I'm a birder. Birds were my first professional interest, before getting turned to the Dark Geology Side. I still carry my binoculars on most of my trips, and have a shelf full of bird field guides from dozens of regions of the world. Chile was a lot of fun for me, birding-wise. The ferry trip from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales gave me access to dozens of pelagic bird species I've never seen before, including hundreds of albatrosses. As a birder, you have to love a country that has both flamingoes and penguins! Chile also isn't overwhelming in terms of huge numbers of bird species (unlike, say, biodiverse Ecuador). It was pretty easy to see a significant number of the native species in two weeks. However, I confirmed a couple of these with better looks subsequently, during my brief time (4 days) in Argentina. Here's my list of identified birds for the whole trip:

Silvery grebe
Royal (or maybe Wandering?) albatross
Northern giant-petrel
Black-browed albatross
Sooty shearwater
Magellanic penguin (my first wild penguin!)
Peruvian pelican
Red-legged cormorant
Neotropic cormorant
Rock cormorant
Imperial cormorant
Darwin's rhea (my first wild rhea!)
Great egret
Black-crowned night heron
Black-faced ibis
Chilean flamingo
Black-necked swan
Coscoroba swan
Kelp goose
Upland goose
Flightless steamer-duck (one of the world's five species of flightless duck)
Crested duck
Yellow pintail
Chiloe widgeon
Red shoveller
Andean (ruddy) duck
Turkey vulture
Black vulture
Andean condor
Black-chested buzzard-eagle
Cinereous harrier
Southern caracara
Chimango caracara
American kestrel
White-winged coot
Red-gartered coot
Red-fronted coot
Southern lapwing
Magellanic oystercatcher
South American snipe
Parasitic jaeger
Chilean skua
Kelp gull
Dolphin gull
Brown-hooded gull
South American tern
Rock dove
Eared dove
Austral parakeet (WTF? A parakeet next to a glacier? I love Chile!)
Chilean flicker (sadly, I did not manage to see the Magellanic woodpecker, and that makes me quote sad. I think I'll have to go back...)
White-throated treerunner
Thorn-tailed rayodito
Magellanic tapaculo
Dark-faced ground-tyrant
Spectacled tyrant
Austral negrito
Fire-eyed diucon
White-crested eleania
Tufted tit-tyrant (yes, really!)
Rufous-tailed plantcutter
Austral thrush
Austral blackbird
Yellow-winged blackbird
Long-tailed meadowlark
Patagonian sierra-finch
Mourning sierra-finch
Rufous-collared sparrow
Black-chinned siskin

...That's 69 species of birds, mostly brand new to me. Plus there were a bunch in Buenos Aires that I have no idea about... Oh well.

While I'm at this listing business, here's a list of wild mammals I saw:
Guanaco (a llama-like camelid)
Bottlenosed dolphin
Sea lions (sp?)

...Significantly shorter list, eh? That's why people go into birding so obsessively... and why you never hear about anyone going "mammaling."

Labels: argentina, birdies, chile, mammals, patagonia, travel