ECUADOR TRIP REPORT
TRIP REPORT
ROGER AND LOUISE MCGOVERN
OCTOBER 26 – NOVEMBER 16, 2008
INTRODUCTION
In the past four years Louise and I have made birding trips to Costa Rica, Arizona, New Jersey, across the width of Canada, South Africa, Madagascar, Texas and Poland. However, the one major bird region in the world that we had never visited was South America and we decided to make this our destination in late 2008.
After sounding out many people with experience of birding in South America, we made the decision to go to Ecuador on our first foray to the continent, based on species diversity, ease of getting around, personal safety, availability of good accommodation, and the mixture of Andean and Amazonian habitats.
Our good friends Roger and Carol Skan in the UK had made contact with Xavier Munoz, an owner of the Ecuadorian tour company Neblina Forest (www.neblinaforest.com ), at the British Bird Fair in 2006 and again in 2007. They were sufficiently impressed with Xavier and his operation that the four of us made the decision to use Neblina Forest to organise our birding visit to Ecuador in 2008.
After some e-mail exchanges, a 16-day birding itinerary was established based around the high Andean areas and associated lower(western and eastern) slopes in the Quito region, together with a side trip to the Napo Wildlife Center in the Ecuadorian Amazon Basin.
With Ecuador’s bird list standing at more than 1600 species, it was clearly not viable to visit all areas and habitats in such a short period of time and the final itinerary was based on seeing good numbers of species as well as experiencing both the high country of the Andean paramo and the equally spectacular Amazonian jungle. In the brochure of Neblina Forest, they state that the average expected number of species seen on our itinerary is between 450 and 500. In the event, my final species count was 538 seen, with many more heard.
I use the term “my” because we all had different counts mostly because, during intense bird waves in thick dark rainforest, it is very difficult to see and identify every bird that passes through and we all saw and missed birds that others missed and saw! Of these 538 species, a total of 366 were life birds, which was rather disappointing considering that it was our first trip to South America. However, our previous birding in Costa Rica and Trinidad together with the good numbers of North American migrants led to the lower-than-expected tally of lifers. With such a huge number of birds expected and seen, none of us had any serious wish list birds (with the possible exception of Harpy Eagle, which we didn’t see) and so there were no real missed or seen target species.
However, the birds that I particularly remember as special were the pair of low flying Andean Condors in the Antisana Ecological Reserve (the only ones that we saw), a pair of Rufous-bellied Seedsnipes in the impossible high country near Papallacta, and the unforgettable Hoatzins along the black water creek at the Napo Wildlife Center (NWC). Also noteworthy is that we saw 55 species of hummingbirds and 76 species of tanagers but trying to absorb the details of huge numbers of species in a short period of time was extremely difficult.
Itinerary
October 26, 2008
departed Sydney and arrived in Quito (thanks to the 16 hour time difference)
October 27, 2008
Louise and I did a little birding in Quito at Parque La Carolina whilst awaiting the arrival of Roger and Carol Skan
October 28, 2008
day’s birding at Parque Jerusalen near Quito
October 29, 2008
departed Quito for Mido via Nono and the Tandayapa Valley (overnight at Sacha Tamia Lodge)
October 30, 2008
Milpe Road and Milpe Cloudforest (overnight at Sacha Tamia Lodge)
October 31, 2008
Las Muna Road, Silancha (Mindo Cloud Forest Foundation), Los Bancos and Rio Blanco (overnight at Sacha Tamia Lodge)
November 1, 2008
Birdpeace Refuge (Angel Pax’s antpitta farm), Alambi River and Reserve and then to Quito
November 2, 2008
day trip to the Antisana Ecological Reserve in the high paramo
November 3, 2008
Quito to Coca (by air), canoe trip down the Napo River to the NWC
November 4, 2008
NWC - lodge tower, canopy tower, canoe trip (rained nearly all day)
November 5, 2008
NWC - long morning trail walk, late afternoon walk to canopy tower area
November 6, 2008
NWC - canoe trip to Napo River and the clay licks
November 7, 2008
departed NWC and returned to Quito via Coca
November 8, 2008
Quito to Papallacta (overnight at Termas de Papallacta)
November 9, 2008
Papallacta to Guano Lodge (Papallacta River), the Rio Quijos Valley and San Isidro (overnight at San Isidro Lodge)
November 10, 2008
San Isidro and Antisana Reserve (overnight at San Isidro Lodge)
November 11, 2008
San Isidro to Quito
November 12, 2008
day trip to the Yanacocha Reserve
November 13, 2008
departed Quito on an evening flight
November 16, 2008
arrived home in Sydney
Day by Day
Sunday 26 October, 2008
We departed from Sydney at 10.45am on Lan Chile flight 800 which stopped in Auckland en route to our destination of Santiago where we arrived at 12.55pm on the same day. While waiting for our connecting flight, we had a look for bird life from the terminal building seeing only house sparrows and feral pigeons at first.
Then we caught sight of a smallish raptor which we later identified as a Chimango Caracara, our first and only lifer in Chile! We departed from Santiago at 4.05pm on Lan Ecuador flight 1447 which arrived in Quito at 8.55pm after a short stop in Guayaquil.
It had been 30 hours since leaving our home in Cremorne and so we were delighted to be met by an agent and driver from Neblina Forest who escorted us on the fairly short drive (it being a drizzly cold Sunday night) to the Hotel Sebastian.
Monday 27 October, 2008
With our official tour not starting until tomorrow, and Roger and Carol Skan not arriving from London until late afternoon, we had a spare day to spend in Quito. Our friend from Neblina Forest last night had suggested that a local park called Parque La Carolina might be worth a visit and so we picked up a map from hotel reception and set off on the half hour walk to the park.
On the way there, we saw many of the two species of birds which seem to dominate the Quito streetscape, Great Thrush and Eared Dove –and in any patch of thicker vegetation, we would find a lovely Rufous-collared Sparrow.
On arrival at the park in the cool of the mid-morning (Quito’s daily temperature range is from 10degC to 20degC almost every day of the year) things didn’t look terribly promising since much of the park was open grass used for picnics and ball games.
We did find a pair of migrating Eastern Kingbird (our only sighting of this species in the trip) and a Swainson ’s Thrush before coming across a small fenced off botanical garden with some good vegetation and a small freshwater stream. We spent the rest of our morning here recording Summer Tanager, Solitary Sandpiper, Black Flowerpiercer, Black-and-White Warbler, Sparkling Violetear and Cinareous Conebill. The violetear was our first hummingbird of the trip and, along with the Black-tailed Trainbearer, is a common bird in urban Quito. Hunger and jetlag brought a halt to our brief birding foray and we finished with 11 species for the day.
Tuesday 28 October, 2008
Very early start at 04:30 and then drive to reach EL REFUGIO DE LAS ANTPITTAS, where Angel Paz has developed a unique relationship with three antpitta species: Giant ,Yellow-breasted, and Moustached.
There are also good chances to see Andean Cock of the Rock at a hide that has been set up appropriately to admire these creatures during their lek activities. After this, a walk along the trails is a must to enjoy the unique richness of this forest. Some birds likely to be seen in the forest are Golden-headed quetzal, Olivacious piha, Toucan barbet, Black-chinned mountain-tanager. After this we will walk back to the entrance to enjoy a huge tipycal breakfast. After the meal continue with a walk to see some other unique birds in these area such as Scaled and Orange-breasted fruiteaters, Beryl-spangle tanager, Golden tanager, and various hummers around the property.
Afternoon birding session happens at Sacha Tamia lodge, where we will see hummingbirds coming to the feeders. Some special birds can be seen here like Velvet-purple coronet, Violet-tailed sylph, Brown Inca, Collared Inca, among other 17 species registered in this place. On our way back to Quito we will stop at Calacali and try looking for some dry forest birds like White-tailed shryke-tyrant and Tufted tit-tyrant. Return to Quito for an overnight at our local hotel.
Tuesday 28 October, 2008
Roger and Carol arrived safely last night and this morning at 7.00am (actually, due to a mix up it was 7.35am and we saw Black-tailed Trainbearer while we were waiting) we were picked up at the hotel by Alejandro for our first day of ‘proper birding’ at a park north of Quito called Parque Jerusalen. Alex said that this was just an easy few hours of birding and that we wouldn’t get a large species count. As it turned out, the habitat was different to anywhere that we visited subsequently (quite dry and scrubby) and we saw quite a few species on this day that we didn’t see again throughout the trip. After getting out of the city, we turned off a main highway onto a dirt track which looked out over dry bushy slopes down to a fast flowing stream.
Without moving more than a few metres, we saw sixteen new trip birds in about 20 minutes of watching. Several of these were not new species for Louise and me including Blue-and-white Swallow, Blue-grey Tanager, Tropical Kingbird, Streaked Saltator, Southern Beardless Tyrannulet, Vermillion Flycatcher and Lesser Goldfinch. Other species here which were lifers included Hooded Siskin, Scrub Tanager, Dull-coloured Grassquit,
Ash-breasted Sierra-Finch and a juvenile Black-chested Buzzard-Eagle perched on a distant snag close to the stream. We were to get much better looks at this bird later on in the trip. This Vermillion Flycatcher posed very nicely for us.
We got back into the bus and continued up the track for another half an hour and arrived at the Parque Jerusalen which is used as an interpretive centre for school groups and the like, but we were the only patrons today. There was not a huge amount of bird activity in the park which comprised semi-open vegetation with some bushland, but we saw some good birds. At first we had Common Ground-Dove, Harris’ Hawk, Southern House Wren (not yet split from the nominate race) and a pair of Vermillion Flycatchers tending a nest with young, all birds familiar to us from North America.
We also started to see some lovely members of the tanager family including Blue-and-yellow Tanager and Golden-rumped Euphonia as well as Southern Yellow Grosbeak, Streak-throated Bush-Tyrant and a skulking, but well seen Azara’s Spinetail. We also added some lovely hummers to our list including Western Emerald, Purple-collared Woodstar and the world’s largest hummingbird, the very impressive Giant Hummingbird.
On the way back to Quito, Alex’s sharp eyes picked up a group of swifts from the bus and we pulled over to get good views of White-tipped Swift. We arrived back at our hotel in the mid afternoon as Neblina Forest had arranged a late afternoon tour of the Old City for us, in the rain as it transpired. However, we were very happy with our first day having recorded 29 new species for the day.
Wednesday 29 October, 2008
After a very early breakfast, Alejandro and Alfonso picked us up from the Sebastian at 6.00am and we set off on our first of our three major side trips from Quito, this one being a four day trip to the western slopes of the Andes based out of Sacha Tamia Lodge in Milpe. After leaving the urban sprawl of Quito behind us, we turned on to the narrow and mountainous Old Mindo Road, normally devoid of traffic but unfortunately this morning, very busy, as the main road to Milpe had been closed. We started in quite high country and the weather was distinctly chilly, not to say almost freezing! After a frustrating sort of start when we heard five new species (of which four were antpittas) without seeing them, we began to start seeing some birds. With the habitat being a mixture of open grassland and semi-forested areas, the mix of species was very good.
Our first new bird of the day was a hummingbird, a Tyrian Metaltail followed by an impressive Andean Guan, Scarlet-bellied Mountain-Tanager, the wonderfully named Supercilliaried Hemispingus (a member of the tanager family), Spectacled Whitestar, Sapphire-vented Puffleg and our first woodpecker of the trip, the very handsome Crimson-mantled Woodpecker. As the morning progressed, we eased into steadily lower elevations and the cool morning air slowly warmed up, although the weather was still fairly overcast. We continued to add new species to our list with a whole variety of tanagers, hummingbirds, flycatchers and warblers. A very brief sighting of a fast-moving White-rumped Hawk was somewhat frustrating as this is a scarce bird in Ecuador and Alejandro was disappointed that we didn’t get a good view – however, we were to have spectacular views of this species later in the trip.
As lunchtime approached, we had good views of a huge Black-and-Chestnut Eagle and then Alex showed us our first Andean Cock-of-the-Rock of the trip sitting on a nest in a dark overhang of rock at the side of the road.
A few minutes later, we arrived at our lunch site, a lovely secluded house in the thick forest of the Tandayapa Valley owned by a couple devoted to all things related to birds, Tony Nunnery and Barbara Bolz-Nunnery. He was away guiding a VENT bird tour in Panama and she produces wonderful artwork of the many hummingbirds which come to their feeders around the house.
While we sat and ate our boxed lunches at the back of the house, we saw no less than 12 new species of hummingbirds – it was absolutely incredible. Even more incredible is that their regular yard list of hummingbirds is between 15 and 20, and their total yard list is a massive 40 species, both of these figures being world records. All hummingbirds are works of art but probably our favourite at this location and for the trip was the lovely Violet-tailed Sylph.
We reluctantly departed from our lunch stop having stocked up with Barbara’s hand-painted postcards of all the hummingbirds that we had been watching. We continued down the western Andean slope entering dense cloud forest as we approached the Milpe area and the weather became even gloomier. New birds kept on showing and we had our first sightings of some of Ecuador’s most brilliantly-coloured tanagers including Grass-green Tanager, the amazing Golden Tanager, Beryl-spangled Tanager and Golden-naped Tanager. Unfortunately, the dark conditions did not show the birds at their best nor did it allow any possibility of photography, but we did see many of these birds again in better light during the trip. We began seeing our birds in waves of up to 15 or so species travelling together, and seeing them and identifying them in the poor light became quite difficult not to say fraught! Alejandro would be drawing our attention to each bird that he saw, sometimes pointing his green laser to indicate the approximate location, but we all missed some birds during these frantic sessions and hence finished the trip with somewhat different species counts.
As we approached the Milpe area, we parked the vehicle and walked along a well-formed track to search for one of the locality’s major target birds, the Plate-billed Mountain-Toucan. Having been told that some of the commercial bird tours spend two days looking for this bird without success, and with us walking in thick cloud fog late in the afternoon, our expectations were not high. We did hear a Spillman’s Tapaculo calling on the ground in dense vegetation near the track. From our experiences of tapaculos in Costa Rica we knew that our chances of seeing this skulking little non-descript bird were very low as they never venture from the undergrowth. However, Alex moved to one side and played his tape just at a point where a one metre wide cleared track could be seen in the undergrowth. “Watch that track and don’t take your eyes off it” said Alex as he started the tape and, suddenly, our little brown bird ran at 100mph across the little clearing and was gone! At about two nanoseconds, it was probably our briefest sighting of a bird ever and we were all in fits of laughter at such a bizarre experience.
It was extremely quiet now in the cloud forest, but I caught sight of a large bird landing in a high tree in the fog which I initially thought to be a raptor. However, Alex got the scope on it and it turned out to be a Plate-billed Mountain-Toucan which was then joined by its mate – we were all delighted to see this elusive and impressive bird. Shortly afterwards, we found our second guan of a long day, this time a Sickle-winged Guan and during another late bird wave, we had more tanagers including Lemon-rumped Tanager, Orange-bellied Euphonia, Flame-faced Tanager and Blue-winged Mountain-Tanager the latter bird bringing our day’s tally to 76 new species and the trip list to 116. We arrived at Sacha Tania Lodge in steady rain where we had a bit of a walk to our chalet. Then it was a quick shower, dinner and a final surprise when we left the main lodge after dinner, when we found that Alfonso had located a Black-and-White Owl in the tree right outside the entrance, and we all had good views of this handsome bird.
Thursday 30 October, 2008
As was to become the norm, we were up at 4.30am for an early breakfast and an early getaway so that we could be on the Milpe Road, some 30 minutes drive away, at dawn. It was still overcast as we left the lodge and we had our first new bird of the day before boarding the bus, a White-lined Tanager.
By the time we reached the Milpe Road, we were out of the thick cloud and the countryside was bathed in early morning sunshine.
The plan was to walk for some distance along this quiet road with our bus just following along a little way behind.
It was really my sort of birding with a mixture of open fields, hedgerows and a few stands of trees providing a good variety of habitat. We immediately started seeing many species in the sunshine including Pacific Hornero, Masked Water-Tyrant, Scrub Blackbird, Yellow-faced Grassquit, Black-striped Sparrow and Bran-coloured Flycatcher. A superb Swallow Tanager made a wonderful picture in the morning sun as did a Bronze-winged Parrot and their photographs are showing here.
As we continued our walk along the road, the wonderful variety of new birds continued, with our first motmot of the trip, a Rufous Motmot, Choco Toucan, Fawn-breasted Tanager, Blue-necked Tanager and Guira Tanager along with a whole array of flycatchers including Common Tody-Flycatcher (ssp esclateri), One-coloured Becard, Dusky-capped Flycatcher, Sooty-headed Tyrannulet and Golden-faced Tyrannulet.
At mid-morning, we were seeing less new species and re-boarded our bus and drove the short distance to the Milpe Cloudforest Foundation’s reserve. At the reserve’s hummingbird feeders at the entrance we added White-whiskered Hermit, Green-crowned Woodnymph and Green Thorntail to our burgeoning list.
Within just a couple of minutes of starting our walk, we saw the amazing quinella of Pale-mandibled Aracari, Broad-billed Motmot and Crimson-rumped Toucanet each of them spectacular birds. More tanagers kept coming including Yellow-throated Bush-Tanager, Ochre-breasted Tanager, Silver-throated Tanager and Rufous-throated Tanager and we also started to see some of the skulkers of the deep forest including Slaty Antwren, Red-faced Spinetail, Russet Antshrike, Grey-breasted Wood-Wren and Spotted Barbtail.
Day 7
We will drive on the way to Cuenca exploring the hills that surround the Cuxibamba Valley, were Loja is located. There we will try to collect all those birds that we have not seen in previous days.
We will also look for some new birds for the trip such as Rainbow starfronlet, Three-banded warbler, Red-faced parrot, Chesnut-crowned anpitta.
After having our box lunch we will drive straight to Catamayo airport to catch or flight back to Quito. Upon our arrival to Quito we will be transfered to our Hotel.
Day 8
Early departure to Antisana, a private reserve that protects Paramo habitats (slightly above 11,000 feet / 3353 meters). This unique place harbors populations of the endangered Black-faced Ibis.
It is also a great place to look for Andean Condor. Other important species are Andean-tit spinetail, Streak-backed canastero, Ecuadorian hillstar, Caranculated caracara,
Paramo pipit, Anden gull, Torrent duck, Black-winged ground-dove, Andean lapwing, Andean Coot, Andean-ruddy duck, and Silvery greebe, among others.
After lunch at the Hacienda or a box lunch at the La Mica Lake we will drive straight to Quito Airport to check in for our international flight. Otherwise overnight in Quito and then next day early morning transfer to our flight back home.
