Andean cocks-of-the-rock in Jardín
Birds are cool – BUT cocks-of-the-rock are uber-cool 🙂 – and what’s even cooler in the town of Jardín is that you don’t need to be up before the crack of dawn to see them… Yep, we’ve met birders that are so desperate to see this bird that they are up at 4am!!! We on the otherhand were fast asleep at this stupid hour – preferring to visit their stomping ground – the Jardín de Rocas, Parque Natural – at the more respectable hour of 4pm! 🙂 🙂 There are apparently around 25 male birds and 12 female birds that nest in the grounds of the Jardín de Rocas, Parque Natural – and once you’ve paid you can hang around for ages just watching them… we stayed for over TWO hours…. it was AWESOME 🙂 🙂
What’s so special about a bird with a silly name I hear you ask… Well, where to begin… firstly – they look AMAZING! Males have a huge red head that is shaped like the head of no other bird that I have EVER seen in my life. Secondly – they engage in a bizarre dancing and sqwawking ritual called lekking (this usually happens in the morning – hence birders getting up early as it’s usually their best chance to see this elusive bird).
We saw our first cock-of-the-rock in Peru where it is the national bird… it wasn’t the best sighting in Manu, but we were happy to have seen it. Our second sighting was also in Peru – it was a better sighting but the rain meant no photo 🙁 Our third sighting was in Ecuador – and we thought it couldn’t get any better than that… well unless we had wanted to join a group of hardcore birders on a tour at 4am – no thanks!
Seeing cocks-of-the-rock at the Jardín de Rocas, Parque Natural came as a surprise -we almost skipped Jardín altogether as we thought the town would be very similar to Salento… there was no marketing blurb about birds to entice us there… we could have missed out! 🙁
But we didn’t 🙂 And as a result you too get to enjoy a beautiful selection of our pictures of these amazingly spectacular birds (all of the pictures are of male cocks-of-the-rock except the last one which is a female – that’s why she looks different! 🙂 Enjoy!!!
And if all those awesome photos were’t enough, we also have a video that I know you are dying to watch 😉