Once again I was up for a very last minute off-the-cuff birding excursion-the last one in Colombia.  This time I was on my own as my husband wanted to take a day off and relax in the hotel and get over his altitude sickness.  I was targeting Brown-breasted Parakeet and had studied their locations on eBird.  Birds of Passage had a nice post about their birding in the area, looks like they had bad weather to contend with as well!  I contacted Oswaldo Cortes on Facebook but he was already booked that day but he suggested we go to Chingaza for the parakeets.  So I got the hotel to book a car & driver (SUV) who arrived promptly at 5am to take me to Chingaza.  The scenery was gorgeous along the way!

Finally we arrived at Chingaza National Park.  I was already looking for parakeets!

This is the desired Brown-breasted Parakeet and the mascot of the park.

This is the office where you pay admission and enter the park.  However they didn’t want to let me in since I didn’t have a guide!  I was hoping a guide might show up or be waiting around the entrance like they do at some other parks but no dice.  The area where the parakeets frequent is further into the park so I couldn’t just hang around the car park area and hope to get lucky.  So not wanting to waste any more time, I decided to try the other place where the parakeets had been seen – Bioandina which is on the north side of Chingaza.

You can see how we traveled from the hotel to Chingaza (blue line) and then we backtracked to where the red line begins.  I knew Bioandina was in that general area (yellow) but it wasn’t very well signposted and we ended up going all the way to where the red line ends until we realized we missed it.

This is the road we turned down which finally led to the right area.  I never saw the word “Bioandina” but we did head into prime bird habitat.

I think this is some kind of school, anyways it is very near the trees where we finally saw and heard a good-sized flock of parakeets!  The trees are in the photo above.

The area was fenced off so all we could do was sit on the side of the road and wait.  It was so frustrating, I could hear LOTS of parakeets and see them flitting back and forth.  I knocked off a few Hail Mary shots but just couldn’t get them.  After about 20 minutes, they took off like bats parakeets out of hell and disappeared down the valley. The fence kept us from getting closer and I was feeling minor effects of altitude sickness from the previous trip so I was sitting in the car hoping they would come closer.  They didn’t.

We drove around the area some more hoping to find the parakeets again. 

We found a crested guan hiding in a bush near the road.

A few shots of the road heading back into Bogota.  I wanted to go to some craft shops but we couldn’t find any along the route.

The driver dropped me back at the hotel and I found Ina in much better spirits after having a day to rest.  I was one one hand happy to have found a flock of parakeets but disappointed I didn’t get any photos.  Maybe I should have bought some flowers!