Forteleza and beyond

April 11

This morning we docked at Forteleza, the 4th largest city in Brazil and located on the eastern end of the northern coast. Forteleza was founded by the Portuguese as a sugar cane colony, then as a coffee economy, and finally in the 19th century a group of Dutch settlers moved in to revitalize the city. As with Salvador, there are beautiful historic buildings, some of which have been restored and others lost to new construction. We visited a handcrafts market housed in the original city jail.. a lovely building unlike most such structures in other cities. In the courtyard  we spotted a few Common Marmosets.

The main objective of the day was to go walking and birding in a park about 2.5 hours inland from the city. Northeastern Brazil is naturally dry, a climate called Cachinga that only gets rain about three months of the year. The name of the local state (Ceara) reflects the early Portuguese reaction to how dry the area was (Sahara).  Prior to the age of the glaciers, the area was a combination of Atlantic and Amazonian rain forests, but after the glaciers, isolated pockets of rainforest remained at higher elevations, surrounded by the drier Cachinga forests. This isolation has prompted the development of endemic species that only exist in the islands. We were able to see several today (4 bird species and a lizard) including a very rare parakeet. The gray-breasted parakeet had dwindled to only 500 birds worldwide, but local conservation efforts have increased the number to 2000. Birding maps have an arrow to a small dot as the only location for these parakeets, so seeing 14 of them at close range today was a treat. 

We had lunch at a former coffee plantation that is now a research institute for this unusual biome. The main building dates from 1884, and our delicious lunch of local specialties was cooked on a wood burning stove.  In its prime the plantation produced 72,000 pounds of arabica coffee per year, largely for export to France. Today the smaller coffee fields are all shade-grown varieties that contribute to the revitalization of the ecosystem.  We were very fortunate with the weather today; Forteleza had pouring rain yesterday, and it is the rainy  season, but the only rain we experienced was a brief squall as we were driving back in the late afternoon.  Shortly after we reboarded the ship, the Endurance left port to begin our four-day traverse of the Atlantic. 

Pictured: gray-breasted parakeet, Gray-headed spinetail, kitchen 

, gray-headed spinetail