EcoLodge at Chaparri

Chaparri is a reserve in a "dry forest" in northern Peru, and is one (possibly only?) place where spectacled bears still exist.  It was pretty nice to go hiking where the air was dry!  This lodge has a rehabilitation center for the bears, to re-introduce them to the wild, and that's where we saw this year and half old female:

We actually saw a bear in the wild, also, but it was sleeping up in a tree, and the pictures I got just look like a very distant black blob on a branch.

This reserve has a variety of animals and birds, including foxes and peccaries, but unfortunately, I wasn't able to get any good pictures of those.  I did get a number of beautiful birds.  There's an endemic bird, a White-winged Guan, that is recovering in numbers, from near extinction.  It's the size of a turkey, and sounds like a helicopter when it's flying.

A burrowing owl seemed to pose on a hillside for me:

and a Peruvian pygmy owl just looked miffed that I was taking his picture:

The lodge had a dead tree near the dining area where they put out corn each day, so I could get some great shots of beautiful birds, like this White-tailed Jay:

Our accommodations there were quite rustic, to say the least:

but we slept amazingly well, probably due to all the hiking we did.  On our second day there, we hiked up into the hills surrounding the lodge, hoping to find wild bears, but without success.  This was a dry river bed that we spent an hour clambering over boulders, essentially going nowhere fast, and getting all hot and bothered:

Now we're headed back to Lima today, for our last two days in Peru.

Bye! (for now)