional images, videos, and perhaps a podcast from Guyana to share...

For now, let me share the very start of my trip with you.

Our flight left JFK Airport in New York City just after midnight and flew south-southeast to the northern rim of South America. The dark and orange image above is dawn's early light over the Atlantic Ocean not too long before we landed.

Once on the ground, as we walked across the tarmac to the Cheddi Jagan International Airport outside of Georgetown, the heat was palpable—even at 7:30 am. Inside, while waiting for the luggage to arrive, I noticed signs that Guyana was already aware of its status as a bird-watching destination.

An advert for a cellular phone company featured the harpy eagle! And identified it properly! Bonus points!

Moments later we met our leaders: Michael McCrystal from Wilderness Explorers and Kirk Smock from Carana Corporation, two companies that work with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Guyana Tourism Authority (GTA) to coordinate Guyana's tourism promotion. They whisked us onto the mini-bus and off to our hotel for breakfast and a welcome briefing.


Since it had been a mostly sleepless night on the airplane, the bright sunshine, heavy heat and humid air made things seem quite dreamlike. As I dragged my far-too-heavy bags up to my room, the urge to collapse onto the bed was hard to resist. Instead, I grabbed my binocs and scanned the ocean from my window: black and turkey vulture, magnificent frigatebird, great egret, some sort of large raptor on the sandflats (later ID'd as a rufous crab hawk), osprey, great kiskadee, tropical mockingbird... not too bad for a three-minute scan.

Breakfast and buckets of coffee helped me shake the trance a bit. Little did I know that the sleep deprivation would only get worse over the next 12 days as we got up early morning after morning to beat the heat and get out birding. I think I'm still catching up on sleep a week later...

After breakfast we got back on the mini-bus and headed out for a boat ride on the Mahaica River. This trip, done in the late afternoon heat, had plenty of birds, but most of them we flushed as we drove along with the motors roaring. So the looks were a bit fleeting and the photography frustrating. Still, this was our first taste of Guyana's birds (second if you count the eggs we'd had for brekky) and it whetted our appetites.

Next post: Mahaica River highlights and Chinese Food.