The morning of Friday 12 October was spent in the Santa Victoria Mountains where we were searching for some new high elevation birds. We therefore had an early breakfast and drove the roughly 40 km to the southeast to these impressive, but rather cold, mountains.
One of the star birds of the morning was the Diademed Sandpiper-Plover, a bird found in peatland and boggy areas at the high elevations in the Andes. This is a hard bird to see, but surpringly most of the group had already seen the bird on earlier birding tours.
Other good birds we saw as we drove to higher elevations were the Straight-billed Earthcreeper, Black-fronted Ground-tyrant and Puna Ground-Tyrant. Overhead we had good views of an Andean Condor.
After lunch and a rest we went to the small town of Yavi Chico, which is very close to the border with Bolivia. Here we found a dripping tap that had formed a small pool of water that was bringing in birds.
