After a successful birding walk in Podocarpus National Park, we moved on to the small town of Zamora because the flowers in the town garden are a favourite spot for Spangled Coquettes.  The Coquette family of hummingbirds is quite unique with their brilliant crests and bright colouring.  They are really fast so not easy to capture in a photo!  You can also see some beautiful butterflies and different hummingbirds in the gardens.

Female Spangled Coquette. 

Yellow-tufted Woodpecker

We then headed out of Zamora to the surrounding countryside to try our luck. It was around noon by now so not the best time to go birding but we found a few birds and some Blue Morpho Butterflies which are even harder to photograph than hummingbirds!  Our guide hired a camioneta taxi as the road was pretty rough in spots.  It wasn’t too expensive, maybe around $15 for an hour and if the birding had been better we could have kept him longer.

The highlight was the Blue-necked Tanager.  We also saw some other tanagers like Green & Gold Tanager (no photo), Blue-grey Tanagers and Palm Tanagers.

Now we were pretty hungry so the camioneta dropped us back in town.  I had asked for empanadas as I had read that they were a specialty of Zamora and I was expecting a savoury meat & cheese filled dish but we somehow ended up at a bakery (miscommunication with non-English speaking guide) but the sweet empanadas were tasty and they had nice cakes too!

There’s some amazing graffiti/art around the town, many of which feature birds and wildlife.

This statue of a lady is kind of a landmark and you may see directions saying “turn left at the statue” or similar – this is her!

Our guide (I forgot his name but Catherine at Copalinga can book him) dropped us back at Copalinga and it was the end of a great day of birding in Podocarpus and Zamora.