Milestones...

Whilst in Argentina two important milestones were achieved. First to go was Steve's induction into manhood. Well, to be honest it's not as exciting as it sounds! At the beginning of the trip he needed a good few hundred species to make 2000 for his world list - lets face it anyone UNDER 2000 really IS a very small boy indeed! Anyhow he did it...and became a man, albeit a small one! And the rest, as they say, is history.

But he reached this great towering height with a very special bird. Indeed it was was one of MY very favorite birds of the whole trip - the incomparable Sandy Gallito featured above. The Gallito is a very unusual bird. It is a medium-sized, mostly terrestrial tapaculo that lives out it's life in a very distinctive habitat-type. The habitat is easy to spot. It is basically sand dunes interspersed with low shrubbery - here we go again, always the shrubbery I hear you say!! Now, the Gallito is easy to hear, and at times its distinctive series of "cho" notes seems to be all around, but can be devilishly hard to actually see. They run you see - and they can run very fast indeed! Also, the rather uniform plumage matches the sandy substrate incredibly well so often ones gets a glimpse of this sandy flash out of the corner of one's eye...and it's gone! We were lucky and, as a group, got some really nice looks at this super endemic.

Best of all though was that Steve found and photographed the very first one! Way to go "small man".



The other milestone notched-up was for "solid-as-a-rock" Darrell. He made it to the magical 4000 with the bird above - the lovely Rufous-chested Dotterel. I know for a fact that it was a bird he really really wanted to see - so three cheers for the Darrell Master General!! We only saw two, and they were foraging on the exposed mud around a small pool along the road to Cabo Virgenes, south of Rio Gallagos in Patagonia. The top bird is an adult and the lower a lovely crispy-fresh juvenile. This is a really lovely bird. The MM had only seen birds in non-breeding plumage before (in Chile) so it was a real treat to see a super bright adult AND a sharp-looking juvenile. This species breeds in southern Chile and Argentina and moves north as far as southern Peru and extreme SE Brazil in the austral winter.

As far as I know there were no other milestones reached on this trip. The rest of us just slogging away doing the best we could. I think for the MM though this trip took him pretty close to 2400 for South America, which is okay for now. Now I just have to get to Colombia, Bolivia, some key sites in central Amazonian Brazil and and and...