Botany of Brazil

In the tropics, plants grow almost everywhere. This epiphyte is growing on an electric line.

My birding trip to Brazil yielded more than just birds. The vegetation in that part of South America is lush and dense forests, rich farmland, and lots of edge habitat with viney tangles, giant palm fronds, epiphytes and bromeliads, and every kind of fruit and flower you can imagine.

When the birding got slow in Brazil (which was not often) I enjoyed looking around for interesting plants to photograph. Here are a few of the images I kept, after weeding.

Cecropia frond against the afternoon sky.

The morning dew makes the grasses bow their heads.

The fronds of this vine-like fern were more than 10 feet long.

We ate papayas from this very tree at a restaurant on the Praia da Almada.

A vine's long tendrils reaching for something, anything.

My plan is to share one more brief post about Brazil and then move on to other subjects. If you're interested in reading the full account of my birding trip to Brazil, it will be in a future issue of Bird Watcher's Digest.