A sampling of the wildlife...

Everyone hears about the cows and sheep that dot the landscape in Uruguay. It's still funny to see them grazing in the forests, and also grazing with each other. It's spring down here, which means lots of babies. We've seen a few baby lambs ("corderitas") roaming around with their moms ("corderas"). There are black lambs and white lambs. The cows are black, white, brown, or a combination thereof. Bulls roam freely with the cows.

More surprising is some of the wildlife we didn't actually expect. The birds here are fairly tame towards humans. They'll fly around nearby and land somewhere to watch for awhile. They are more tropical in appearance than what we expected.

We were checking out the trees with the epiphytes and heard a bunch of angry squaking. We looked up and laughed when we saw that the noise was coming from a bunch of parrots. Like the ones you see in pictures of tropical rainforests. They're loud and a bit obnoxious, but they are pretty awesome to see in person.

Among the grazing animals, it has been very common to spot a bunch of horses. There are several around La Corona, and they seem to meander the grounds along with cattle and a ton of birds. When we first arrived at La Corona, one of the horses had wandered into Sonia's own garden, and they went out to shoo it away. It's like deer in the country, but better.

I have no idea what most (well, virtually all) of these birds are, but they are impressive to look at and fun to watch anyway. I watched a bird like the one below walk up to the house today and wander around on the porch. Apparently they'll commonly peck the doors when they see their own reflection. Because they're super smart.

We also saw a group of donkeys ("burros") after a wrong turn during our field visits with Juliana. With most of the fencing, especially near La Corona, there is a gate to move cattle through, and also a path for cars that has parallel posts lying on the ground to make a grate. We'd call these a type of cattle grates, but here they are called mata burros (in other words, donkey killers).
They don't mince words here...