Northeast Brazil 10th December 2017 – 10th January 2018 Sjoerd Radstaak
[email protected] Introduction This trip report describes a four-week-trip to Northeast-Brazil, together with good friends Pieter van Veelen, Jelmer Poelstra and Lars Buckx. For three of us, it was our first time of proper birding in South-America. Only Jelmer had been in Ecuador, Peru and Colombia before, but never in this part of the continent. Sjoerd did visit NE Brazil in December 2018 again as a tour leader for BirdingBreaks.nl. Based on the high degree of endemism, combined with the fact many of these endemics are critically endangered, we decided to visit NE-Brazil. Also, it appears to be a good destination to become familiar with the bird families of South-America without getting overwhelmed by the number of species. While Brazil has always been a birder’s destination, the north-eastern part of the country has long been the forgotten corner of Brazil. However, more than 15 birds new to science have been described here over the last 20 years. Of those, the most famous is - of course - Araripe Manakin: only discovered in 1996 and first described in 1998. Even today avian (re)discoveries are ‘regular’ here, for example the discovery of Blue-eyed ground-Dove in 2016 – a species that was believed to be extinct, as it had last been seen in 1941! Others include Alagoas Foliage-Gleaner, Orange-bellied Antwren and Pinto’s Spinetail. Sadly enough, many of these newly described species and others are now critically endangered or even extinct – with Alagoas Foliage-Gleaner last seen in 2012.