Guy Witney Krocker: Itatiaia National Park

Itatiaia is Brazil's oldest National Park that sits within the Mantiqueira mountain range approximately two thirds of the way from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro. Itatiaia means "many-pointed rock" in the Tupi language.
It took a while to get to sleep the first night as I was enjoying the night sounds of the forest. The next morning began at dawn prior to my alarm going off with a cacophony of incredibly loud bird calls raising and lowering in intensity. They were birds, so obviously I had to get up to see what was going on. There were four large rails about the size of a large rooster chasing each other around the chalets all the while screaming. It turns out that they do this every night at sunset and every morning at dawn. Sweet a natural alarm clock!

I decided to embark on an exploration of the hotel grounds to try and find the rails and see what else may be roaming about. There are about 20 chalets in approximately 10 Ha cut out of the Forest with good sized green areas and trees busy with birds. The forest edges of the property is dense secondary succession underbrush with many small trails leading through the thickets, unfortunately none that are human navigable. There are several rivulets running through te property as well, one running right under my chalet window so it is a spectacular setting.

I was able to ID the noisy rails as Slaty-breasted Wood Rails, I spent more than an hour stalking a couple of them for a photo but it was an effort in futility, whenever I got close they scurried into the underbrush.
I spent the rest of the day after lunch hiking the lower altitude trails along a long series of waterfalls in the southern reaches of the park, As with most rainforests there are two key challenges to photography; a good percentage of the fauna resides in the treetops and the dense foliage cover limits light making photography difficult. Most of my time was spent with the trusty Leica Binoculars in hand instead of the camera.

Quite the maze of trails in this area but my experience in the similar forests of Ecuador and Peru certainly added to my comfort level and of course the Oregon 300 GPS made navigating in and out of the forest a breeze with limited backtracking. In the pre-GPS days I would have been leaving small landmarks along the trails and intersections to simplify my return. I love technology! To be honest though, even without the GPS all I would have had to do was climb to altitude to pick up the sound of waterfalls to regain my bearings.
As hiking in the heat and humidity of this forest had me drenched in sweat in no time so rehydrating was absolutely critical.

Just prior to supper I took the opportunity to drive up to altitude to find the trailhead for next day’s hike and explored the area around a large abandoned hotel called the Hotel Simone. I found out later that I walked extremely close to a hive of extremely aggressive African bees. Lucky…..
I encountered two species of nesting birds here, the single beautiful Swallow-tailed Cotinga and the Red-rumped Cacique, which nest in colonies of long, hanging, bag-shaped nests suspended from branches.
I should note that in order to minimize disturbance the nesting bird pictures are taken at distance with 600mm lens config. The Cotinga pictures are heavily cropped.