Friends;

More about our Ecuador birding:

We come around the corner and someone exclaims, “OH, WOW!! Look at them!” A swarm of hummingbirds dances at a gallery of feeders festooning shrubs a few yards away. Between jolts of high-octane juice they fuss and chase, squabble and perform aerial duets. They squeak cartoonishly and buzz like angry bees. They fill the afternoon with a presence all out of proportion to their diminutive size.

These hummers are gorgeous and they know it, all flash and dazzle as they zip and zoom, strutting their stuff on this airy fashion runway. The sun strikes fire on gleaming plumage: Glinting violets, purples and lavenders; smoldering bronzes, rubies and umbers; sparkling greens and emeralds. A heart-stopping turquoise.

And they’re a squabblesome lot, busy and self-important in the way of the hummingbird tribe. The tiniest hummers seem to be the feistiest. Excepting the fact that they have the moxie to back up their bravado, you might say they suffer from a Napoleon complex. “Hey! Get off my feeder!” a zooming mite seems to say as it strafes a bird three times it size, ripping so close that there’s a clatter of wings as the two meet. The larger bird always gives way.

Over the next few minutes our Ecuadorian guide Xavier Munoz ticks off the names of the ten species we’re seeing: Green-crowned Woodnymph, Fawn-breasted Brilliant, Booted Racket-tail, Rufous-tailed Hummingbird, Empress Brilliant, Purple-throated Woodstar, Brown Violetear, Purple-bibbed Whitetip, and perhaps most beautiful of all with its scintillant turquoise cap and gorget, the Andean Emerald. At least that’s what I scribble in my field notebook in moments when I can bear to take my eyes off the birds, but the polysyllabic cascade completely snarls my short-term auditory memory and inside my head it sounds like this:

• Whiteneckedrufousbrilliantwhatchamacallit... “Hey!! Who’s that on the last feeder?”
• Andeanwoodstarrackettailfawnbreast...“Oh, Wow!! “
• Whitetipbootedgreencrownedsomethingorother...“Geez, Will you look at that!! “
• Fawnbreastedvioletearbootedgreencrownedwhoozit...“My God, they’re beautiful!“

We struggle to learn their markings for ourselves and a few are so distinctive they’re easy. The Booted Racket-tail is a cinch. The males are four and a half inches long, of which fully two and a half inches are tail. Longer than body and bill combined, that tail sets this little guy apart. He sports two slender tail shafts, each fobbed at the tip with a round blue-black blade the size of a dime–the “racket” for which the species is named. And just for good measure, he’s adorned his underbelly at the base of each leg with a tiny puff of dazzling white, so cottony-pure it’s as if he’s flown up to the top of one of those sunlit stacks of cumulus that come tilting from Pacific lowlands of an afternoon and snatched a couple of puffs for his pantaloons. And when he perches, the tiniest imaginable pink claws emerge from those cottony tufts, making him, well ... adorable.

Then there’s the Andean Emerald, with its amazing once-seen-never-forgotten turquoise cap and gorget. Hovering at a feeder or flower he shows an unusual-for-a-hummingbird light bluish hue that begs notice. Then he turns, flares his throat and crown and is transformed. He’s been collecting the tropical sun and now releases the stored energy in a scintillant flash from tiny metallic feathers, each one erected for maximum effect. Having burned his incredible image in your memory, he turns and zips away the very next instant.

Ecuador, a nation about the size of Colorado, boasts over 130 hummingbird species. They are a showy tribe and taxonomists have had a field day naming them. There are the sickelbills, lancebills and awlbills, the coquettes and hermits, the hillstars, emeralds and brilliants, the plumeleteers and woodnymphs, the saphirewings and velvetbreasts, the sunangels and fairies. And these are just clan names. With their descriptives, full species names conjure fabulous images: the Shining Sunbeam and Sparkling Violetear, the Green-tailed Trainbearer and Long-tailed Sylph, the Purple-throated Woodstar and Gorgeted Sunangel. Luscious names for luscious birds.

The hummers live up to those names. The tiny Purple-throated Woodstar, barely three inches long–bill included–boasts a gorget that shoots violet-purple flashes when the mood strikes. The Velvet-purple Coronet is a multi-hued work of cloisine, whose deep blue upper parts swallow light one moment and return it the next with burning blue and green incandescence.

There are phantasmagorical hummingbirds, the ones that can’t possibly exist–except that they do. The Sword-billed Hummingbird measures a full foot from tip to tail and sports a seven-inch bill that’s longer than its body. It sips nectar from a species of grand trumpet flower with six-inch blossoms. The whopping Giant Hummingbird is nearly as big as the American Robin. The Great Saphirewing hovers with wingbeats so slow you wonder how it stays aloft on those richly indigoed pinions.

Dazzled by this first encounter, we are eager for more and will see 40 species of hummingbirds in our eight days of Ecuador birding. Some, we’ll merely glimpse as they rocket among the blossoms. Others will hover so close they’ll fan our faces with their downdraft. A few will perch on our fingers. We’ll delight in their dazzling plumages and wild aerobatics as we struggle to learn their mind-warping names. And to get our heads around the fact that such beautiful creatures exist at all.

Regards,

Keith and Cheryl