Trip of the week: birdwatching in southern Colombia

Owing to the country’s paramilitary rebels and cocaine cartels, Colombia’s remote south was off limits to outsiders for nearly 60 years. But since the ceasefire of 2016, the region has become a great deal safer – and though the FCO still advises against travel to many areas, tourists are returning.

For birders, in particular, a trip here can be irresistible, says Mike Carter in the FT. Colombia is home to roughly 2,000 avian species, more than any other country, and 70% of them are found in the south – a diversity for which the militias are partly to thank, since they preserved the forest and the cover it offered. Guests of Manakin Nature Tours often spot more than 200 species on a five-day trip.

The road from the Andean city of Pasto down into the Amazon basin is so vertiginous, narrow and winding that locals call it “El Diablo” or “Adios mi Vida” – but for the true devotees who sign up with Manakin, the bird sightings to be had along it more than outweigh its dangers. Every few minutes, someone on the tour bus cries out “Golden-eyed flowerpiercer!” or “Glowing puffleg!” and the driver stops obligingly, to let everyone out onto the verge with their scopes and tripods and binoculars.

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As the forest thickens further on, the stops are not for single birds, but for “mixed flocks” of 50 or so species, feeding together in vast numbers as a defence against predators. Each flock is like “a society ball”, with “florid, outrageous” costumes, and music of the “sweetest mellifluousness” you’ve ever heard.

Perched high above the “raging” Río Mocoa, Dantayaco is a “funky” hotel around which the forest presses in so close that you can birdwatch from the hot tubs on the balconies. And deeper in the jungle lies Puerto Asís, where a boat trip down the “wide, languid” Río Putumayo to the Playa Rica ecological reserve offers still richer pickings, from violaceous jays to yellow-rumped caciques that swing on vines like “acrobats”.

See colombia.travel and manakinnaturetours.com for more information