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ECUADOR
Friday 2nd November - Sunday 25th November 2007
János Oláh
Ecuador undeniably offers the best of the ’Bird Continent’ with most species of birds per square mile in the World! On this unbelievable tour we travelled through a wide range of habitats, all full of birds. Birdquest has operated a very long series of successful tours to Ecuador over the last fourteen years. The 2007 tour was a great success and extremely eventful with a good number of Ecuadorian and other South American specialities. We recorded a staggering 800 species of which 728 were seen and all this happened in a mere 22 days.
We visited the regular birding hotspots for which this tour has been known for a long time plus, as usual, some exciting new additions to the itinerary! This was the first time we visited the magnificent Antisana Volcano in the heart of the National Park of the same name. The visit proved very successful with all the usual high altitude birds plus the highly localised Black-faced Ibis, as well as a wide range of raptors from the huge Andean Condor to the small winter visitor, Merlin. Following the last two years’ successes in the pioneering visits to the Angel Paz ‘antpitta forest’ we made another superb day-trip to this magical place. Not only did we get heart-stopping views of two Giant Antpittas but even the smart Yellow-breasted Antpitta and the ultra shy Moustached Antpitta performed brilliantly! It is simply an amazing experience as these shy forest floor denizens take a juicy earthworm from Angel’s hand! This superb place can be really appreciated if you spent many many hours looking for antpittas in the ‘pre-Angel’ era!
Other highlights were the wonderful lodges throughout the tour starting in the Mindo area at Septimo Paraiso, continuing with La Selva and Gareno in Amazonia and finishing in San Isidro near Cosanga. The Wildsumaco lodge on the east slope unfortunately was not open yet (now expected in February 2008) but their hummingbird feeders were superb, with Napo Sabrewing and Many-spotted Hummingbird. Septimo Paraiso was a great base to explore the western foothills with a whole selection of goodies like Plate-billed Mountain Toucan, Toucan Barbet, Ocellated Tapaculo, Club-winged Manakin and a great variety of hummingbirds. The well-known La Selva was as brilliant as ever with specialities like Zigzag and Agami Herons, Lined and Buckley’s Forest-Falcons, Sungrebe, Undulated and Cocha Antshrikes, Black-spotted Bare-eye, Orange-crested Manakin and White-lored Antpitta all appearing nicely on cue! Our luck continued in the rather simple, newly opened, Gareno Lodge, set amidst Huaorani Indian Territory, where day-roosting Rufous Potoo, a fascinating pair of Crested Owls (voted the bird of the trip), Cinnamon Neopipo and a magical army ant swarm with Reddish-winged Bare-eyes, White-plumed Antbirds and Hairy-crested Antbird were the highlights. The cabanas San Isidro area with the Huacamayos ridge is famous for some of the best Andean birding and it certainly lived up to this billing with a wide range of mouth-watering birds such as Collared Forest-Falcon, Golden-headed Quetzal and Yellow-whiskered Bush-Tanager just to name but a few plus extremely fruitful nightbirding with a gorgeous male Swallow-tailed Nightjar, the rare Andean Potoo, White-throated Screech-Owl and numerous Rufous-bellied Nighthawks!
We had numerous breathtaking encounters with those gaudy colour combinations no human artist could ever have come up with such as the displaying male Andean Cock-of-the Rocks at Angel’s antpitta forest, superb cotingas and toucans in the lowlands and those multicoloured manakins and tanagers on both slopes of the Andes. Among the procession of specialities that performed beautifully (and not mentioned above) the glowing red-eyed Silvery Grebe, Slate-coloured Hawk, the rare Semicollared Hawk, the localised Aplomado Falcon, Rufous-fronted Wood-Quail, Torrent Duck, the handsome Sunbittern, Rufous-bellied Seedsnipe, both Andean and Noble Snipes, White-throated Quail Dove, Red-and-green Macaw, Great Horned Owl, Lyre-tailed Nightjar, the lovely Wire-crested Thorntail, the amazing Sword-billed Hummingbird, Velvet-purple Coronet, Giant Hummingbird, Ecuadorian Hillstar, Great Jacamar, Barred Puffbird, the hard-to-see Lanceolated Monklet, Cream-coloured Woodpecker, Yellow-throated Woodpecker, Long-billed Woodcreeper, the localised Double-banded Greytail, Uniform Treehunter, Tawny-throated and Black-tailed Leaftossers, Foothill and Río Suno Antwrens, Yellow-browed and Striated Antbirds, both forms of the marvellous Spot-backed Antbird, the shy Striated Antthrush, the nicely coloured Chestnut-crowned Antpitta, Chestnut-belted Gnateater, the glowing Orange-breasted Fruiteaters, Grey-tailed Piha, Southern Nightingale-Wren, the gorgeous Wire-tailed Manakin, the Moss-backed Tanagers and the rare Yellow-shouldered Grosbeak spring to mind!
We visited an amazing cross-section of habitats and a multitude of hummingbird feeders resulting in an incredible total of 67 species of hummingbirds, which is the highest total for any Birdquest tour ever of this family! Within the steamy lowland and foothills jungles featuring hundreds of tree species we found an enormous diversity of antpittas, antthrushes, antshrikes, antwrens and antbirds, and recorded a staggering total of 78 species. Other ‘family’ totals to highlight this year’s tour were 10 species of trogons; 8 jacamars including white-chinned and yellow-billed; 10 species of puffbirds; 6 species of barbets; 14 species of toucans, 22 species of woodpeckers with point-blank views of Scale-breasted and Yellow-throated; 43 species of ‘furnarids’; 13 species of cotingas and 14 species of manakins to mention a few. We also recorded 27 species of nightbirds of which we managed to see 19! Every tour to this wonderful country is different but there is always something really special for us Birdquesters! It will certainly take some time to ‘digest’ all the fantastic experiences we took home from this memorable tour!
