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.