La Macarena, Colombia just held its first Bird Festival
Birding in La Macarena, Colombia (Photo: Niky Carrera Levy)
Our host, Chris, was invited to give a conference at the first-ever bird festival in La Macarena, Colombia. He found a passionate community of aspiring young birders, a remarkable array of habitats and ecosystems, and a few lifers.
La Macarena is a town and municipality in the Colombian department of Meta. The town is tiny, with around 5,000 people living in about ten-square blocks on the southern banks of the Guayabero River. It's also extremely isolated - there's minimal road access, and the vast majority of transport in and out is via tiny Cessna flights from Villavicencio or Bogota.
The tiny town of La Macarena, seen from the cockpit of our Cessna plane
La Macarena is famed for the nearby natural wonder of Caño Cristales, a shallow river running over the 1.2 billion-year-old quartzite rocks of the Serrania de La Macarena National Park. Between June and November, Macarenia clavigera and other endemic plants in the river bloom and take on a startling array of colors, particularly bright red. This remarkable coloration had led to Caño Cristales being nicknamed "River of Five Colors" or the "Liquid Rainbow."
Before La Macarena was known for its red rivers, it found fame in entirely unwelcome circumstances as a hotbed of activity for armed groups and even as part of a demilitarised zone during failed peace talks between FARC guerrillas at the turn of the century. Thankfully, in recent years and largely thanks to the 2016 peace process, La Macarena is safe to visit and attracts many tourists every year, all hoping to catch a glimpse of its famed red rivers.
Unfortunately, La Macarena sees precious few outside visitors outside of the tourism high season. With this in mind, the local government launched the first-ever La Macarena Bird Festival with help from regional governments, tourism departments, and local agencies. The goal of this exciting event was to highlight the enviable biodiversity of the region, its potential for birding tourism, and to engage local people with birds and birding as a hobby or even a career.
The unique plants and ecosystems of La Macarena provided a stunning backdrop to some excellent birding
I was invited to give a conference at the event and excitedly accepted. I'd never visited La Macarena before and was keen to meet the local birders and experience the unique mixture of tropical rainforest, dry forest, and savanna, which makes this region so singular within Colombia.
I wasn't disappointed on either front. What most stands out from my five days in La Macarena was the fervent local passion for birds and birding, particularly the large number of young naturalists who excitedly flocked to the conferences and birding trips in the hope of learning from expert birders and photographers. The opportunity to spend time with these passionate young birders was undoubtedly a highlight of the event for me. The future of birding in La Macarena is certainly in good hands.
The highlight of the Bird Festival was meeting young birders like Alejandro, who showed me my lifers Bearded Tachuri and Long-winged Harrier
I was in good company as well - other speakers included Fernando Ayerbe, the author of one of Colombia's best field guides; Luis Urueña of Manakin Nature Tours; Niky Carrera and Mauricio Ossa, who recently completed Colombia's first-ever 'Big Year'; the photographer Memo Gomez; expert sound recordist and advocate for birding accessibility and inclusion, Juan Pablo Culasso; and Gloria Lentijo, the Working Lands Strategy Director for Audubon Americas. A fun group to bird with and enjoy a few beers with at the end of the day!
The birding, like the company, was excellent. My birding trips included visits to lowland jungle, oxbow lakes, rivers, grassy savanna, and more. I recorded over 160 species throughout the event - not bad going when the birding was limited mainly to the morning. I typically don't expect to get many new birds during bird festivals. Most of the birding is with larger groups and a mix of hardcore and novice birders and even children, so getting four lifers was also a pleasant surprise.
And what lifers they were! The highlight was undoubtedly Bearded Tachuri (Polystictus pectoralis), a rare and poorly-known species for Colombia, which seemed surprisingly common in the grassy savanna outside the town. I also ticked off a large group of migratory Upland Sandpipers, a little group of bathing Plumbeous Seedeaters, and a gorgeous immature Long-winged Harrier quartering over the long grass at dusk. So my tentative goal of 1,400 species seen in Colombia by the end of 2022 remains a possibility: just 21 to go now!
Birding Fact: Upland Sandpipers (Bartramia longicauda) are often called ‘extreme migrants,’ since they have been recorded making non-stop flights that were >5,000 km in length and lasted up to 7 days. Some individuals have traveled up to 20,000 km per year, and they often cross major ecological barriers during their migrations, including oceans, high mountains, and large tropical forests.
The savanna where I saw Bearded Tachuri, Upland Sandpiper, Long-winged Harrier, and Plumbeous Seedeater
All in all, I can't speak highly enough of La Macarena for birding and ecotourism: there are so many habitats to explore and birds to see there in just a few days. Naturally, work remains to be done, particularly in terms of infrastructure. However, this event was partly conceived to inspire local people to continue developing birding tourism, so hopefully, this will continue to improve in years to come.
Anyone searching for a Colombian birding experience in a lesser-birded corner of the country, with a wonderful mixture of ecosystems and species, could do worse than look into birding in La Macarena.
