We said goodbye to Nick last night and also to our big Sprinter and downsized to a perfectly adequate SUV. Today we drove up to the Valle Nevada ski centre following the Mapocho River.
Our first stop was on the outskirts of Santiago where Chilean tinamous were known to live. While we heard them, we were unable to coax them out.
This interesting house was perched on the hill across from the road. Squatters?
We were, however able to call out the very agreeable mustached turca, the most sociable of the generally unsolvable tapaculos.
We also saw the very cute plain-mantled tit-spinetail, and a bunch of typical Chilean birds like the eared dove.
Further up the road
we stopped for a white-sided hillstar feeding on a flowering bush
Lifer!
And an Austral pigmy-owl, a distinct species from the Peruvian pygmy-owl we saw up north and our North American pygmy owl.
Not the greatest photo but another Lifer!
Higher up yet we reached the vegas grasslands.
We saw three birders standing under a tree and stopped to find:
Lesser horned owl, lifer!
Then finally up to the ski area where sometimes Andean Condors hang out on the condominium balconies. Not today though.
But we did see condors flying, the rufous-banded miner, a black-fronted ground-tyrant building its nest,
Black-fronted ground-tyrant
a variable hawk,
and gray-hooded sierra finches.
We stopped again further down the mountainside for a scale-throated earthcreeper
Scale-throated earthcreeper
and a white-browed ground-tyrant.
White-browed ground-tyrant
Lastly we stopped here:
and spotted the Bird of the Day, a bird Leo and I have long wanted to find, an aplomado falcon, extirpated in the southern US (but now reintroduced in Texas).
Back in Santiago we headed for supper.
The barbecue place we meant to go to was closed so we went to a traditional Chilean restaurant where we both had pastel de chocle, which is like shepherd's pie but with a cornbread topping. We really liked it, and it wasn't a huge portion!
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