Little birdwatching expertise - First, we want to say that the tour operator, Terry Kaweskar of Terraventura Outdoor, is a friendly man who is probably good at his primary adventure excursions. We note on his business card that bird watching is not a listed activity. This tour, which was advertised as a bird watching tour, was not. Terry is very clearly not a bird tour guide, and his performance was extremely inadequate. We have taken bird watching tours of the advertised type all over the world. Here are the primary reasons that this tour was not what was advertised and not we signed up for: Every bird watching guide we have ever toured with, whether on a local trip or international day tour, has provided a bird checklist, has had a bird field guide, or has had color photo pages of the local birds. Terry had none of these. Similarly, every international guide and many in the US have offered us binoculars at the start of the tour, even if we have binoculars with us. Terry did not appear to have extra binoculars. Many guides also have a spotting scope, though this is not universal. Terry did not. The purpose of a guide is to point out and identify the birds seen. Terry pointed out the Humboldt penguins and a couple of other birds, but with no specificity and with other problems as described below. He drove us to two sites with which he is familiar and, based on his other tours, which he visits with some regularity. However, he could not identify most of the birds we saw, frequently not spotting or calling birds, or ignoring our identification questions. Terry doesn't seem to be familiar with the local bird species. He made at least 7 incorrect identifications when asked. We aren't very familiar with Chilean species, but these misidentifications were so extreme that they were obvious. For example, he misidentified what turns out to be a very common swan as a "heron." Its appearance is nothing like a heron's, and its behavior is nothing like a heron's (it is a large, white, goose-shaped waterfowl that swims, whereas Chilean herons have a different type of coloration, beak, size, and body shape, and do not float on the water but stand beside it or perch in trees). He then identified a flock of stilts nearby as "heron babies," even though we had already spotted and identified these birds as stilts to him earlier, herons don't float on the water, herons don't have nearly as many fledglings as in this group, heron "babies" aren't white, and any heron this small would not be near the ground but in a tree rookery. He agreed that the cormorants we saw were double-crested. We see no evidence in our own Chilean bird guide that there are double-crested cormorants in that area. He misidentified a cormorant as a vulture. His identifications, such as they were, were primarily very general descriptions, not species names. For example, he said that the wetlands had "Four kinds of ducks--big ducks, black ducks, orange ducks, and green ducks." Even allowing for the use of "ducks" as a generic term that included teals, these are not species names, but broad general descriptions that are not the standard of a professional birdwatching guide. We wonder if Terry knew the names of these birds in Spanish, English, or the Latin species names. We have never encountered a birdwatching guide who was unable to specifically name the birds in their own language, our language, scientific language, or all three. When "There's a hawk on the pole. Which hawk is it?" is answered with "small hawk," we must ask what we are paying hundreds of dollars for. We spotted it, and we already know it's a small hawk. We want to reiterate that Terry might be a fine leader for other tours, but not this one. For a fraction of the cost, we could have hired a driver. Terry made no contribution to our bird spotting or identifications (other than pointing out the penguins). It's been impossible to reach anyone at Viator to express our concerns privately. We would have preferred not to post a review but to provide feedback to Viator itself.