Anne and I made it home safely this afternoon after a couple of wonderfully uneventful flights, and it appears that I will have no trouble getting back into Estabrook Park tomorrow morning. In the meantime, let me show you a few more sights from Nicaragua.
The river we were kayaking up on Saturday petered out into a wide-open soggy field, and when we arrived, it was full of ducks. A couple were the Muscovy ducks I already showed you, and the rest, dozens and dozens of them, were black-bellied whistling-ducks. Long-time readers may recall that we’ve already seen birds by that name in Brazil, but they don’t quite look the same. Well, it turns out that those were probably “South American adults (subspecies autumnalis)“, and the ones in Nicaragua were probably “northern juveniles (ssp. fulgens)“.
Another bird that we’ve already seen before, just this fall in Belize, is the roadside hawk, but this one at our lodge on Ometepe was way more accommodating and let me take a very nice portrait.
As I mentioned when I showed you the purple gallinule on Saturday, there were also common gallinules, which we have seen at Horicon, and they’re not quite as flashy as their purple cousins, but they are still pretty sharp looking birds, if you ask me.
I saw plenty of jacanas on this trip, and I just showed you one this fall, but that was an adult, so here’s a youngster, which I haven’t shown you since Brazil.
Finally, here’s one more butterfly from that hike we took on Sunday in search of petroglyphs: a Dyar’s or confused swallowtail (Battus ingenuus). In my picture, it sure looks like it has a long thin spar extending from its wingtip, which got me all excited, but my sources make no mention of such a thing, so perhaps it is just a stray strand of spider silk, or something like that. We may never know.
In closing, let me just say that Nicaragua exceeded all my expectations. The people are super friendly, the wildlife was amazing, the food was delicious, the driving was easy, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking to get off the beaten path a bit.
Signs of Life in Estabrook Park 
Many thanks for all the posts from this trip and your tireless efforts to keep up while on the ground there. I visted Nicaragua several times in the 1990s, but alas before my birding days – so thanks again for showing what I missed. I look forward to returning to your posts to take another closer look.
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