Our second full day on the river was even better than the first. Weather continued to be amazing with mild temps and sun.
The dark-headed morph of the Roadside Hawk tricked us several times throughout the day.
Solitary Black Cacique fly-by.
Rusty-collared Seedeater
Southern Beardless-Tyrannulet
A Masked Yellowthroat was only seen by a few of us and never cooperated for photos although if you use your imagination this should be diagnostic with the gray head and black mask barely visible behind the grass.
Pale-vented Pigeon
Great Black Hawk
Smooth-billed Anis
Yellow-chinned Spinetail
Yellow-chinned Spinetail speed blur.
Unicolored Blackbird - male.
The only Little Cuckoo of the trip!
Boat-billed Heron
Southern Screamer
And that is when we lucked into our best Jaguar sightings of the trip at about 8:30 in the morning on a beach that stopped for a bathroom break on the previous day. In fact these jaguars walked within steps of where I had peed the day before, a little scary to think about it and its amazing there are not more attacks in the area.
One Jaguar starting to come in to the beach where we idled only a stone's throw away.
Then as he/she looked back, another came in from the tall grass....
I pretty much lost my mind at this point.
I was and still am speechless.. Everything after that paled in comparison but I did my best to keep on birding.
Southern Rough-winged Swallow
We motored upriver later in the morning and checked some marshy areas that are sometimes good for shorebirds.
Yellowish Pipit
Collared Plover
Yellow-billed Tern
White-winged Swallow
On the way back to the floating hotel for siesta and lunch, we checked on the dead cow carcass from the day before and had more great looks at Jaguars.
Cooling off and trying to get away from the flies.
He went for swims, took some bites from the cow and then lazed about some.
As the one jaguar lazed about, he probably didn't smell this other one coming in because of the dead cow probably overpowered the scent.
Finally the darker jaguar noticed the lighter male and they had a fierce stand-down where the lighter male asserted his dominance but eventually allowed the darker male to stay with he carcass, not before marking the territory and sauntering off. I guess he wasn't hungry. With such a big kill, the males probably didn't think it was worth fighting over as everyone could get their fill. If it was a small caiman or capybara, the fight probably would have been more vicious.
After lunch/siesta, we headed out to some riverside gallery forests to look for some birds.
Piping-Guans showing some mixed parentage of the Red and Blue varieties.
Sunbittern!
I did manage a couple poor speed blur shots of the open wings.
Golden-crowned Warbler
Blue-crowned Trogon - sadly this was our best looks at this species that is really the only trogon in the area.
We were lucky enough to watch a couple Sunbitterns do their mating dance. Now that I have the R7 camera, I am looking forward to making some movies. This would have been a perfect opportunity.
Large-billed Tern
Large-billed Tern
Large-billed Tern chick!
Peach-fronted Parakeets
Green Ibis
Capybara
On the ride back to the hotel boat, I tried some shots of the birds flying by alongside the boat at high speed. This Striated Heron was one of the only ones that came out good.
Hard to imagine we were going 20 mph on a boat when I took this shot. Just goes to show, the more shots you attempt, the more times you will get a good one.
Cocoi Heron
White-throated Piping-Guan in eBird or Blue-throated in the guidebook.
I wish I took some photos of the hotel boat in retrospect. Gretchen got a bunch which I may pilfer later. The dinners were super good with chicken and beef and fish on offer most times. However, best of all were the Caipirinhas which are the national drinks of Brazil. They are sort of like Mojitos with even more lime.
I already want to go back. In fact I never wanted to leave.
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