Jeremy Barker
- Contents
- Introduction
- Species seen
- Images
Introduction
We set out from London Heathrow on the evening of November 27th on a BA short-haul flight, arrived in Madrid around 11 p.m. and caught the overnight LAN-Chile flight to Quito; a perfectly decent and comfortable trip over the Atlantic.
We arrived at Guayaquil airport, where we had to abandon the plane for an hour. A typically rapid tropical dawn meant we could do a little birding before we had to re-embark and head on into the Andes. A Tropical Kingbird flycatching against the windows of the airport was Na's first neotropical bird... This was rapidly followed by a handful of Southern Rough-winged Swallows and a brief view of a Long-tailed Mockingbird, before a small Chaetura swift flew over - either Grey-rumped or Tumbes Swift. Finally, a small number of Great-tailed Grackles lolloped around beside the runway as we taxied out to take off for Quito.
We arrived in Quito after a short flight over some spectacular scenery, wound our way through an unsmiling immigration process and emerged into a pleasantly warm sunny day. From Quito we had organised a transfer to the Mindo Gardens Hotel, just outside the small town of Mindo - about 2 hours drive northwest of Quito. Our driver - Sandro - spent the journey explaining to us the many varied and horrific experiences a traveller could hope to encounter in Ecuador, ranging from the risks of Quito, especially after dark, to the dangers of travelling the roads in bus or hire-car. Outside the car, the scenery rapidly changed from the rather trashed arid inter-Andean valley north of the city to the more lush, verdant slopes of the Western Andes. The car wound down the slope, overtaking a variety of grunting lorries and colourful buses, and being overtaken by a proportion of apparently suicidal car and van drivers.
After a couple of hours of winding along the road, we turned left off it, and dropped into the small dusty town of Mindo, looking rather reminiscent of a stage-set for a Hollywood Western. We slipped through the town onto a proper dirt track and drove for a further 15 dusty minutes to the hotel, arriving thirsty and dusty and profoundly grateful to have stopped travelling. Settling in involved one of us taking the opportunity for a half-hour snooze and the other extracting binoculars and camera to saunter round the hotel grounds. I leave it to you to decide which of us did which...!
After 'resting', we took a trip across the river in a small hand-powered cable-car, then walked up to the old Nono-Mindo road, very slowly and steadily, with frequent pauses for breath, wildlife and mouthfuls of water. We finally gained the ridge and wandered along until we reached a small tree in full flower, which was attended by something in the region of a hundred hummingbirds - mainly Booted Racket-tails and Sparkling Violet-ears, but with the occasional White-whiskered Hermit and Purple-bibbed White-tip in attendance. We sat on the bank and admired the comings and goings of the tiny birds, before heading back reluctantly to the hotel for some fresh-pressed fruit juice, then dinner and a delightfully deep sleep. The unexpected sight of an agouti in mid-afternoon was a surprise - to me for its unexpectedness, and to Na for it's name ("It's a what?" "An Agouti." "I'll never remember that!")
9th November. We awoke early - about 4 a.m. - but fortunately managed to get back to sleep before the dawn chorus of weird whistles and shrieks, squeaks, groans and caws of tropical wildlife woke us again. We wandered along the road for a few metres before breakfast, then headed purposefully along the dusty track to Mindo to purchase some lunch. We eventually strolled into the town, to see that most of the shops were shut, and that there was very little fruit to be found. We managed to find some mangos, some empanadas for carbohydrate and a packet of biscuits for emergencies, then had a glass of fruit juice by the road and set off back for the hotel, along the ridge road.
Had we known that the ridge road would take so much longer than the valley road, we might not have attempted it, but we didn't. Somewhere along the way we attracted the attention of a blonde dog of uncertain parentage, who adopted us with some relish. He was clearly keen to be of use and soon picked up on our desire to see the local wildlife; indeed, he drew our attention to various squirrels he had treed and occasionally jogged off into the undergrowth on the trail of exciting and delicious animals he felt sure we would appreciate.
We finally dropped back down the ridge to the hotel, with our faithful companion, and Na disappeared off for a restorative snooze, whilst I once again sauntered around in search of things to photograph. Not a great deal was forthcoming, so in the end I settled down near the hummingbird feeders and enjoyed their comings and goings.
We again woke at 4 a.m. on the 10th, but this was no great problem, as we had arranged a car and guide to meet us at 4.30, for the supremely dude activity of going to see birds someone else had found. We drove peacefully back along towards Quito for half an hour, then turned off south again and wound our way up to a darkened farm. The farmer wasn't responding to flashing headlights, hazard flashers or Danny (our guide) flashing his torch around the various buildings to see where he was, so eventually we started walking down into the valley. The sky lightened to a half-light, whilst Orange-bellied Euphonias, Slate-throated Redstarts and Andean Solitaires regaled us with their morning serenades. A distant Giant Antpitta burbled some song, and a Cloud-forest Pygmy Owl trilled its way down the scale in the trees above.
The stars of the show were more extravagant than this, though. We could hear them before we saw them; a hoarse, rather soft cawing - somewhat like the exclamations of male Black Grouse mid-lek. Suddenly the trees below us were lively with woodpigeon-sized male Andean Cock-of-the-rock, leaping around branches, flaunting their bright red plumage that glowed even in the semi-gloom. Even the noisy arrival of two or three tour groups of birders couldn't quite dim the magic of the lek.
After a decent period, we left the hide and wandered about a hundred metres down a trail where we stood and waited to see what would happen as the sun rose. We found ourselves staring at phenomenally gorgeous birds with exotically unfamiliar names - like Toucan-barbet, Lineated Foliage-gleaner, Sickle-winged Guan, Violet-tailed Sylph, Golden-headed Quetzal... Again, we moved on slowly to a small fork in the path, where the tour groups had assembled, all facing a mossy stump with the air of an audience about to meet a celebrity. We waited patiently as one of the farm staff wandered up the path calling out "Maria, Maria..." - and then returned with a Giant Antpitta bounding along the path behind him. She was followed by what was apparently one of her sons, though he was more shy than she, and refused to run the gauntlet of lenses aimed at the stump. When she had sated herself on worms, we upped-sticks and continued to the favoured feeding spot of a Yellow-breasted Antpitta, and then further still to a Moustached Antpitta. Whilst the whole experience was a bit of a circus, it was also a prime chance to see three shy and spectacular antpitta species without using tape-recordings, and to do a bit of people-watching at the same time! Very instructive... A potential fourth species - Ochre-breasted - failed to show for some mysterious reason, so we were taken back towards the farm, sat before a couple of feeders and again gave over to admiration of hummingbirds. A different set of species here - Purple-throated Woodstar, Fawn-breasted Brilliant, Empress Brilliant, Tawny-bellied Hermit.
We again caught up with the tour groups at breakfast, where we watched them rush down the hill to look for a pair of Orange-breasted Fruiteater, only to return disappointed and - some of them - even confused about what they were meant to have been looking for! Oh dear... A leisurely cup of coffee later, and the news filtered up that the fruiteaters were showing again, so we wandered down the track for a hundred metres and admired them for a while; Danny was particularly pleased - they're not the easiest of birds to see normally, so to have a pair feeding quietly about 50m away from us was quite an event.
The afternoon was spent strolling around the hotel area again - first of all a sit-down by the river, where a totally unexpected Sunbittern was creeping down the opposite bank, then we crossed the river and walked downstream to a group of apparently empty buildings with fishponds beside them.
11th November. We began by walking the road by the hotel for an hour or so, then packed for a transfer back to Quito. This passed uneventfully and we were deposited at the bus station with the ominous warning that this was not a good place to hang around. So, we didn't. A quick question in the offices about buses north - and we found ourselves immediately on a bus for Cayambe, about 2 hours north of Quito.
We sat tight in the front and watched the driving with fascination! Slow, chugging lorries, laden with fuel and construction materials toiling up and down the twisting roads, each attended by an increasing queue of traffic, made up of cars, pickups, buses and less heavily-laden lorries, all of which would attempt to get by the leader of the queue as soon as visibility along the road exceeded 30m. The success of the technique is well demonstrated in some areas by the number of roadside crosses and memorials, as well as some impressively mangled crash-barriers.
The whole journey is made more exciting still by the behaviour of the buses, all of which are run by competing companies attempting to maximise the number of passenger on their bus - anyone standing or walking by the road is a potential customer, so every bus swoops to the verge with a flamboyant honking of horns and slows down, regardless of following traffic, with the bus-boy leaning out to yell their destination to you. This is then followed by a return to the flow of traffic, accompanied by a cacophony of horns from irate lorries and cars which have just been cut up...
We arrived in Cayambe in early afternoon, fortuitously just outside the tourist information and toilets! A very helpful young lady piled us with pamphlets and leaflets about the nearby Cayambe-Coca National Park, offered us information about the relative merits of nearby hotels and arranged us a car and driver to take us to the national park on the following day. The rest of the afternoon was spent re-acclimatising to living at just below 3,500m and in a wander around town. We spent a little time in the local cemetery, where bodies are interred in apartment graves, which are block-booked by the family. Painting religious icons on the sealed doors of the graves would appear to be a fairly safe job in the town!
We met our driver outside the hotel on the morning of the 12th November. After turning up a little late, he dropped in to the taxi cooperative for half an hour, then re-emerged, smiling, with a couple of plastic bags containing a light lunch for us each, somewhat unexpectedly. We finally began our drive up to the refuge below the Laguna Verde, initially cruising over smooth tarmac, then rapidly bumping over a nicely cobbled road east out of Cayambe, and eventually crawling slowly and carefully over one of the more rutted tracks it has been my pleasure to traverse... As the road climbed up out of Cayambe and the final scatter of houses fell away, the countryside gradually became more wild and open, until we entered the park itself, where ridges of grassy paramo rolled up into the cloud above. We stopped briefly to give one of the refuge workers a lift to work - Na pointing out a cracking ringtail Cinereous Harrier hunting a little way down the hill at this point. The driver rapidly picked up the fact that we were interested in birding and indicated that we should let him know as soon as we wanted to stop for something; this we promptly did, when a couple of Andean Condor appeared just across the valley, soaring effortlessly between hills and cloud.
After a surprisingly long drive, we emerged from the pickup into harsh sunshine, finding ourselves right on the vegetation line. Above us the slopes of the volcano were covered with bare rock and sandy grit until the ice and snow began. At our feet was a fascinating community of incredibly tough alpine plants, many of them half-familiar, some of them completely novel to us both. We stumbled, limbs and lungs protesting, back down the road for a while, whilst Bar-winged Cinclodes and Plumbeous Sierra-finches sang and displayed around us. Further down, a patch of orange-flowered Chuquiragua jussieui, a high-altitude species of Aster, sheltered a couple of male Ecuadorian Hillstars - a rather immaculate hummingbird.
We eventually retraced our steps back towards the refuge and rejoined our patient driver. Although slightly surprised that we weren't too bothered about the crater lake, he accepted the apparent madness of birders and we headed back downhill, pausing to watch Brown-bellied Swallows gathering nest material for their bankside holes, a Carunculated Caracara and a scattering - literally - of Tapeti Sylvilagus brasiliensis (a.k.a. Brazilian Rabbit) in amongst the tussocks of Paja (Calamagrostis intermedia) and cushions of Plantago rigida. There is a reasonable quantity of Polylepis woodland near the road here, which would surely repay some work by birders with their own vehicle.
We left Cayambe at the appropriately birder-type hour of 5.30 a.m., walking up through town to find the bus to Quito. We didn't have to search hard: one coming down the road hooted us, and the busboy leaned out to tell us how dangerous it was to walk the deserted streets with our rucksacks at this time of day, and would we like a lift to the terminal? Stage one began... and two hours later ended, painlessly, in Quito. We then boarded a taxi across town to the new terminal Quitumbe, south of the city. This took longer than anticipated, mainly due to a spectacularly long traffic-jam in one of the tunnels along the highway - conditions in the tunnel well described by the workers wearing full-face gas masks whilst they shovelled dirt.
We made it into the bus station - a very swish building indeed - found the correct desk for buses to Latacunga, and within half an hour, were hurtling south, away from Quito. This surprised us somewhat, but we discovered that the local buses have an enviable ability to time their connections so that buses in arrive about 10 minutes before buses out. Coming from a country where the bus out invariably leaves 10 minutes before the bus in arrives, this was quite a shock. Another couple of hours later we arrived at Latacunga, where we boarded the northern route bus for Chugchilán. This took us a leg-cramping four hours in the end, generally with a variety of people or produce propped against us - at one stop some 40-50 schoolchildren crammed themselves on board, gradually dissipating in dribs and drabs. The heavens opened about three quarters of the way to Chugchilán; mercifully we worked our way through it after an hour - the combination of an overladen bus, hairpin bends, slick cobbles and uncertain brakes on the approaching lorries made us both slightly nervous...
Finally, weary, sweaty and desperately in need of a walk, we arrived at the Black Sheep Inn, to be enthusiastically welcomed by the young couple currently volunteering there. A couple of pints of coca tea and a shower revived us, and we immediately headed up the ridge behind the hostal for a short walk. Black-tailed Trainbearers - a spectacular hummingbird with tail-streamers about three times the length of their bodies - crackled and zipped in the bushes all around, Band-tailed Pigeons flocked the trees and a distant Short-eared Owl floated gently across the grasses. The cloud hanging low in the valley made for a spectacularly atmospheric walk as well.
On the 14th, we set out on one of the many walks described on the local map, which had been handed to us when we arrived. The canyon loop, as it is described, takes you downhill from the hostal, to the bottom of the canyon, then gradually upstream along the river, then a tributary of the this river, and finally up the local tracks and back to Chugchilán... Yesterday's cloud had entirely vapourised, leaving a fresh, sun-drenched day in which to enjoy the flowers and the wildlife. A pre-breakfast cup of coffee on the yoga terrace (!) gave us a chance to get to grips with a handful of new species: a Sword-billed Hummingbird briefly dropped in to the Eucalyptus, before being harrassed by the local Black-tailed Trainbearers; another hummingbird with the delightful name of Tyrian Metaltail fed enthusiastically at Eucalyptus flowers, along with Black Flowerpiercer and Cinereous Conebills; Hooded Siskins bounded overhead, 'poo-eet'ing just like our own species of siskin...
We set off soon after breakfast, finding small flocks of Plain-coloured and Band-tailed Seedeaters bursting up out of the grasses at the roadside. Bright blue-flowered sages - Salvia spp - clustered the verges, mimicking the colours of the sky.
Eventually we wound up at the river, where we stopped for lunch. We were interested to see that the nice modern bridge had been eroded away on one bank, so the simple response of the locals was to rip off a set of hand-rails and lay some boards over them to make a safe route on: enterprising and pragmatic, I thought... Further along, as we huffed and puffed up the tributary, we eventually found a shady spot to escape some of the sun's heat, lurk, do some birding and generally chill out - a White-crested Elaenia shuffled through the branches above us, whilst Streak-throated Bush-tyrants launched themselves high into the air, cinnamon wings glowing, and Brown-backed Chat-tyrants tried to convince us that they were related to Whinchats.
The 15th was spent on what is billed as 'one of the four most beautiful walks in Ecuador' (Lonely Planet claim, but given the rest of the book's content, I wouldn't rely on it), from lake Quilotoa back to Chugchilán. A minor hitch - for the Black Sheep personnel - was that the guide they usually arrange wasn't answering his phone, but we were certain we could make it alone.
A pickup took us up to the crater lake - about 4,000m up, so high enough to make exercise a wee bit more effort. We spent a little time admiring the green lake and the phenomenal view, which included both peaks of Volcán Iliniza and the distant peak of Volcán Cotopaxi.
Eventually we headed down off the rim of the crater, dropping rapidly along the edge of potato fields and winding down into gradually flatter land. We strolled through a small village and came to the edge of the canyon which lay between us and home. The track then dropped down the Ecuadorian version of our Devon lanes - steep, narrow and generally with only room for one at a time. We waited at passing places whilst gaggles of children came rushing home up the slope, heading back from the Chugchilán market. Each group would initially pause in surprise that a couple of gringos were coming down the track, then walk past with a chorus of 'Hola, Hola, Hola', with the occasional 'Hello' - invariably followed by a crescendo of giggles.
The 16th - our last full day at the Black Sheep - was passed with another long walk, up to the remnant cloudforest above the hostal. A relatively short, but steady climb up over the ridge of paramo took us to an interesting habitat where shrubby paramo graded gradually into cloudforest, albeit somewhat degraded and invaded by local farmers. The cloud began to descend, appropriately, as we did. We stopped off in a patch of scrub that was reminiscent of Mediterranean maquis, apart from hosting Great Thrush, Glossy and Masked Flowerpiercers and abundant Tyrian Metaltails.
We worked our way round to the cloudforest, where we struck a good patch of birds by virtue of sitting down and having some food: a flock of mixed warblers, tanagers and associated hangers-on came through the trees immediately in front of us, perhaps the most beautiful of which was a couple of Pearled Treerunners - look them up: they're stunning. A couple of Andean Guans provided some extra entertainment, lumbering through the branches above us, and another hummingbird with a spectacular name - a Sapphire-vented Puffleg - fed energetically from the flowers in the canopy. Eventually though, the cloud defeated us - we trailed back to the hostal in increasingly wet and chilly conditions; finally dropping below the cloud and mizzle close to the Black Sheep - a Long-tailed Weasel bounded across the road in front of us near the end of the trail.
On the way to bed, Na told me that there was a small mammal in the toilet block - like a mouse, but with a black and white face. When I made it there, I discovered something rather larger than I expected: an opossum about the size of a young rabbit, lurking behind the waste bin. He/she/it was encouraged out of the building with the aid of the basket...
Finally, the day came when we had to depart the Black Sheep Inn. We awoke to the alarm at the painfully early hour of 3.30 a.m., gathered our bags and stumped up the hill into Chugchilán for the early bus out. Five minutes before the scheduled departure time - 4 a.m. - the bus driver's tousled head appeared from the front seats of the bus, and the busboy yawned his way out of the back door and loaded our bags. A bleary collection of locals descended on the bus and we were off with a merry fanfare from the horn: bet the local residents love that alarm call!
We twisted and turned our way south, past Quilotoa, until we were dropped off, shivering, in a frosty Zumbahua, where we squeezed our way onto a bus bound for Quevedo. This rumbled steadily down the Western Andes, the temperature rising as we descended. The four hour journey was enlivened by a brief stop to change a wheel in the middle of nowhere, then eventually we were left in Quevedo. We then changed onto another bus, taking us four hours further west, to Portoviejo, another for an hour longer, which took us to Jipijapa, then a final bus for yet another hour, to the coastal town of Puerto Lopez... The scenery changed dramatically as we travelled, from the high grassy paramo down through cloudforest and through successively more agricultural landscapes until we reached the lowlands, which are dominated by vast monotonous banana and palm plantations. The last couple of hours took us through some very dry seasonal coastal forest, some of which is protected by Machalilla National Park, then over onto the coast.
By the time we arrived in Puerto Lopez, we were shattered - we walked up to the Hosteria Mandala, at the north end of town, with barely enough energy to glance at the Magnificent Frigatebirds and Brown Pelicans that thronged the air and sea, then flopped gratefully into bed.
We spent the 18th of November around Puerto Lopez - we wandered into town to organize a permit to get into the National Park, found ourselves a boat tour to take us to Isla de la Plata, did a little shopping (ouch!) and found the spectacularly cute in the form of an Amazilia Hummingbird, which had decided to nest on top of a telephone cable leading into the local fire station: the sight of mum feeding a cluster of little red bills was revoltingly cute.
We then wandered up the beach, to admire the frigatebirds, pelicans and assorted gulls and ternsas the fishermen unloaded their catch. The way it works is this: the beach is deserted, bar a few loafing Franklin's and Laughing Gulls, a generously sprinkling of Sanderling and a scatter of Royal, Elegant, Common and Sandwich Terns. The odd frigatebird swirls around in the air above...
A fishing boat arrives and runs up the beach, stern first - this is the cue for the gulls to go up:
A lorry backs down the beach, where it stops - about 30 metres from the water. Two men trot down to the boat with empty boxes, into which the fishermen shovel fish from the boat. The men then trot up and down the beach with the boxes on their shoulders, emptying them into the lorry. After maybe one or two boxes, the frigatebirds cotton on and all hell breaks loose: the air fills with frigates in a scene reminiscent of Hitchcock; whilst pelicans sneakily harass the men from ground level, the frigates swoop in and attempt to snatch something from the top of the box - any successful strike is followed by a frantic escape attempt, as any bird with food is the immediate focus of a dozen others. The whole display is spectacularly rivetting!
Eventually, Na tore me away and we walked up to the north end of the beach, crabs scuttling into their holes as we walked. A Yellow-crowned Night-heron on the beach was a pleasant surprise; then we crossed the sand bar to find a small lagoon stuffed to the gills with herons and waders.
On our way back we flushed a Lesser Nighthawk off a single egg, laid directly onto the sand.
We finally made it back to the Mandala, where we finally had time to look at the remarkable artwork scattered around the place and admire some of the garden wildlife, including rather surprisingly, a couple of large Iguanas!
On the 19th, we were picked up at 8.30 in the morning and taken down to the far end of the beach, where we assembled with a motley group of other tourists and waded out to a boat for a guided tour of the Isla de la Plata. The island lies about 40km off the coast and is a part of the Machalilla National Park. It's billed as the 'poor man's Galapagos', though it seems as though most birders aren't that poor these days! We pottered out of the bay, the captain tinkering with the two outboards as we went, then pelted across the water to the island when he'd got them tuned to his satisfaction. The journey was reasonably dull, though a Wedge-rumped Storm-petrel or two and a couple of close Sabine's Gulls enlivened things briefly. Eventually we drew to a halt in a small bay, with a Green Turtle nosing and loafing around the other boats anchored nearby. We disembarked and milled around for a while, whilst the guides got their act together and a welcoming party of Long-tailed Mockingbirds and Collared Warbling-finches flitted from bush to bush, anticipating crumbs.
We split into two groups, one with the Spanish-speakers and one with the rest of us, and set off up the hill. Passing a dead Barn Owl, we stumped up to the ridge where the two trails diverge and the guide put us to the vote as to which way to head - along the ridge to the frigatebird colony, with Blue-footed and Red-footed Booby colonies to entertain us, or right, up the hill, past Blue-footed and Nazca Booby colonies to the possibility of Waved Albatross and Southern Sea-lion, though these were described as '50-50 chance at best'. All but one of us chose right, so right we went. We started out through a dispersed colony of Blue-footed Booby, about which the guide was able to pass on a variety of bits of information, including sexing them (iris size and call), their feeding habits and their nesting behaviour, their display and their courtship.
We then walked into a colony of Nazca Booby, a species only relatively recently recognised as different to Masked Booby, with which it was previously lumped. These are smart white-and-black Gannet relatives, with a taste for yellow lipstick
By this time, however, our guide was losing interest and wanted to get back to the boats - the pace picked up, and we fairly yomped into the apparently deserted albatross colony, to be greeted with some consternation by a three-quarters grown downy chick and complete indifference by a superb brooding adult. She (or he, perhaps) sat tucked under a thorny bush, complacently preening...
We carried on at the same pace, briefly scanning the sea-lion beaches (nothing, but a fine view of a Manta Ray swimming just under the water's surface from the clifftop) and stopping for a couple of rather desultory lectures about some of the local flora, then careered down the hill to the boats, where we sat and waited for 20 minutes whilst they weighed anchor and came in to meet us. We then re-embarked and trolled round the island a little, so the swimmers could snorkel with what looked like some great fish, whilst the non-swimmer (me!) watched the tropicbirds and frigatebirds and finally managed to pick out a couple of Red-footed Booby heading in and out from the cliffs.
We woke on the 20th to find that an unexpected visitor had taken up residence under our gable and that a rather smart toad was wandering up the path towards our cabin.
We headed into Puerto Lopez to hire some bikes from a shop in town, then headed on towards Agua Blanca. We were slightly unimpressed to learn that it would cost us another 5 dollars each for the privilege of passing the gate towards the village, even though we weren't interested in going to the village, just in birding our way up the riverbed. We wandered up the riverbed trail, slowly, admiring yet another community of new birds - besides the familiar Blue-grey Tanagers, we found such species as Blue-crowned Motmot, Streaked Saltator and a surprise in the form of a Pale-browed Tinamou. Lizards hurtled everywhere, many of them Stenocercus iridescens - something without a common name.
We continued up to Los Frailes, a local beach, hampered somewhat by the fact that Na's bike managed to break somewhat catastrophically: the gearing system on the rear wheel effectively exploded! We limped on to the beach, Na swam and I read, and generally chilled out before returning in somewhat ignominious fashion in the back of a motor-trike...
We went back to bus travel on the 21st, taking a local bus down to the Rio Ayampe, another site described in the rather useful "Where to watch birds in South America". This was a very good move. We saw virtually no-one and had the whole area to ourselves, totalling some 70 species of bird on the way. The river is one which the local council have contemplated damming for a hydro-electric power scheme. An interesting idea, but not the most inspired bit of thinking I've come across...
We spent our final day in Puerto Lopez on a rather lazy note - we visited the fascinating garden of a couple on the edge of town - an ecologist and archaeologist who have been working in the country for many years and have a wealth of information about the local plants - especially their uses in food and medicine - the local wildlife and the archaeology of the area. We finished off with a wander back up the beach to the scrub at the north end, where we didn't see a great deal more of interest, but enjoyed a bit of an explore through the saltmarsh and scrub.
The 23rd was a bit of a wash-out in many respects: we spent the entire daylight hours (almost) travelling back to Quito on the day bus. There were few birds to be seen and when we got into the western slope of the Andes, it started to belt with rain, so the remainder of our journey was completed in increasing gloom. We booked ourselves into the Auberge Inn, in central Quito, had a pizza and slept...
The 24th wasn't much better in terms of birding - a day spent travelling to Otovalo so that some Christmas shopping could be done. We did get out to a small lake just outside the town, where we could admire the mountains and watch Slate-coloured Coot, Yellow-billed Pintail and a Greater Yellowlegs, as well as listening to the local Moorhens cackling in the rushes, but aside from that it was pretty much business as usual. The next day was a trip to the Quito vivarium and the botanical gardens, which entailed a lot of walking and some very informative botanising, whilst keeping an eye on Swainson's Thrushes and Summer Tanagers.
We took a last day out - a bus from Quitumbe towards Papallacta, a village just into the Amazon watershed. We managed to cause great confusion with the driver, by asking to be dropped at the top of the pass over the mountains, but drop us he did, and off we set. The cloud swirled dramatically around us, and we were able to admire the bogs and mires looking very Devon-like, albeit at a high enough altitude to leave us fairly breathless.
As with the paramo in general, the plantlife was breathtaking as well. We wandered up a dirt track for a while, admiring a multitude of flowers, yet another species of hummingbird - Blue-mantled Thornbill - and a very smart stripy bird with an even more funky name: Many-striped Canastero. Brown-bellied Swallows swooped around us, earnestly gathering nest material and diving into their earthbank nest holes.
We discovered that the new road offers few birding opportunities, but made up for it somewhat by working our way up the old road for a while, until we ran into a flock of Black-backed Bush-tanagers, which carried with it a couple of Rufous-naped Brush-finches, a handful of glowing Spectacled Redstarts and - best of all - a pair of Giant Conebills.
We rounded off with a couple of Tawny Antpittas and then a couple of Scarlet-bellied Mountain-tanagers on the road towards Papallacta. Finally admitting defeat through tiredness, we settled down by the road to flag down the next bus back to Quito...