A few pictures from a birding trip to Peru. Organized by Bird Treks and guided by the extraordinarily competent Huw Lloyd of Manu Expeditions, over three weeks our group of twelve explored the Andes near Cuzco and wandered throughout the fabulous Manu National Park, seeing (or hearing) more than 600 bird species, ten species of monkeys, innumerable butterflies, several snakes, a tapir, and all kinds of other flora and fauna.
This was a serious birding trip, rising at 4:30 am almost every day, birding until nightfall, and out at night looking for owls, paraques, nightjars, and other nightlife as needed. Food, accomodations, transportation were all well above average, but hey, it's the jungle -- you have to enjoy the occasional critter and being off the grid for awhile. A trip that more than met my expectations, and I'd recommend these guys for anybody serious about seeing good birds.
For this trip, I brought along two cameras, my pocket-sized 2.1 megapixel Olympus D-490 Zoom (an excellent camera with batteries that last a couple of years) and my new 4 megapixel Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ10 (with batteries that last maybe two weeks, but with a 12X stabilized optical zoom and a 512 Mb memory card worked pretty well). Once I got home, I waded through the pictures to pick the better ones, cropped/resized/adjusted them with Paintshop Pro, and arranged them for this page. Lots and lots of pictures, but I cut it down to a total of eight pages. Thanks to Mary and Nick Freeman and Amos Swimmer for a few of their pictures added a little later. There are many more pictures in my head and a few of the photographs could be better, but the point of this trip was the birds and photos were a distant (but important) second priority.

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