Sacred Valley Birding Tour — 21 July 2026

Our Sacred Valley day on 21 July began high above the valley at the Santuario de Colibríes, the 'Ensifera' camp named for its star bird. The feeders and flowering slopes gave us the Sword-billed Hummingbird — the only bird on earth with a bill longer than its body — alongside Giant Hummingbird, Sparkling Violetear and Tyrian Metaltail, while a skulking Undulated Antpitta showed briefly in the undergrowth and a Chestnut-breasted Mountain Finch fed at the forest edge.

Dropping to the valley floor, we birded the Río Vilcanota at Pachar, where the fast, clear water holds one of the Andes' great specialities: a Torrent Duck powering through the rapids, with a Torrent Tyrannulet working the boulders alongside it. Here we also caught up with the Green-and-white Hummingbird, a Peruvian endemic, and a Green-tailed Trainbearer trailing its long tail over the riverside scrub.

We finished the day at Lago Piuray, the beautiful highland lake near Chinchero. The water was busy with Andean and puna waterfowl — Andean Goose, Puna Teal, Yellow-billed Pintail and rafts of Slate-colored Coot — while around twenty Chilean Flamingos fed in the shallows and Puna Ibis and Andean Flicker worked the surrounding grassland. A fine cross-section of Sacred Valley birds, from cloud-forest hummingbirds to high-lake waterbirds, in a single day.