Saturday, Oct 2 - In Search of the Three-Toed Jacamar

We all piled into the van at 6:30 this morning. The sky looked hazy but clear. We drove through Nova Friburgo once again, but heading off in a northwesterly direction into farmland at about 3000’ elevation. We were standing on the roadside watching a pair of lovely Streamer-tailed Tyrants flying acrobatically, landing on wires when I discovered that I was standing on an ant hill and little stinging ants were flowing into my shoe and through my socks. I tore off my shoe and socks and tried beating them on the pavement to no avail…each little ant had to be picked out of my shoes and disentangled from my thick socks…meanwhile I’m missing great birds!
We found a tiny Yellow-lored Tody Tyrant building a nest and I got a photo. We also discovered a small dead porcupine on the highway which we think might be a Orange-spined Hairy Dwarf Porcupine with a prehensile tail!


We stopped several more times before ending up at a roadside café overlooking a vast rolling pastureland where John found a nesting pair of Red-legged Seriemas which stand about 35” high and rather resemble the Secretary Bird of Africa. We bought Guarama Antarctica (guava flavored) sodas as the day was getting warm. The plan had been to make a large loop trip today, ending with a search for the rare Three-toed Jacamar. But Cirilo had found out that the connecting road had been damaged from the rain in the past two days and so we had to detour for an hour and half which in the cramped van and warming weather was pretty uncomfortable. We finally stopped on a little country road with bare mud cliffs along side with small holes bored into them which turned out to be the jacamar nesting holes and there they were, a pair of 7” hummingbird-like birds with grey heads, black backs and white fronts…not too spectacular, but very rare and hard to see unless you know what mud wall to look for! The elevation was only about 900’ and the temperature was 94 and sticky. We ate our sandwiches and headed back to the Lodge.


More birding along the way so we didn’t arrive until 6:10 after seeing a total of 119 species for the day! Bob dashed into the shower and finally succeeded in getting a warm one. I grabbed a beer and raced out to the pool to try and download photos for Thursday and Friday’s blogs, dashed back in to have a cool shower and meet the others for dinner at seven: fired chicken, veggie and mayo salad with flan for dessert. It’s is difficult to use the computer in the dark with frogs and who knows what about and I managed to lose the photos and will try again tomorrow$@#@.

(pics:  Yellow-lored Tody Tyrant, Dusky-legged Guan, Streamer-tailed Tyrants)

Sunday is a big election day for Brazil and everyone has to vote by law so we’re just going to birds nearby and say out of the towns since the traffic might be fierce.