Texas Forest Stewardship award

Texas Forest Stewardship award
In 2007 we received a Texas Forest Stewardship award. L-R; Susan Sander, Sherry Collins, Clay Bales, Tom Collins

Sunday, November 15, 2015

CHILE BIRDING TOUR



Well we just returned from a 21 day adventure in Chile - birds, mammals, and earthquakes.  Chile has 450 species of birds, there were about 252 species we did not have on our list.  At the end of the tour we had seen 157 species of those 252, not bad as our target was 150 species based on the past trip lists.
We had a fairly good mammal list too and an earthquake that measured 6.8 at about 4:30am on our first couple of days in country.  We fly on 4 different internal flights, road on 4 different boats/ferries and several thousand kilometers on various tour busses.  There were 12 participants and two leaders.  Our primary leader, Peter Burke drew about half of the color plates in our Chile field guide.  He autographed it and drew a picture of one of the birds she liked on the same page.

Highlights, other than the earthquake, were 3 life species of each of the following - Flamingoes, Penguins, and Albatrosses.   Plus one of the rarest hummingbirds in the world and one of the most difficult Plovers to reach in the world.