Apparently, We’re Birdwatchers Now: Wildlife on Colombia’s Magdalena River

A bird could be sitting what seemed like kilometres away, behind a tree, possibly facing the wrong direction, and somehow they knew exactly what it was.

Okay, I’m slightly exaggerating, but you know what I mean. These guys were good!

We saw Amazon and green kingfishers, black-crowned night herons, great and snowy egrets, black vultures, brown-throated parakeets, snail kites and yellow-headed caracaras.

We think we also spotted a ringed kingfisher and a lesser yellow-headed vulture, but I’m not going to pretend my bird-identification skills have progressed quite that far yet!

A couple were particularly special.

The northern screamers were a rarer sighting, and we learnt that they mate for life, which immediately made me like them.

We were also lucky enough to see limpkins, which were another bird that wasn’t quite as easy to find. They eat snails, which explains that wonderfully long beak. I could do with a couple of these birds in my garden to be honest.

By this stage, I was actually getting quite excited every time someone spotted something new.

Who knew?

Of course, it wasn’t just wildlife we were watching. As we travelled through the waterways, we saw horses, cattle and pigs along the banks, offering little glimpses of everyday life in these very rural communities. There was always something to look at.

The iguanas were another matter

Apparently there were iguanas everywhere.

I was useless at spotting them.

Someone would point into a tree and everyone else would be saying, “Oh yes, there it is!” while I stared at exactly the same branch seeing absolutely nothing.

I did eventually get better.

The trick seemed to be to look for something that resembled a snake hanging out of a tree. Quite often it was actually the iguana’s very long tail dangling down from a branch.

The males had these fabulous crests along their backs, while many of the females we saw were much greener.

Once I knew what I was looking for, I even managed to find a few myself!

And then there were the otters

The otters we saw along the Magdalena were one of my favourites; probably because I had not thought about them being there.

They were quite shy, so we couldn’t get particularly close, but they were much bigger than I expected.

And judging by the size of them, they’d certainly had their fair share of the fish that morning!

We also spotted caimans lurking around the edges of the waterways.

Caimans are related to crocodiles and alligators and are found throughout Central and South America. They love rivers, wetlands and slow-moving waterways, so the Magdalena is pretty much perfect for them.

They’re incredibly well camouflaged too, which probably explains why our guides could spot them and the rest of us took much longer.