Andean Giants (PERU, 1 Oct.)

I arrived in Lima, Peru the day before and was quickly connecting with a flight to the southern city of Cusco. In the evening we dropped in at Barry Walker's famous Cross Keys pub, with no sign of Barry anywhere save for the odd abandoned scope in various corners of this very British pub.

I was in Peru as a guest of ACCA, a Peruvian arm of ACA (Amazon Conservation Association http://www.amazonconservation.org/), who have various biological stations in the region. Myself and WINGS guide Rich Hoyer were invited to see three of these and comment and advise on how these may be developed for bird tourism. This gave me my first views of Peru, even though I had been living "next door" in Ecuador for the past seven years or so. Our first ACCA property was to be Wayqecha station, (http://www.acca.org.pe/espanol/investigacion/wayqecha/area_wayqecha.html) positioned in high altitude cloudforest on the Manu Road. However, we had a long drive before we would get there, and many birds to see en-route. We decided to make a stop at Huacarpay Lakes, en route in the hope of an endemic, and gorgeous Peruvian endemic, the Bearded Mountaineer. While searching the tobacco bushes for these Andean beauties, we were distracted time and again by an abundance of Giant Hummingbirds present in the area at the time. This hummingbird always shocks me. Being used to seeing hummingbirds in my Andean home in Ecuador, I am used to them being flitting, dashing beauties, darting excitedly from bush to bush in a blur of high speed wings. However, the Giant Hummingbird is a very different animal indeed. The World's largest hummingbird it weighs in at around 24 grams or 8.5 ounces, around twice the weight of an American Goldfinch, and eight times the weight of the familiar Ruby-throated Hummingbird of North America. In length it is also notable too, at almost 9 inches or 23 centimeters being larger than an Eastern Bluebird or a Red-winged Blackbird, and almost three times the size of North America's Ruby-throated Hummer. Thus when this bird flies there is not the familiar blur of wings, and a motion that is hard for human eyes to keep track of. Rather the wings flap deeply and deliberately in clear strokes clearly discernible to our eyes and brains. Indeed this starling-sized hummingbird often does not strike as such at all, with its labored movements and unimaginable size when compared to most others in this diminutive family. We enjoyed watching this particular individual as compensation for the missing mountaineer, while a Many-colored Rush-Tyrant, another oddity that bucks the trend and reputation of all flycatchers being dowdy creatures, vied for our attentions at the lake edge behind...

More from the land of the Incas on the way...