Backcountry Birding

The plane landed at about 5am local time, and I groggily made my way through immigration and customs. On the plane I had met an architecture student from El Salvador; he was on the way back from christmas break as he studies at the University of La Plata (45 minute drive from the Buenos Aires city center). He was very kind to let me share an Uber since my hostel was right on the route to La Plata, but we had to wait a bit at the airport since it was still only 6:00am. When I got to the hostel we swapped WhatsApp contacts and said goodbye. I stashed my luggage in the closet and since my room wasn’t yet ready I headed out on the town.

My hostel is just a few blocks from a HUGE nature reserve called Costanera del Sur, which is a 350-ha (860-acre) wetland right next to the ritzy Puerto Madero district. In my hungry, sleep-deprived daze I walked through the skyscrapers towards the birding spot. It kind of hit me at this point just how enormous the city actually is. Later I looked it up and the greater metropolitan area is home to about 15 million people. That’s about 2.5 times the population of Atlanta.

At the reserve I started off seeing some very cool waterfowl, like Silver Teal (Cappucino Duck in Spanish):

And loads of striking Rosy-billed Pochards, Picasso’s Duck in Spanish:

I walked a little further and met some birders, Gonzalo and Catalina, who were extremely kind to humor this US birder and point out some of the things they were seeing. I quickly realized that I was going to have to learn the Spanish names for birds; I asked them and yeah, nobody uses the scientific or English names for the species down here. Definitely makes sense and it will be a fun challenge to learn! I switched my Merlin app to Argentinian Spanish and that’s been helping a lot. A few more steps down the walking path and we got to see a Southern Screamer with its chicks foraging in some floating vegetation:

I explained a bit about my project and that I was hoping to meet some local birders. Gonzalo grinned and said “How lucky are you, this Saturday the Buenos Aires bird club will be doing the quarterly census of the wetlands here. You should come along!”

What an offer! I was overjoyed and very grateful that he would invite a foreigner to such a cool event. We said Chiau and I walked to the closest grocery store and had my first Argentinian meal: a pre-made chicken sandwich, a bag of chips and a handful of chocolate bars from the checkout counter. Absolutely starving! Feeling a little better with a flood of sugar in my system I walked over to a market district to change money at the informal exchange rate. Here’s the briefest possible explanation:

Argentina has experienced quite a bit of inflation over the past few years, and the exchange rates are all over the place. There is an official exchange rate (about 200 pesos to the dollar) that you’ll get if you take out money at an ATM, and a black-market rate (360-380 pesos to the dollar) that you can get by changing money with a street vendor or Western Union. So everything in Argentina is cash for me from here on out.

The birding event was GREAT. About 40 birders met up in the morning at the park entrance, and split into 5 groups with different routes to walk. I joined route 5 with Gonzalo and his friends. Over about 5 hours we saw 84 species (eBird Checklist), bringing the number of lifers I’ve got for Argentina to 45! In just two mornings of birding! It’s like a different world down here.

I definitely felt like I was almost at home at a Georgia Audubon bird walk or a christmas bird count. It was really great to meet so many birders (some my age as well) and to see such an incredible birding spot that’s just a few minutes’ walk from the homes of thousands of people (and within a bus ride for probably well over a million). Imagine if Central Park in New York City was the size of a National Wildlife Refuge.

I was able to help with the count a bit since one of the most-wanted birds was Cliff Swallow, usually not seen near the coast in Argentina. Since they’re so common in Georgia I had the advantage of being able to pick the 1-2 cliff swallows out of the cloud of 50+ Brown-chested Martins and White-rumped Swallows. Definitely felt good to be at least a little useful, but obviously I was completely lost with most of the other species… here are some pictures of the four most unusual swallows we saw, 3 of which are fairly common in most of the US!

Another cool part was getting to see the Argentinian Flag butterfly, a pale blue subspecies of Morpho that’s only really found along the coast here around Río de la Plata. It’s the southernmost-occurring Morpho (range map from iNaturalist here), Morpho epístrophus argentinus. It was cool to see that almost all of the birders were equally excited to see these butterflies around the reserve, as there’s been a big effort to restore their host plants to appropriate sites around the trails. A few years ago, I’m told, they were nearly impossible too see. The efforts have definitely been successful; we saw dozens over the course of the day floating through the mid-level vegetation and around the planted Coronilla (Scutia boxifolia) host plants. Their floppy, unpredictable flight pattern has done two things: earned them the colloquial name “Borracha” or ‘drunk’, and stopped me from getting a picture of one in flight!

In the afternoon I got a picture of a Crested Caracara perched on Luis Viale’s head! There’s not really an explanation of the monument in English, so if you translate this Wikipedia page that might be your best bet. It’s a remarkable story, definitely worth a read!

I’ve been in BA for several days now waiting on responses to emails, eating dozens of empanadas, and enjoying the city. Once I got over the bit of culture shock going straight from living on a beach in Costa Rica to a continental metropolis, I started to really like the atmosphere down here. The food is super affordable (big meals for $2-3, and a bottle of fantastic Malbec costs about $1.50) and there are tons of things to do. I didn’t really stay in any community-based hostels in CR, but Puerto Limón Hostel has been great, everyone has been in the common area and I’ve made quite a few friends! We went out to a restaurant and I tried Morcilla (Argentinian Black Pudding) which has a lot more bacon bits included to change the texture drastically from the Black Pudding I’m used to in Scotland.

I’m here for a couple more nights and then I’m off to Patagonia by bus before it gets too cold!