laurus_nobilis | Photos!

This is going to be pretty image-heavy, of course.

So! I've been at the South American Bird Fair, that takes place in a town called San Martín de los Andes. It's a small mountain town, relatively close to where I used to live (Bariloche), and looks like this:

Except that this year, like many places in Patagonia, there are times when the ashes of the Puyehue volcano reaches it. Like on Saturday, when everything looked grey.

Still, we had amazing luck, because that happened to be the one day when there weren't any outings planned. I went to two of them! The first one was to the nearby wetlands, but sadly you can't really see a lot of actual birds in the photos, because my camera doesn't have that much zoom. :( You can sort of vaguely see some ducks and coots in the third one.

The other one was a walk along a stream that's right there in the middle of the town, then up to a viewpoint in the forest. I did manage to take a picture of a kingfisher near the stream, and then a pair of black-chinned siskins, male and female.

The conferences and workshops take place in this really nice convention center:

But the fair isn't all about outings and workshops! There is a lot of involvement from the whole town, and it gives a lot of importance to showcasing local artists and musicians. There's a photography contest and even a bird-themed art exposition. This year they even showed related work from local primary schools.