Manu Road & The Amazon 20 Days

Birds of Peru Tours has designed a NEW birding tour which this year now includes Manu Wildlife Center (the Tambo Blanquillo Lodge which we normally use are working on their rooms with private bathrooms, however their rooms with shared bathrooms are still available).

This tour is for 20 full days along Manu Road to experience its astounding diversity and Manu lowland for Amazonian specialist plus the biggest Macaw clay lick in Manu Biosphere, oxbow lakes, canopy tower and more for sure! The birds are genuinely breathtaking. We should encounter more than 500 species, including some endemic species, birds of limited range distribution, specialist and several mixed flocks assemblages.

Manu Biosphere Reserve is a vast, spellbinding wilderness in southeastern Peru replete with some of the richest flora and fauna to be found anywhere in South America. It offers the uncontained possibilities of an entire ecosystem, from golden grasslands of the Puna zone down the eastern Andean slope, through various altitudes of montane cloud forest and into seemingly endless lowland rainforest.

From the Cusco valley, we climb the endemic-rich arid slopes to the high Puna zone and then descend into the tree line through temperate and subtropical cloud forest and down to the foothill zone at the eastern base of the Andes. we will be based at several comfortable lodges as we bird up and down one of the wolds famous birding routes Manu Road, which ribbons its way through a wilderness full of flagship east-slope species including Lyre-tailed Nightjar, Red-and-white Antpitta, Andean Cock-of-the-rock, White-collared Jay, Golden Tanager, Versicolored Barbet and a handful of endemics and regional specialties. Then we have two full days of birding in upper tropical rainforest while based at the lovely elevation of 1600 feet, with hummingbird feeders in the garden bringing in beauties like Rufous-crested Coquette and Violet-fronted Hummingbird. Enjoy the sound of Tawny-bellied Screech-Owls and potoos calling outside our room at night and explore a great trail system leading from the garden to several different habitat types.

Southeastern Peru is generally acknowledged as the most species-rich birding region on Earth. Manu Biosphere Reserve, incorporating Manu National Park and a couple of contiguous conservation tracts, is a vast, spell-binding wilderness the size of Massachusetts that protects the entire watershed of Rio Manu its 200-mile long tributary of the Rio Madre de Dios, itself a major Amazonian tributary winding through lowland rainforest in the department of Madre de Dios. The Manu Biophere Reserve and its buffer zone also protect much of the department of Cusco’s east slope Andean drainage from 14,000 feet in the Puna grasslands well above tree line down through temperate and subtropical cloud forest right down to the foothills and lowland rainforest. There are few places so precious in South America where there is legal protection for a comparably rich transect of undisturbed forest on the diverse east slope of the Andes.