We have gear up an exciting sea birding expedition aimed to reach San Ambrosio Island, part of the Desventuradas archipelago, a still unknown and seldom explored group of remote, barren volcanic islands off northern Chile. Starting from the port of Caldera, north of the port of Coquimbo, in the Atacama Desert southern fringes, we will board the “Vegvisir”, an ocean-going 52.5ft sailing yacht, expertly led by its highly experience skipper and its crew. The maximum group size will be 6 participants, led by one of our birding experts.
The waters of this section of the Humboldt Current are fairly cold and productive. We will start our journey westwards, watching a variety of endemic seabirds of this oceanic system, including Inca Tern, Peruvian Diving-Petrel, Peruvian Booby, Band-tailed Gull and thousands of Guanay Cormorant. As we leave the Atacama Desert coast, heading to the open ocean, we will be reaching subtropical waters and the presence of other seabirds is likely, such as Waved Albatross, Salvin’s Albatross and even Petrels such as Cook’s and Parkinson’s; Markham’s, Elliot’s and even Ringed Storm-petrels are also potential species along this stretch of ocean as well as several species of cetaceans. We will have several days at sea to document our journey while cover the 500 nautical miles to the Desventuradas.
San Ambrosio is one of the islands of this group that we will be able to visit. Blue Noddy, Brown Noddy and Sooty Tern breed here as well as Masatierra and Kermadec Petrels, Red-tailed Tropicbird and Masked Booby. Potentially White-bellied Storm-Petrel also breed in the group.
We will be “chumming” in several stations along the whole track and we hope to detect other seabirds with yet mysterious distributional range.