Old Nono-Mindo Road - July 30, 2010

After leaving Yanacocha, we continued our way Northwest, descending the Andean slopes towards the Pacific. Our route was mostly along an old dirt road that followed a small river cutting through the mountains. With each hundred meter (everything is metric in Ecuador, as in really the entire rest of the world besides the USA) drop in elevation there was a noticeable increase in temperature, and the flora and fauna changed accordingly. At various points Marcelo would notice something perched besides the road, and we'd stop the car and quickly run out to get a look. Almost instantaneously Marcelo would have his crisp scope set up on the bird, and Emily and I would take turns ogling.
Our first major discovery was a beautiful red-crested cotinga, found not too far from Yanacocha reserve in a small patch of woodland surrounded by extensive recently deforested pasture. Lower down we ran into a female masked trogon, stoically perched right next to the road. Soon after we found an active slaty-backed chat-tyrant, a striking maroon and black flycatcher that favors the lush vegetation bordering cloud-forest streams. And so on and so forth we wound our way down the Andes.

masked trogon, female

By late afternoon we had descended over a thousand meters, and were driving through a large patch of pristine subtropical forest owned partly by the Bellavista Cloud Forest Reserve. A light rain had begun, and Emily and I were almost incoherently tired from all the traveling and lack of sleep. But when a high pitched croaking sound seeped in through the crack windows, and our driver quickly stopped the car, I instantly went on high alert. I had only learned a few bird sounds before coming to Ecuador, but this was one of them. The plate-billed mountain-toucan. Plate-billed mountain-toucans are found only in a thin strip of cloud forest along the Northwestern Andean slopes in Ecuador and adjacent Colombia. The major field guide for Ecuador, Birds of Ecuador, chose these near-endemic toucans as their cover bird, and the beauty of that cover beckoned to me all summer long as I touted around the Field Guide memorizing what birds I could. And now, there they were, in the flesh.
We jumped out of the car and raced down the road, heading towards the weird creaky yelps echoing across the canopy. And then there they were, a few dozen meters away, searching the trees for fruit and calling back and forth--a troop of six or so mountain-toucans coming our way. For the next twenty minutes we jogged up and down the road trying to get good angles through the dense lineup of trees, but eventually the toucans settled nearly directly overhead, and we simply stood and stared. It is hard to explain how beautiful these birds look in the wild, and the pictures Marcelo took through his scope with my little camera, although surprisingly good given the circumstances (nearly all the bird pictures from the first part of our trip were expertly digiscoped by Marcelo), do not begin to do them justice. But they are stunning, and we were stunned. Finally, soaring off with their strange massive bills leading the way, they left us with the rain and silence, and we finished our descent to Mindo. Somewhat reeling from culture-shock, Emily and I grabbed surprisingly delicious brick-oven pizza from the tiny downtown, and, earplugs in place, settled in to our comfortable hostel room for the night. Tomorrow would be another 4 AM wake-up call. Our trip had just begun.

plate-billed mountain-toucan

Yanacocha - July 30, 2010

Our hired guide Marcelo Arias picked us up from our Quito hotel in the predawn gloom, and we winded our way up Northwest, ascending the Volcano Pichincha. Our first stop that day was the private Yanacocha reserve, run by the Ecuadorian conservation group Fundaction Jocotoco. Yanacocha contains almost 1,000 hectares of threatened high elevation polylepis forest, and is likely the only home left for the vanishingly rare black-breasted puffleg (a species of hummingbird). As we were visiting the reserve in late July, our chances of seeing a black-breasted puffleg were pretty much nil, but a host of other high-elevation cloud forest inhabitants awaited us.

As we drove up from Quito, we could see the lights of the city twinkle below, wreathed in fog. We drove past suburban shacks and small plots of cleared land, and turned onto a narrow rutted dirt road, avoiding small dogs and old Quechan women who had already started their day. Within an hour, the cleared land was swallowed up by densely forested slopes. We were at the reserve.

Yanacocha Reserve: the slopes of the Volcano Pichincha

We parked the car at the gate and gathered our gear. The air was thin, as we were at well over 10,000 feet, but while in North America such an elevation would be covered in rock, ice, and tiny creeping alpine plants, here we were surrounded by lush and vigorous tropical foliage. Tree branches were blanketed in ferns, liverworts, bromeliads and orchids. Dense clumps of bamboo clogged gullies, and people-sized leaves hovered over the path. Not twenty four hours removed from our departure point of Minneapolis, Minnesota, we were finally in the tropics.

yellow orchid amidst the epiphytic chaos

And then there were birds; wonderful, novel, marvelous neotropical birds. A tawny antpitta hopped across the entrance road, reappearing to peer at Marcelo, who was whistling his song. An occellated tapaculo was tracked down deep in his bamboo thicket lair, where after twenty minutes of waiting Marcelo was able to point out this remarkably inconspicuous but stunning bird. The tapaculo scratched and kicked in the litter, whistling away, oblivious to our presence as we admired the bright stars on his inky back and the deep burnished chestnut of his head and rump. Scarlet breasted and blue-winged mountain-tanagers flocked through the canopy, hummingbirds--preposterous sword-billeds, great-winged saphires, golden-breasted pufflegs and more--savagely attacked the feeders and each other, and Andean Guans lurked about amongst the branches. We strolled only a mile or so into the preserve and then, winded from the elevation, turned back to the car as the sun rose and the birds quieted. Already we had seen and heard dozens of new birds, hundreds of strange new plants, and our day had just begun. Awaiting us was the long drive down to our destination for the night and home for the next few days, the town of Mindo.

Ecuadorian Odyssey

I've just returned from Ecuador, the tiny country nestled in between Peru and Colombia on the Northwest flank of South America. It is a mind-blowingly diverse country, and one that deserves far more than just the two weeks I spent in it. But within those two weeks I encountered much of what makes the Neotropics so special. Over the days to come, I will hopefully share some of those moments here.