Wespent a day birding south of the Isthmus, just a short drive out of Mapastepec. A short way down a road with scattered trees, farm houses and agricultural land we found a pair of the biggest wrens on Earth, the lone endemic to Chiapas state, Giant Wren (see bottom photo). The same area also held our first Spot-breasted Orioles. Laterin the morning we also found a few Prevost’s Ground-Sparrows, Yellow-winged Tanagers and a nice male Rose-throated Becard. However, one of the best displays of the day was left until late on when we found a lek area for a couple of impressively ‘endowed’ male Long-tailed Manakins (see top photo), when two males ‘danced’ for us.
A pair of tits (Blue and Great) in a London park 30 years back changed my life; I became a birder, and an obsessive birder by the following weekend. Works like Bill Oddie's Little Black Bird Book and Richard Millington's A Twitcher's Diary helped in no small part to nurture this in my formative years.
30 years on I am still an avid birder but have also learnt to appreciate other sectors of the natural world, especially frogs and primates in particular, through the undoubted influence of David Attenborough The Great and others. I now work as a full-time professional tour leader for Tropical Birding Tours, and now reside in the Andes of Ecuador. I love my job, sharing birds with people provides every bit of a buzz as a lifebird, which, of course, still creates a wave of excitement every time. I have been lucky enough to see well over 6550 bird species on my travels, which does not make me any more talented than anyone else, just one that is always greedy and impatient for more, which has taken me to all seven continents, and always yearning for that ONE...MORE...B-I-R-D!
I use Swarovski binoculars & scope, & shoot with Canon 7D and Canon 400m f5.6L lens.
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What happened at the end of paragraph - see (if.......endif) note??
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