The Brazil Pics Continue…

Estabrook Park eluded me again today, but I believe you know the drill by now.

On our last day at Dolphin Lodge, we visited another nearby family, and this one had befriended a white-throated toucan (Ramphastos tucanus) so that it stuck around. Thus, I was finally able to get a portrait of this amazing creature.

Also in that yard, I finally got a nice clean shot of a bird I had tried repeatedly and in vain to capture on the wing. The bright yellow on its face means that it is neither a black vulture nor a turkey vulture, both of whom we have already seen in North America, but instead is a greater yellow-headed vulture (Cathartes melambrotus) or a lesser yellow-headed vulture (Cathartes burrovianus), who do not come north of Mexico

We’d been seeing these cuties, white-winged swallows (Tachycineta albiventer), swooping just above the water surface ever since we arrived a Dolphin Lodge, but I wasn’t able to get a decent picture until the last day.

As we were returning from our last boat excursion, and the sun was getting low in the sky, so around 5:30pm, I got crazy lucky to spot this yellow-tufted woodpecker (Melanerpes cruentatus) on the dark side of a dead tree trunk. Fortunately, by then, the guides were familiar with my shenanigans, and so they quickly slowed the boat and gently drifted us toward the bird so I could get this image, which is good enough for a positive ID. Woo Hoo! Our first woodpecker.

At some point on that last day, I found this tiny mystery hummingbird taking a sun bath, and it never moved enough for me to see any more of its plumage. The best google image search can suggest is a couple of birds that are native to Asia and have never been sighted in South America. Oh well. “Your secret is safe with us, Sweetie.”

Thankfully, this bird, a yellow-rumped cacique (Cacicus cela), is easy to identify by its jet-black plumage with bright yellow highlights. They stay up high in trees and move fast, however, so it wasn’t until the guides found a colony of nests, characteristically installed near a big wasps’ nest, that I was able to get this picture.

Eventually our time at Dolphin Lodge came to an end, and on the trip back to Manaus, which required 4 boats and 4 automobiles, we saw a great egret (Ardea alba), …

my first ever snowy egret (Egretta thula), close cousin to the little egret we saw in Slovenia, and …

my very first anhinga (Anhinga anhinga), which I thought at first was a cormorant drying its wings, as we’ve seen the do in Estabrook, but then I zoomed in and saw the light brown neck and head. Cool. I read that they are also called snakebird, darter, American darter, or water turkey, and anhinga comes from “the Brazilian Tupi language and means ‘devil bird’ or ‘snake bird'”, which is said to come from the fact that “only the neck appears above water” when they swim “so the bird looks like a snake ready to strike.”

Before we say goodbye to the Dolphin Lodge, here’s one more visitor to the dining hall screen, one of the leafwing butterflies, genus Zaretis, but I really can’t tell which one.

And from a shrub out in the yard, a Sara longwing (Heliconius sara), probably.