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Iguassu Falls easy bird watching?
Your Iguassu Falls easy bird watching experience can start with an ‘introductory’ visit to the Parque das Aves or Bird Park near the entrance of Brazil’s Iguassu National Park. This is an excellent opportunity for watching hundreds of bird species of the Iguassu Falls region. Birds are enclosed with their entire natural environment inside giant aviaries 8 m (26 ft) high that you walk into for observation. Watching birds here is almost like doing it in the wild but much easier, it’s an awesome experience!
This Iguassu Falls easy bird watching attraction is great for all kinds of visitors (Santiago, my 11 year old son loved it!) but it is most interesting for bird watching enthusiasts, photographers and ornithologists who want to study beforehand the birds they plan to observe in their real birding expeditions inside the Iguassu National Parks.
The Bird Park also gives you the opportunity to observe some of the rarest species you might not have a chance to find on the field.
But the real Iguassu Falls easy bird watching experience of course occurs inside both Iguassu National Parks (Brazil’s and Argentina’s).
The jungle surrounding the Iguassu Falls is a living cosmos supporting 436 different bird species in an area as small as Luxemburg and this makes it one of the best and most interesting “easy bird watching” territories in the world.
The Iguassu Falls rainforest is a thick mass of vegetation growing up to a height of 30 m (98 ft) in a layered manner with more than 2,000 different vascular plants competing for a share of the sunlight. When you walk into it you can see beautiful flowers growing upon the trees as on the ground and can hear the never ending sounds of birds, insects, and falling twigs. It’s life at its fullest expression wherever you look!
If you are near enough from them, you can also hear the distant roaring sound of the magnificent Iguassu Falls. Every living being here has a specific role that makes the whole ecosystem work properly and is interdependent with everything else. A complex balance attained after millions of years of evolution and that reminds me we are intruders here and should not perturb this living symphony in no way. But there were humans living here that weren’t intruders. Did you know this place was inhabited by the Guarani natives? These people were an harmonic part of the Atlantic rainforest in every way and their culture has provided us with what I call the
spirit of the Iguassu Falls.
Just in case you are a newcomer to birding just like me, keeping silent (and your eyes and ears wide open) is the number one rule for this easy bird watching expedition much in the same way you listen quietly to a concert performance. You can think of each bird species as a different instrument of a giant orchestra with a unique sound you can learn to identify. There is no apparent director but each living creature here executes his business in perfect synchrony as if reading a hidden score that was carefully written on his genes by millions of years of adaptation.
Sharing some of your time with the Iguassu Falls jungle can be one of those special moments you don’t forget in a life time and now is the moment to explain you something about it that can be of help on your Iguassu Falls easy bird watching expedition.
Following is a graphic showing you the basic structure of the Iguassu Falls rainforest. Knowing this structure is useful for your Iguassu Falls easy bird watching expedition since different bird species prefer to live in different layers of the forest.
A limited bird listing for each layer will help you grasp the great birding potential of this paradise. When available, there are links to the Mango Verde World Bird Guide site for picture viewing and hearing the bird sounds of each species opening in a separated window for your convenience. When you finish watching each bird picture you can close that window to continue your reading on this page.
The Emergent Layer Staring around you can clearly distinguish four layers of vegetation; the emergent at the 20/30 m (65/98 ft) level made up with the giant trees that protrude over the green mass below, these are the ‘old daddies’ of the forest with some of them more than 200 years old. The emergent layer is the place for Iguassu Falls easy bird watching of spectacular eagles, macaws, parrots and toucans.
The mighty Harpy Eagle is not an Iguassu Falls easy bird watching specimen though it is among the inhabitants of the Iguassu Falls jungle. It is so scarce it will be very hard to find.
Harpy Eagles build huge nests of sticks and branches in the tallest trees. Females, which can be twice as large as males, lay 1 - 2 eggs. After the first egg hatches the other egg is usually abandoned. The chick will fledge from 4 1/2 - 6 months of age, but the young bird stays in the parent’s territory for at least 1 year. One Harpy Eagle needs a large area of uninterrupted rainforest to survive and, as it usually happens with great predators, it is one of the first endangered species when humans deplete the forest. They feed on monkeys, reptiles, and other birds that live on the trees. Other species and more probable findings on the highest tree tops are:
The Canopy
The canopy is made of medium-sized trees at the 10/20 m (33/65 ft) level that are heavily covered with epiphytes and climbing plants, this is where most of the living activity inside the rainforest goes on and home of an incredible variety of birds. Most of them are larvae and insect eaters and without them the jungle would be eaten up in no time by a mass of voracious vegetarian bugs. So these birds are here not only for our Iguassu Falls easy bird watching, they keep a vital balance inside the jungle. Flycatchers are especially abundant here and you can also find beautiful woodpeckers, wood creepers, thrushes and ovenbirds among many other possibilities. Here are some examples:
The under story at the 3/10 m (10/33 ft) level is made of the youngest trees waiting for an opening of the closed green umbrella above to grow. With profusion of ferns and tangled vines this level is also a very rich area for our Iguassu Falls easy bird watching expedition. Some of the many birds we can spot here are:
The forest floor is covered with wide-leaf grasses and ferns that are adapted to living in the permanent twilight of this part of the forest. Here’s where the important decaying of the forest’s derbies occurs releasing the nutrients for plant growth.
Did you know most of the nutrients of this rainforest are contained in the living creatures (living plants and animals)? The soil is relatively poor of nutrients so the forest is heavily dependant on recycling of its derbies made of falling leaves and twigs, animal depositions (of which bird depositions are a great part) and dead plants and animals. Nothing is wasted; everything is reprocessed in the never-ending life cycle of the jungle. Insects, fungus and bacteria are in charge of decomposing every single bit of waste on the forest floor. What’s up for your Iguassu Falls easy bird watching here?
This isn’t a layer but a special place of the rainforest near rivers and ponds and a favorite place for certain bird species adapted to this environment. What can our Iguassu Falls easy bird watching expedition find here?
To know much more interesting things about this exiting travel destination return from this
Iguassu Falls easy bird watching page to our family vacation getaway page.
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