Bird watching

Best by far (according to bird-watching friends) is "Birds of the High Andes", a solid well-illustrated tome by two Danes (one called Jan Fjeldstra?), but available in English. May be difficult to obtain, but try Googl-ing or Amazon-ing.
Hope this is useful.

Birds of the High Andes is EXCELLENT, although heavy and awkward to carry. Many birders rebind the book into two volumes and carry the plates to the field and leave the descriptions back at the hotel.

Unfortunately, Birds of the High Andes only covers birds resident at about 2000 mts or more (though, of course, there is some overlap). The lower elevations, i.e., a LOT of Bolivia, are sorely lacking a good guide.

The best, albeit one with lousy pictures, is de la Pena and Rumboll, Birds of Southern South America (Princeton U Press, 1998). I found it helpful enough when birding in Santa Cruz department and in the Yungas.

Princeton has also put out a new guide, The Birds of South America: Non Passarines. It was new when I was last in Bolivia long enough to have some free time to bird so I haven't used it much.

There is a new field guide to Bolivia in the works but the authors (Joe Tobias and Eustace Barnes) say it is several years away still.

I guess you know, but anyway: BirdLife International www.birdlife.org</a> has the partner 'Asociacion Armonia' in Bolivia www.armonia-bo.org</a> cf. www.birdlife.org/worldwide/national/bolivia/index.html</a><BR>A contact to these may give further information.
New to me is the NHBS Environment Bookstore http://www.nhbs.com They do a lot in ornithology.
The authors of 'Birds of the High Andes' are the Danes Jon Fjeldså and Niels Krabbe. (Fjeldså is written with the Danish letter å, the same as aa).

I just got back from a two week birding trip to Boliva. There is no field guide to the country and the books you will need depend on where you will be. My trip went from Santa Cruz to Comarapa to Cochabamba and on to La Paz/Titicaca so I needed both lowlands and highlands. I took Birds of the High Andes, though I had to leave it in the room because of the weight, but it was the bible that I checked every night when we were in its altitude range. I also had the Pena/Rumboll Birds of Southern South America and the Non-Passerines Princeton checklists, as well as the plates from the Hilty Colombia book (which has some of the tanagers and other lowland birds that the other books are missing). Another guy on our trip had color zeroxes of the plates from the two volume Ridgley/Tudor passerines books and if you had these combined with the Princeton Non-Passerines book you would probably be fine. The Bird Bolivia website discusses the various book options in detail. Jaramillo's Chile guide can also be recommended for the highland birds if the expense and weight of Birds of the High Andes ($150+) does not work for you. Some people had Clements Birds of Peru but the illustrations are terrible. A better Peru book is coming out from Princeton in the fall and this will be useful for Bolivia as well.