Chile: Tierra del Fuego to the Atacama Desert

A fascinating collection of birds coupled with some of the most spectacular scenery on earth makes birding in Chile a superb experience. This narrow strip of territory, 150 miles wide by 2,500 miles long, is a land of immense variety and beauty: from the grandeur of wave-dashed Pacific beaches to the solitude of high Andean lakes, and from the rolling plains of Tierra del Fuego to the utterly barren Atacama, the most perfect of deserts. Traveling the length (and breadth) of the country impresses upon one the remarkable similarities of climate, vegetation and topography, not to mention convergent evolution, between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Our tour of Chile is the equivalent of going from southeastern Alaska to southwestern Mexico! Birders today can thank Goodall, Johnson, Millie, and Philippi, who brought to the fore our knowledge of Chile’s avifauna through their extensive field work from the 1920s through the 1950s. The triumphs and failures of this pioneering work are conveyed in Johnson’s classic Birds of Chile, now sadly out of print. Their work showed that Chile has a bird list combining high quality and high visibility. The avifauna ranges from penguins, rheas, flamingoes and a superb selection of southern waterfowl and shorebirds to 30 species of ovenbirds (furnariids), eight tapaculos (three of them endemic), nine sierra-finches, and five siskins.

Our tour coincides with the austral spring, when bird activity is at its height, and is designed to take in all the major regions of this diverse land. Chile is throughout a safe and friendly country in which to travel, and has an excellent infrastructure for tourism.