The name of the city sounds like Solapur Jaipur Delhi Chennai, made of multiple cities. But it is a single entity and means Saint Joseph of the Fields. A chance chain of communications made this the first point of my (first) visit to Brazil. I will be attending the LSST meeting in Rio next week. When that was decided I wrote to a couple of colleagues from the S20 meeting two years back and they graciously agreed to host me even though one of them is physically not here. That is how I ended up at INPE which does a lot of fun things in technology and science. Gave a seminar there on handling time series (not to mention the scramble to do a short remote presentation for the RAPID review).
Of the fields is a strange name. Its biggest claim to fame is a huge airforce base which is unlike any airforce base in US or almost anywhere. It seems mostly docile. But the city does have many parks and also a very large reserve right in the middle of today's city confirming to the name of fields. Kudos to them to have kept it that way.
Because the fields (I mean parks) are in Brazil, there are birds. And because Brazil is in the tropics, they are colorful. You here parakeets all the time almost exactly like in Pasadena. They are so colorful, that a subvariety had to be called plain parakeet. Otherwise normally the names are like red cheeked, blue tongued, yellow vented and so on.
Got to go around a couple of parks and saw several avian species. Thousands of km away from amazon (this is a biig country) and yet the trees are tall and the canopy is thick making it difficult for those illiterate in south american birds to identify many. Merlin puts its hands up early saying it can identify only 57% sounds here and asking if I can help. Good luck with that.
The colors on the Toucan are solid in all senses of the word. It sat on a Juçara palm (Euterpe edulis) and gobbled its fruit in one go. At the Vicentina park there were Turkeys and Thrashes too. The Thrashes were like the Towhees of Pasadena.
The Roberto Burle Marx park flouted a greater variety owing to its water bodies. Kingfishers, Herons, Teals etc. but also few new species for me. A Hornero, and even a (Masked Water) Tyrant. I need to find out what kind of tyranny it does. Seemed rather docile to me. There is that word again. And speaking of it, did see a few Capybara that are described as the most relaxed rodents. They are pig sized herbivores, weigh over 50 kg, and just sit there ignoring everyone around. Fun life.
On to Rio.
