Buenos Aires - Day 4 - Costanera and Culture

With my birding appetite well and truly whetted I negotiated with Mrs L to spend a few hours birding ostanera Sur in the morning. She would spend the morning browsing The price was that I had to spend the afternoon going to museums and galleries. Fine.

Laguna de los Coipos

I arrived at the reserve just as it opened. For those unfamiliar with it, it is a vast wetland reserve immediately that sits between the very centre of Buenos Aires and the estuary. One minute you are walking around the Presidential Palace, the next you are on a boardwalk. When you first arrive initially all you see is a long rectangular canal called the Laguna de los Coipos that looks a bit unexciting, and somewhat choked with Water Hyacinth. But look more closely and there are birds all over the place and this is actually a really productive area. Wattled Jacanas follow the Hyacinth clearing boat, and there are tons of White-tufted Grebes, Rosy-billed Pochard. Red-gartered and White-winged Coots in the clearer patches of water. With luck you see a few White-faced Whistling Duck and perhaps a Great Grebe, and Great Kiskadees and Tropical Kingbirds are everywhere. In the more vegetated clumps you may find Southern Screamer and various Egrets. Yet again I have no photos of the birds. As I have made abudantly clear this was definitely not a birding trip and thus I did not bring a birding camera. Understood? Good.

Anyway, back to the birding. I started at the southern end and walked north alongside this piece of water on a shaded path on the estuary side called the Camino de los Lagartos. Every now and again there are lookout points where you can get a clear view of the water. There are also viewpoints that enable you to see into the main lagoons. At the time of my visit only the southern one, the Laguna de Los Patos, seemed to have any water in it, and in here I found Black-necked Swan, Rufescent Tiger-Heron and some White-faced Ibis amongst other things. About half way along there is a boardwalk through the floating vegatation that takes you back across to the City side, but I decided I would save that for later and took a boardwalk that crossed the Camino del medio and went through some of the habitat towards the sea. I walked the whole northern loop, the Camino de los Alisos, back to the central boardwalk. The last bit of los Alisos, at the northern edge of the reserve, seemes particularly productive as the tall trees overhang a small stream of sorts and there is a lot of bird activity. I found that phishing really worked along here. 

I then walked back south along Lagatros. The Laguna de los Coipos is considerably more vegetated at this end, and also pretty birdy although it's harder to view. Once back at the centre point I took the aforementioned boardwalk across to the City side and exited the reserve for some culture.

I walked 4.6 miles over the course of three and a half hours, fairly slowly it must be said, and recorded 71 species which I thought was pretty good going. The full list is here, but there were so many birds albeit that you had to be quite persistent to see them well. The reserve is also a busy place, with loads of joggers, cyclists, school parties and maintenance people. I am not sure I saw another birder, that seems not to be the main focus of the reserve from what I could see even though it is well set up for it. The only real disappointment was the sea which had nothing on it. I was hoping for flyby Gulls and Terns and so on, but it was a bird-free zone. I had visited Costanera Sur back in 2008 but really struggled, but this time around it was great. I think the difference is simply experience.

Here's what happens when I am faced with culture

Back on the culture trail I met up with Mrs L for a light lunch in town and then we went to the Museum of Latin American Art for the afternoon. This is a great museum and comes highly recommended even by a philistine such as myself. Definitely worth a few hours of your time if you have a few days in BA. We spent the rest of the day wandering the streets, it seems that different areas of the city have a really different feel from one another, some feeling more neo-colonial and others downright European. 

In the evening we went back to the rooftop bar to join the Instagram generation on the actual roof. Lovely cocktails and a lot of people watching, albeit that this mostly involved vacuous pouting and then checking of phones for a level of perfection that never seemed to be achieved. This in respect of the people being watched of course rather than the watchers. I think there was a marriage proposal somewhere in the mix as well. Again, not involving me and Mrs L for obvious reasons.