Photos above and below left: Copyright Tommy Pedersen
In a small forest fragment such as this one, species come and species go. We have had both gains and losses here recently. First, the good news: the Dusky-throated Hermits, the exquisite and difficult-to-find forest hummingbirds whose restless song I first recorded in August, are now putting on a daily show in the heliconia-rich forest edge where they have a lek - a series of adjoining breeding territories. When you go to the area (it's at the start of the main trail through the forest) you are guaranteed to see two or three of them chasing one another and settling in predictable places to perform the elaborate display captured brilliantly in these photos by my guest Tommy Pedersen on Wednesday. Tommy was here with guide Rick Simpson during a 24-hour stopover between flights - not as a passenger but as a pilot! He flies Boeing 777s for Emirate Airlines, and in his spare time acts as bird recorder for the UAE.
The less encouraging news is that I have now pretty much given up hope of hearing or seeing the Black-headed Berryeater this breeding season - thereby losing (for now) one of the flagship species of this place. Since we were hearing it continuously - literally every day - between early September 2007 and July 2008 when it abruptly stopped singing, the optimistic view is that it simply moved location for the current breeding period, and we may still get one coming back in the future. For birders reading this, however, I should add that if you really want to see this amazing and threatened species there are primary forest areas nearby where it can be located.
There've been plenty of compensations, like this little White-throated Spadebill (Platyrinchus mystaceus) which hops about quite tamely at the far end of the forest trail near the Jaboticaba tree. I quite accidentally caught this wing display when I took this photo a couple of weeks ago. Another great find is that we have Uniform Crakes (Amaurolimnus concolor) breeding in the wetland area near the trail to the riverbank. They have so far evaded the camera, but I nearly stepped on the female ushering two black chicks away from the trail. I also got this recording of the distinctive song, interrupted near the end by the chatter of a nearby Brazilian Squirrel.
Finally, an example of the amazing mysteries of nature you see daily here. A couple of weeks ago we looked at a hole near the base of one of the big trees along the forest trail and saw that it was seething with a mass of ants - when I gingerly poked a stick in, it was a good 4-5 inches thick, and these big light-coloured soldiers emerged to defend the colony. A few days later, they had all disappeared.
