Birding News: Aqua Expeditions’ Amazon River Cruise Participates in Peru’s Global Big Day 2017

6 years ago Amazon, Nature

Many of our Aria Amazon guests travel to Peru’s Amazon because of the many species of rare and unique bird species which habitat in this part of Amazonia. Our expert naturalist guides on our Amazon river cruise share their insights about the many varieties of birds which make their home in the Amazon’s wetlands.

This year, a group of guests and members of the local community joined “Global Big Day”, an international event uniting the community of birders all over the world on a single day. On May 13^th 2017, our Amazon cruise team at Aqua Expeditions joined almost 20,000 birders from 150 different countries to compile more than 50,000 birder checklists containing 6,564 species— representing more than 60% of the world’s birds! This is a new record for the number of bird species reported in a single day.

Global Big Day showcases the birds from each region—helping to increase awareness about the importance of bird species conservation, regionally and globally. This year (as in previous Global Big Days), the friendly competition in South America continued to evolve as an inspiring story, with four countries topping 1,000 for the single-day tally: Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia. In 2017, Peru’s species count totaled 1,338 unique varieties of birds (topping 2016’s 1,242 and 2015’s 1,183) while completing 804 checklists. South America continued to break records with more than 25% of the world’s birds reported from this continent on this one day in May.

Our Amazon cruise guests told us they felt so special being able to participate in this worldwide celebration of the beauty birds bring to our lives.