Lima

 Saturday November 5, 2022

Our flight arrived early (before 5am), immigration was very quick and our hotel is on the airport property, so we had quite a while to wait before the start of  our birding tour at 7:30.  We drove to three different areas south of Lima. Our first stop, the Villa Wetlands is a national park on the Pacific Ocean.  We walked around a lagoon and saw many species of shorebirds and ocean birds, as well as the beautiful rush-tyrant in the reeds. Our second stop was Pucusana, an active fishing village.  There we went out in a motorized skiff to see cormorants, terns, pelicans and  Humboldt penguins nesting on the rocky shoreline cliffs. We also saw an amazing number of sea lions — sunbathing, swimming, and porpoising all around our skiff.  The final location was a dirt road along a rather smelly polluted stream, but it is one of the few places near Lima that has natural vegetation (because of the stream) and we saw a hummingbird and some unusual songbirds there.

The most striking thing was how dry Lima is. It literally never rains here, although sometimes there is mist or fog. The combination of the cold Humboldt current from the south, and the rain shadow from the Andes to the east creates a temperate desert. All the water for this city of 10 million comes from rivers that flow down from the Andes to the east. Nothing grows (no shrubs, no grasses, let alone trees) unless a human irrigates the plant. Lima is right on the Pacific Ocean, and the original shoreline is very steep sandy cliffs. The city has reclaimed a lot of land from the ocean and uses it as park land, mostly for ball fields and beaches.

Pictured: Humboldt penguin, many-colored rush-tyrant, bran-colored flycatcher (rufescent sub-species), Peruvian pelican.