Cuiabá in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil is the gateway to the Pantannal, to the south, and to the Chapada dos Guimarães to the north. My son and I spent close to a week in the Chapada dos Guimarães after we left the Pantannal - and before we headed to the Southern Amazon, in the summer of 2003.
The Brazil portal page on this website has links to the individual bird species videos I recorded in this area.
Photographs from this trip can be found in The Birds of Brazil photo gallery.
Notes from my trip are posted below the video.
Notes From This Trip
It is July and we are taping in the Chapada dos Guimaraes of Brazil. I am looking for Helmeted Manakin and the tree to the left in the photograph has been hot all morning. I decide to climb a large boulder near the tree so that I can shoot directly into the crown of the tree. It is a chore, the boulder is about twenty feet high and is steep - but that is what all that rock climbing in my younger days was for. I finally get all my stuff up the rock and settle in to wait for a couple of hours of no bird.
I have made one of the most revolutionary findings in modern scientific endeavor. While perusing Brazil photographs I found a view of the moon from the Southern Hemisphere. After extensive comparisons with photographs from the far north I am prepared to announce that the moon looks the same in the Northern Hemisphere as in the Southern Hemisphere. Thus, based on rigid empirical evidence we can safely discard this issue as a source of dispute between the world’s peoples.
Sadly however, this same examination has uncovered extensive variation in sunsets around the world - and even from individual sites. This does not portend well for humankind. I can only hope that we can look to the Moon and recognize our commonality and not note how different the sunset is in the Chapada dos Guimarães of Brazil (or is that Brasil).
