Birding Without Borders Read online

  5

  The Harpy

  BY LATE JANUARY, the days had begun to speed up and blur into each other. After leaving Freddy and amigos in Jujuy, my plan was to blitz through northeast Argentina, then spend the next three weeks racing through the birdiest parts of Brazil with a relay of excellent local contacts.

  In Argentina I joined up with a gung-ho birder named Guy Cox to rattle around the Misiones province in his newly acquired 1974 Chevy camper van. Our meeting was slightly delayed on account of a broken drive shaft that had to be fixed, which gave me a morning to explore the spectacular Iguazu Falls, a two-mile-wide cataract best described as “Niagara on Viagra,” as well as Iguazu’s specialty bird species—a flock of Great Dusky Swifts that nest behind the falls. Then Guy and I trundled down red dirt roads to the nearby San Sebastian de la Selva forest reserve, a little-known gem where we ditched the hordes of tourists and found ourselves surrounded instead by tropical birds: antshrikes, antvireos, antwrens, antthrushes, antpipits, antpittas, and ant-tanagers.

  At last, I’d reached the tropics, complete with unrelenting heat and humidity, cloying mud, brightly colored macaws, all manner of vines and fronds, titi monkeys . . . and ants. The northeast corner of Argentina forms the western boundary of a wet, muggy jungle called the Atlantic Rainforest, which stretches in a narrow belt 2,500 miles along the coast to eastern Brazil. The forest is isolated by dry savannas to the north, so it’s a hotspot for endemic plants and animals: more than 150 species of Atlantic Rainforest birds are found nowhere else. Unfortunately, it is also one of the world’s most degraded environments, and virtually all of the Brazilian section of the forest has been chopped down. A system of reserves protects the Argentinian side, which means that while historically only 4 percent of this forest was outside of Brazil, today about 50 percent of what’s left of it is in Argentina.

  Guy and I prowled the jungle, looking and listening for specialty birds. With Guy’s local knowledge and incredible ear, we found many, including a gleaming blue-black-green-red Surucua Trogon on January 22 that marked my first big milestone—the 500th bird of the year. Only 4,500 to go.

  I said adiós to Guy, then crossed the Brazilian border by taxi and flew onward to São Paulo. Brazil was a key strategic stop, but as a United States citizen, it was not easy for me to get in because of an ongoing visa spat. In most countries I got tourist visas, for a fee, online or upon arrival. But to enter Brazil, U.S. citizens must procure a travel visa ahead of time at a Brazilian consulate, which entails showing up at an appointed time with a completed application form, extra photo, valid passport, copy of a round-trip ticket, and U.S. Postal Service money order for the full price (no cash or check). This is all payback for the United States government’s tightening its visa requirements for Brazil and other nations in 2001. Of the many visas I had to get, the one for Brazil was by far the most complicated and expensive. In the end, I had to buy a second passport and hire the specialists at VisaHQ to sort out the visa morass. I would shell out more than $2,000 on visas during the year.

  In Brazil I hooked up for a couple days of birding with Guto Carvalho, a birder and film producer who sold his production house several years ago to focus on special projects and conservation. Guto used to commute to Hollywood and New York to work on special effects for commercials and films. Now he travels around South America to give talks about birds, runs the annual Brazil Bird Fair, organizes regional bird fairs in other states, and operates a small editorial house that publishes nature and photography books. He had recently wrapped an animated TV series about sustainability and would be off in a couple of weeks to northern Brazil to work on a book about Amazonian bird life. Partly because of a dedicated core of birders and conservationists like Guto, a grassroots birding culture is rapidly growing in Brazil.

  “Ten years ago there were almost no birders in Brazil,” he told me as we left behind the lights of São Paulo near midnight, “but now we have lots of them around the country.”

  Guto and I visited Intervales State Park, one of the last significant remaining patches of Atlantic Rainforest. There, with the help of park guide Luis Avelino—who called out bird names in Latin—we saw more than 120 species in one exceptional day. At dinner that evening, it struck me that birding had brought together a very unlikely trio: a Brazilian film producer (Guto), a rural forest guide (Luis), and a twenty-eight-year-old bird man from Oregon (me). None of us would have had any other reason to know each other, and Luis spoke only Portuguese, yet we connected instantly and effortlessly with our shared interest in birds.

  Guto passed me on to René Santos, a thirty-four-year-old birder also from São Paulo, who had a Spix’s Macaw tattooed on his left shoulder, and the phrase “Extinction Is Forever” written in Portuguese on the spare tire of his seventeen-year-old Jeep. Tall and athletic, a disciple of surfing and the Brazilian martial art form of capoeira, René took me up the coast to the island of Ilhabela—literally, “beautiful island”—where we stayed at a friend’s house and walked for hours through the hot, sticky lowland forest, searching for a few final regional endemics. Seeing a near-threatened Spot-breasted Antvireo was almost as sweet as the celebratory açaí ice cream, with sliced bananas and honey on top.

  René dropped me at the São Paulo airport with good wishes, and I winged north, looking forward to a change of scenery. In ten full days of birding with Guy, Guto, and René across various sections of the Atlantic Rainforest, I had slept in ten different places. My few clothes desperately needed a wash, sweated out from a week and a half of slogging through the moist and mucky jungle, but I had trouble mustering the energy even to rinse them in the sink. All these quick transitions from one spot to the next—driving late, arriving in the middle of the night, getting up in the dark to start birding at dawn—were wearing me out, and sleep took priority over laundry, which wouldn’t have dried anyway.

  I scheduled most of my travel segments during afternoons and evenings to preserve the precious morning hours for birding, but I had no idea whether this itinerary would be sustainable. Besides the lack of sleep, I had no downtime, no alone time, and no rest. Whenever I moved to a new place, a new local birder was ready to go, and the effect was like constantly swapping in fresh horses for the Pony Express. I had another eleven months to go. Could I keep this up? Should I pace myself more? The great benefit of going nonstop is that new sights, people, and birds are always ahead, and an exhilarating jolt comes with each transition. Despite experiencing some torpor in the tropics, I was glad I had planned one continuous journey because I enjoyed the rush and didn’t really want it to end. At this point, I was adjusting to the routine, relying more and more on the kinetic energy of new ground to keep me going. Increasingly, rest seemed to me a bad idea—it would break the flow, stop the roller coaster. Better to just keep riding.

  After almost a month on the run, things were going fantastically well. None of the things I most feared had happened. I had not been sick. There had been no serious logistical nightmares. None of the local birders had let me down. And I was racking up birds faster than I’d dared to hope. Despite the slow start in Antarctica, by January 29 I had recorded 617 species, well above the daily average needed to reach 5,000 by the end of the year. It was early days yet, but I could feel the Big Year momentum building. The sun seemed to be shining a new light on the world, and nothing could overshadow my happiness. Maybe it couldn’t last, but so far, so good.

  Then, upon landing in the city of Cuiabá in central Brazil, I received some unexpected and exciting news.

  ✧-✧-✧

  Deep in central Brazil, in the sprawling state of Mato Grosso near the Bolivian border, lies an obscure range of low mountains called Serra das Araras. The landscape here is squeezed between powerful forces. To the north, the Amazon—the world’s largest rainforest—runs all the way to Guyana and eastern Ecuador. To the south and east is the Cerrado, an interior plateau about the size of Greenland, with tropical savannas to rival the wide-open vistas of east Africa. And
to the west, the famous Pantanal floods a seasonal wetland the size of Spain. The headwaters of the Paraguay River trickle down from the Serra das Araras; follow the flow and you’ll drift 1,700 miles across the Pantanal and into Argentina, merge with the Paraná River, and continue another lazy eight hundred miles to the Atlantic Ocean somewhere north of Buenos Aires.

  West-central Brazil is a long way from anywhere, and amid this trifecta—Amazon, Cerrado, and Pantanal—the Serra das Araras doesn’t get much attention from foreigners. The escarpment isn’t dramatically scenic or touristy, though you can stay at a small Brazilian inn called a pousada with a spa and cozy rooms next to grazing cattle and a limestone mine. It’s sizzlingly hot and sticky, and the access highway from Cuiabá, the nearest big city, has so much heavy truck traffic that the pavement resembles hardened Conestoga wagon ruts.

  As darkness fell, I bumped down this road with Giuliano Bernardon, a young bird guide, and his sister Bianca, a biologist visiting from the north Brazilian province of Amazonas. They had picked me up after I touched down in Cuiabá on a late afternoon flight. Once we crossed the city limits, the highway ran straight as a parrot can fly. The landscape was flat, flat, flat, and it was crowded with trucks, trucks, trucks. Roadside tire shops popped up every couple of miles, evidently doing brisk business owing to the many potholes and ruts. After sunset we were left in a jarring, terrifying tunnel of oncoming headlights and black holes, and I was relieved when Giuliano decided to stop in the tiny town of Jangada for dinner and a few hours of sleep. We had originally planned to head straight for the Pantanal, but when Giuliano met me at the airport he had some good news.

  “There is an active Harpy Eagle nest at Serra das Araras!” he said, before we’d even made it across the parking lot. “It isn’t exactly on the way—more of a side trip—but we can be there at dawn tomorrow.”

  Giuliano wore a broad smile, dark beard, and mustache, and was outfitted in loose layers of khaki and a wide-brimmed hat. He explained that some visiting birders had confirmed a female sitting on the nest just a few days before, so we had a good chance of staking out the elusive eagle. It might be only one species for my Big Year total, but it was worth spending an extra morning for a chance to see the most powerful raptor in the Western Hemisphere.

  Three feet tall, with a seven-foot wingspan and weighing up to twenty pounds, the Harpy is a Sherman tank with fighter-jet wings. Early South American explorers named this bird after the Harpies of Greek mythology—ravenous beasts with a bird’s body and a woman’s face, sent by Zeus to snatch people off the face of the Earth—and the comparison is apt. Harpy Eagles prey mainly on monkeys and sloths, plucked unceremoniously from treetops, and can take down red brocket deer and other large rainforest animals, given the chance. To do so, they have evolved enormous talons, longer than the claws of a grizzly bear, and powerful legs as thick as a child’s wrist. Females are nearly twice the size of males, as with most of the world’s eagle species.

  These creatures are stunning to behold, with large crests and bold black-and-white plumage, and have no trouble speeding through a dense canopy at fifty miles per hour, exploding onto their targets in a burst of speed and raw power. Monkeys have learned to let go when they see a Harpy Eagle coming, preferring to drop like a stone to the forest floor rather than confront such a fearsome predator at canopy level, but by then it’s usually too late. Harpies are masters of surprise and disguise, adapted to close combat in jungle environments. They are the ultimate avian predator.

  Harpies are also quite rare, as they need large tracts of intact forest in which to live and breed. One pair generally requires several thousand acres of pristine rainforest, which is hard to come by. Habitat loss has threatened the species throughout most of its historic range, from southern Mexico to northern Argentina, and Harpies are now found in appreciable numbers only in the wildest parts of the Amazon basin, including northern Brazil.

  Even in the most untouched, remote forests, Harpies are exasperatingly difficult to glimpse. They have evolved cryptic behaviors, skulking through the canopy rather than soaring overhead, in order not to spook potential prey—which means you either need to get extremely lucky to spot one or stake one out at a nest.

  While we ate fried sandwiches at an open-air food cart in Jangada, surrounded by hungry truckers, Giuliano explained that the Harpy Eagle nest at Serra das Araras has been used for about twenty years, since the mid-1990s. Many birders have seen their first wild Harpy at this site. The eagles take two years to raise their chicks, and the nest is used irregularly—at most once every other year. A few other nests are scattered elsewhere in Brazil, but the birds aren’t always present, and none of the others seemed to be active during my visit. So this would be my only real chance for a view of the near-mythical bird.

  Giuliano and Bianca checked us into a small hotel and, with a brief boa noite, left me in my room with instructions to be ready at 4:45 A.M. for the eagle search. I dropped my backpack in a corner, sat on the bed, and switched on the TV. It had only a few stations, all in Portuguese, and I couldn’t understand much. As I pulled out my laptop, propped up on a pillow, and typed some notes for the day, a Brazilian newscast droned in the background.

  It felt strange to be touring the world and yet to be so detached from it. In the previous week, unknown to me, the president of Yemen had resigned, people were massacred in Nigeria, Swiss banks caused turmoil in the financial markets, the U. S. Senate approved the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, and the Ebola crisis escalated in West Africa. Before leaving home a month earlier I’d paid close attention to the global news, sensing that I’d soon be out there inside the headlines. But the reality was just the opposite: here in a tiny village in central Brazil, the news felt very far away indeed. Now that I was actually traveling the planet, each day deepening my connection with its great wealth of birds and birders, the media stories seemed to apply to some completely different universe—one in which I had no part. The time I spent searching for each bird was so intense—heightened by the knowledge that I would soon leave and move on—that it seemed to swallow up all the available space. Disoriented, I gradually fell into a restless sleep of uneasy dreams.

  When my alarm went off several hours later, it took a minute to adjust to my surroundings. Then I remembered: Harpy day! I grabbed my backpack, stumbled out the door into the dark, and met Giuliano and Bianca. We threw our gear in the truck and drove toward the eagle stakeout, ready for action.

  In light traffic at 4:45 A.M., we made efficient time, arriving at Serra das Araras just after dawn. The rutted pavement gave way to dirt, then disappeared entirely into a grassy cow pasture. Giuliano carefully picked out a parking spot amidst the cows and cowpats, and led the way on foot for the last few hundred yards.

  Birds were everywhere among the clearings and forest patches as the sun rose. Lettered Aracaris, a type of small, colorful toucan, played hide-and-seek among the foliage, while Yellow-tufted Woodpeckers chased each other in playful circles around a snag. A dark Bat Falcon, no bigger than a flying beer bottle, streaked overhead. Thrush-like Wrens chattered noisily from the thickets, a Blue-headed Parrot admired the view from the top of a tall tree, and a Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl called from a distance. Almost every bird was new for my year list, this being my first morning in central Brazil, but they were all common species I expected to see again in the coming weeks. I had one target here and, as the moment arrived, I could barely contain my excitement.

  A massive tree materialized in front of us. About two-thirds of the way up, in a three-way fork in the trunk, I beheld a nest the size of a Volkswagen bus—a platform of sticks big enough for me to lie down inside, had it not been inhabited by one of the world’s most ferocious creatures. These eagles had built themselves a magnificent fortress in the sky. I raised my binoculars, focused on the spot, and saw, poking above the rim of the nest . . .

  Nothing. No Harpies.

  This was obviously the right spot, but where were the eagles?

  “
Hmmm,” said Giuliano, after a minute of steady inspection. “Bianca, do you see anything?”

  “Nope,” she replied. “All I see is the nest.”

  The three of us stared upward. Birds twittered and sang all around us, but we were focused only on the one that wasn’t home.

  “They were here last week,” said Giuliano, looking perplexed. “A group of birders stopped here and reported the female sitting on the nest, and even watched the male fly in with some food. So it has to be active. Let’s try a different angle—maybe she’s in there right now but is sitting too low so we can’t see her.”

  We edged around the tree, maintaining an equal radius from its trunk, until we reached the opposite side. No eagles, though the nest itself, from this new angle, was still impressive enough. Imagine building a treehouse, piece by piece, without being able to use your arms! What a load of work.

  “Hmmm,” Giuliano repeated. “They must be around here somewhere. Let’s wait awhile and see if one of the eagles turns up. Maybe they’re out getting breakfast.”

  For one of these birds, popping out for breakfast would likely mean murdering a monkey—an indelicate thought, barbarous even. Did they ever wake up and reflect on this stuff?

  We settled down on a fallen log to wait. Giuliano and Bianca sat next to each other in matching outfits: pastel green shirts, field pants, knee-high rubber boots, and sun hats. Giuliano, as a full-time bird guide, knew this site well and seemed completely at ease as he kept up a pleasant banter about birds, culture, and food. Bianca, meanwhile, had just traveled down from northern Brazil, where she worked as a bird researcher in the Amazon rainforest, and her eyes lit up every time a new species was spotted. Brother and sister picked off one sighting after another, and I scrambled to keep up.