After spending the morning exploring dirt tracks to the South of Chasico on my Pampas Meadowlark quest, I finally got back onto tarmac roads near to Bahia Blanca. It was now lunchtime and I had a four hundred and fifty mile drive South to Trelew for the lunchtime flight on the following day. Fortunately, it was a good and generally quiet highway. I made a quick stop at a salt lake near to Bahia Blanca, which hosted a large flock of over two hundred and fifty Baird's Sandpipers.
A few miles after the salt lake, there was a roadside pool with a reasonable selection of Waterbirds to make it worth a quick stop.
The next stop was around Parque Eolico Villalonga, which is a wind farm about sixty miles North of Viedma. This was a local eBird hotspot for Hellmayr's Pipit around the wind farm. There must be an engineer who sees them there. I spent about thirty minutes looking in the wider area, but I drew a blank. Time was pressing and I needed to continue South. My final stop was for a roadside comfort break when I was back in the arid habitat near San Antonio Oeste. This is similar habitat to Las Grutas. There were a few Birds around, including my final Tick of the Argentinian trip: a Tufted Tit-spinetail. I nipped back to the car for the camera, but I couldn't relocate it when I returned to look for it.
I continued driving South until dusk, when I was about sixty miles North of Puerto Rawson. I found another large garage to park up in for the night. It was an early start on the following morning to get to the Commerson's Dolphin rib office, in case they were planning on going to sea. Unfortunately, they were closed up again. I spent a couple of hours exploring the coastline for Commerson's Dolphins with no success.
My final Birding stop was Laguna Chiquichano in Trelew. There were some eBird records for Red-crested Cardinal, which I've only seen as introductions in Hawaii. I didn't have any success. It was time to head to the airport to return the car and check in for my flight back to Buenos Aires.
The Jet Smart flight left on time for Buenos Aires and it was a good flight back. The only snag was the Trelew flights were from the domestic airport, which had worked well with the flight back from Ushuaia, but I needed to get a coach back to the international airport on the far side of the city. Thanks to the traffic it was a slow journey. Once at the international airport, I arranged a pick up from the owner of the private house, that I had stayed with on my first night in Argentina. The following morning, I was dropped back at the international airport for the flight back to the UK. It had been a great trip.
In hindsight, I should probably have considered staying in Argentina for another ten days and trying to catch up with a few more species that I had missed on my first Argentinian trip in 1998. But that would have made it an even more expensive trip, so perhaps the short Patagonian dash was the right move.