Dec. 8 - A Day of Amazement and Delight, but first, a map

Enrique had asked for box lunches for us, which meant that we were going out into the middle of NOWHERE, one of my favorite places to go! Here is an incomplete map of our itinerary for Dec. 8:

I described the map as 'incomplete' because we went off the map where the arrow points up. I really have no idea which roads we were on, but it was the best day yet!
[BTW - when I wrote the post about the very skinny bridge and couldn't understand why the date was wrong, it was because that bridge was near the Hosteria Las Torres, NOT near the Hotel Rio Serrano! I was going to try to re-do that entire post, but will do a short edit of it, referring to this mental lapse on my part. My apologies.]
By now, Ivan and I were very comfortable with Enrique and Alvaro and we were beginning to know the birds we were seeing, birds like these:

Southern Crested Caracara

Chilean Flicker

House Wren (at nest)

We stopped at a couple of desolate looking spots and looked around. The terrain was somewhat hilly with low to medium-sized shrubs and dry, gravelly ground. The winds were ever present, but weren't very strong.

Here is a map that will prove to be VERY important. It's of Laguna Azul, a long, very popular lake at which we stopped to have our box lunches.

Check out the red-dotted map above this one so you can see where this lake is. I made an ellipse around the part of the lake that ended up having great significance to us. It's a long, skinny lagoon on which, I am not kidding, were nesting a pair of Flying Steamerducks, several pair of Red-gartered Coots (is that not just the very best name for a bird with red thighs?!), some Crested Ducks, some Upland Geese and, hang onto your hat - two pair of Silvery Grebes.  One pair was still building their nest and one pair had two babies. These birds, Silvery Grebes, are about the size of a grapefruit, so you can imagine how small the babies are!  Ivan took these two lovely photos:

Silvery Grebe with baby (grebe-ling?)

Silvery Grebe with passenger and baby following

I thought I would die of pleasure watching these birds and their young! Even looking at these photos of the incredible beauty of this bird makes my knees go weak! We watched them for about an hour as the adults dove underwater and brought minuscule aquatic critters to the eager babies. They repeated this action about twice a minute for several minutes.
And then there were the Red-gartered Coots and their babies! Most of the waterfowl with young got along very well, but the Red-gartered Coot was a notable exception. The Crested Duck on this water had 5 babies and when they all swam a little too close to the coot's family, the adult attacked. The Crested Duck is a diving duck and the babies all dove underwater, but the coot seemed to find particular disfavor with one of the babies and as soon as the baby surfaced, the coot rushed over to attack, and the poor baby had to dive again. This frightening activity was repeated about 4 times until the little Crested Duckling got far enough away to appease the coot. I purloined this photo from the web because it shows the main way this coot can be identified, and that is by the red line that goes across its bill between the bill and what's called the frontal shield. Obviously, while the bird is on the water, observing its "red garters" is problematic at best! There is only one other coot in this area, the White-winged Coot, and it doesn't have that red line across its bill.

Red-gartered Coot