Peru already is well known to birders as a "must see" destination - it has almost unparalleled bird species diversity, on the richest continent for birds. In November 2012, Peru hosted the Birding Rally Challenge - the first organized, international birding competition. Last year's event represented a transect from the steamy (but very birdy!) Amazon of southeastern Peru up to the cloud forests of the cool Andes. The initial Birding Rally Challenge (BRC), sponsored by PromPeru and by the Inkaterra Association, was a great success. Six teams, representing five countries (and four continents!), squared off over six days of back to back birding. The pace was grueling, but the rewards were fantastic-600 species were reported during the BRC. And naturally the Lab was there! Our team, the eBirders, included Tom Schulenberg (team captain), Lab alumns Mike Andersen and Tom Johnson, and eBird's Man in Central America, Oliver Komar.
The Birding Rally Challenge returns this June, with a new, longer, and even more ambitious route across the Andes of northern Peru. The eBirders will be posting updates on the eBird Facebook page, so be sure to check it out and follow our travels.
The 2013 version of the BRC highlights some of the lesser known parts of Peru - but regions that still have much to offer, and that command the attention of intrepid birders. The eBirders will be back, with a reconstituted team: Tom Schulenberg (team captain, an author of Birds of Peru, and Neotropical Birds project leader), Steve Kelling (Director of Information Science at the Lab, which runs eBird), Marshall Iliff (eBird project leader), and Luke Seitz, a rising sophomore at Cornell, Maine eBird reviewer, and birding phenom with multiple South America trips under his belt already.
The eBirders of course are thrilled by the prospects of exploring new territory and encountering 100s of Peruvian birds, but the BRC also is important for eBird. Peru is one of the South American countries with its own bilingual portal (eBird Perú) and a growing, and active, community of local eBirders. This year's BRC will be a great chance to promote eBird further in the birding, scientific, and conservation communities in Peru and beyond. The Birding Rally Challenge runs from 11-18 June.
Thanks to a generous offer from the BirdsEye/BirdLog team, all teams on the BRC - not just the eBirders! - also will be outfitted with BirdLog and will be generating important data with every bird sighting.
The eBirders' competition this year is formidable, including the LSU Tigrisomas (USA), the Forest Falcons (UK), the Zululanders (South Africa), Tramuntana Birding Team (Cataluna, Spain), and Ararajuba Team (Brazil). The eBirders will be posting regular updates on the eBird Facebook page. Watch Facebook to keep up with our adventures, successes, mishaps (hopefully few), and fantastic birds, from the Peruvian Plantcutter to the Marvelous Spatulatetail.
Team eBird and the eBirders wish to thank PromPeru and Inkaterra for organizing this competition, which helps to highlight the remarkable diversity of South America birds, both in Peru and beyond. Conservation of South America's unique avifauna will be possible only by raising public awareness, and events like this do a fantastic job of engaging locals, promoting ecotourism, and highlighting the value of all biodiversity and our collective responsibility to protect it.
Caption: Chestnut-throated Seedeater: Not a rarity, but a nice coastal species that is to be expected in the first days of the BRC.
More at http://ebird.org/content/ebird/?p=1017
