For the past four years, Mindo, Ecuador, has been the top Christmas Bird Count in the world. In each of those years, more than 400 species were counted and more than 125 people participated. On December 18, 2010, I was one of the participants.

Audubon Director of Bird Conservation Greg Butcher, by David J. Ringer.

The call came Wednesday night, May 5. Would I be willing to fly to Louisiana to assess the oil spill and advise on what Audubon could do to help? Within two hours, I was at the airport.

Guyana is poised to be a poster-child for sustainable development. The government is very interested in ecotourism and in sustainable forestry. The unbroken forests of Guyana are a fabulous carbon sink, preventing untold amounts of greenhouse gas emissions that would cause a lot of global warming. Guyana would love to reap the rewards of storing all that carbon.

You don’t think of Guyana as a place with a swinging night-time scene? Let me tell you why I’ve been staying out so late on so many nights! (Hint: Orange-winged Parrots, Blackish Nightjars...)

Girard is a tour leader from Europe who really loves woodpeckers. He has an iPod with bird calls on it--but only for woodpeckers. He has a target list of birds he'd like to see in Guyana--all the woodpeckers there. Like most of us, he likes everything about nature travel in Guyana, but he enjoys it all while looking for woodpeckers.

It started with the Capped Heron. At dawn, we were sliding down the Essiquibo River in central Guyana in a small motorboat looking for waterbirds. We saw the Capped Heron land at the top of the tallest tree at the edge of the river. Why wasn’t it down by the river looking for food?

Toco Toucan and Red-shouldered Macaw provided the first signs that I had arrived in Guyana this morning. In fact, there were large flocks of macaws and parrots to greet us, plus Great Kiskadee and several look-alike species such as Lesser Kiskadee and Rusty-margined Flycatcher. Our early morning was topped off by a family of manatees – father, mother, and pup (is that the right term?).

Tomorrow I set off for Guyana, a South American country sandwiched between Venezuela and Suriname and just north of Brazil. It’s the former British Guiana, so thankfully, everyone there speaks English (or Creole or a native American language, but mostly English). People who know me as Audubon’s bird conservation director won’t be surprised to hear that my main activity there will be birdwatching. And with its more than 850 avian species, this country the size of Kansas is a certainly a great place for it—perhaps now more than ever.