Our volunteers:
When we put out the call for volunteers for this, our first mini-guide project, we were a little unsure of how much of a response we were going to get! We were pleasantly surprised then when five volunteers signed up, their combined volunteer fees allowing us to be more ambitious with the fieldwork than we had previously planned.
Our volunteers were:
Hemme Batjes: A retired Dutch banker with a life-list of over 5000 species.
Derek Onley: An English ex-pat who has resided in New Zealand for the past 20 years. Derek is a professional bird artist who very generously offered to paint some plates for our mini-guide.
Regis Nossent: A Belgian biologist making only his second trip to South America.
Bryan Wainwright: An English birder on the first leg of a South American tour of undetermined length!
Sally Wechsler (September): A US birder with another massive life-list of over 3500!
HOTEL TIROL MINI-GUIDE PROJECT June and September 05
The aims:
Hotel Tirol in southern Paraguay boasts a small, isolated patch of Atlantic forest, a remnant of the majestic forests that once blanketed most of eastern Paraguay. An old list prepared mainly from the collections by the American Museum of Natural History in the late 70s and early 80s existed, but no thorough survey had been performed at Tirol since then. With the forest cover considerably depleted since those collections were made and no thorough survey of the site having been performed since, we wanted to produce a “modern list” for the area, combining all the data from occasional visits since 1997 (an arbitrary date chosen to coincide with the inception of Guyra Paraguay our partner organization) with our own observations. This would give us an idea of which species had survived the fragmentation of the forest, which ones had not, and which new species had benefited from the removal of the forest. The short week-long follow-up project in September enabled us to briefly survey the site after the arrival of the spring migrants.
The work:
With one of the aims of our mini-guides being to attract new birders to the hobby, Bryan and Hemme (as the most experienced volunteers) were assigned to perform “visibility censuses”. These censuses were designed to discover which species are the most easily seen, and hence the most likely to be encountered by novice birders. Each evening a list of the birds recorded with approximate numbers observed was collated over a cool beer. Derek took the opportunity to take field sketches of the birds, Regis, in addition to picking up the birds and their calls extremely rapidly, took some incredible photos of the bird and insect life of the forest, many of which now decorate this web-site!
The results:
We recorded 170 species during the fieldwork of which 11 had not previously been recorded at Tirol (worryingly 8 of these new species could be considered open-country rather than forest birds). A further sixteen species that had not been recorded since 1997 were located. The modern list for Tirol now stands at 189 species. We obtained morphometric and detailled plumage data from a total of 44 different species. To read the full report of the fieldwork follow the link at the top of the page or you can click here.
What the volunteers said:
Regis Nossent - "Being only my second visit to South America, Paraguay offered me the chance to discover a lot of new tropical birds. And for someone who comes from Belgium, the bird diversity is absolutely astonishing. Paraguay is a fantastic country with very friendly people and an incredible wildlife - well worth visiting. Many thanks to everybody for this lifetime opportunity!"
Designed by Paul Smith 2006. This website is copyrighted by law.
Material contained herewith may not be used without the prior written permission of FAUNA Paraguay.
Photographs on this web-site were taken by Paul Smith, Hemme Batjes, Regis Nossent,
Alberto Esquivel, Arne Lesterhuis, Rebecca Zarza and Hugo del Castillo and are used with their permission.
