Across the Andes - August 4, 2010

On Wednesday we slept in late (until 6 AM), and enjoyed our last Mindo breakfast of fresh squeezed blackberry juice, flakey buttery breads with jam, eggs, coffee, and slices of fresh fruit. Our new driver Miguel showed up with our new guide (conveniently also named Marcello) and we were on the road around 8. Our plan was to bird our way up and over the Andes, en route to Cabanas San Isidro on the East slope. We wound our way up to the inter-Andean plateau, and after driving through a few suburbs of Quito we stopped in a dusty back lot, where we saw a golden-rumped euphonia flitting around the bushes. A simple start to what would be become an epic day of new bird after new bird.

Next we wound our way to the high paramo near the Papallacta Pass. This was an ancient portal across the Andes to the Amazon, and had long been used by native peoples to traverse the often snow-covered summits of the Equatorial Andes. We were over twelve thousand feet high, and the ground was covered with strange spongy alpine-like plants and laced with trails of icy mist. We tracked down Andean tit-spinetails and Sierra finches, but the harsh wind made birding difficult and we had little patience for time spent outside the warm car. So we continued on, to the cloud forests on the Eastern side of the Andes.

blooming bushes of the paramo

We stopped near the thermals of Papallacta to eat lunch, and stumbled upon a fantastic mixed flock of tanagers and flower-piercers, as well as one of the more spectacular high-elevation hummingbirds, the stunning purple-backed thornbill. Moving down again, we stopped to wander the grounds of Guango Lodge. The hummingbird feeders at Guango were overwhelming, with sylphs and swordbills and sunangels and woodstars all zipping about inches from our faces. After sipping coffee and making use of the first truly plush bathroom facilities of our trip, we walked through an adjoining pasture down to a torrential river. There, on a rock 100 meters downstream, perched a female torrent duck! We watched her swim about until she vanished in the foam and slipped out of sight, and then we piled back in the car and continued our journey.

the preposterous sword-billed hummingbird

collared inca and tourmaline sunangel

Our last stop of the day was a dirt road near the town of Baeza, close to our destination San Isidro. The scrubby forest bordering the road was overwhelmingly full of birds. Trees filled with turquoise, golden, emerald and silver shimmers of tanagers. Woodpeckers, spinetails, bush-tanagers, brush-finches, barbets, foliage-gleaners and more whirled past in dizzying succession. We crept along the road until it got too dark to see, all the while finding new bird species after new bird species, until we finally were forced to call it quits. All told we saw almost 90 species of birds, nearly all of them new to me. Spent, we arrived at the beautiful Cabanas San Isidro in pouring rain. We were met by the proprietor, the lovely Carmen Bustamente, who saw us to our cabins and alerted us to dinner at 7.

runoff from the paramo splashing down to the Amazon

Dinner was superb--Indian nouveau with curried meatballs and cardamom bread pudding. We shared a table with a couple from St. Louis who had been to South America many times, often while leading tour groups, and we listened to the equivalent of birding war-stories while the evening wore on. After dinner our table-mates pointed out an owl perched near the cabins--an undescribed subspecies of black-banded owl. There were hot showers awaiting us back at our cabin; a magnificent end to a magnificent day.