Two and a half years ago, we found paradise. Well, at least for bird watchers who like to travel. In the Andes mountains of Ecuador, cool cloud forest air, lush green forests, and birds of all kinds.
Sometimes when you try to recapture lightning in a bottle, that special place or time that is so wonderful in your memory, you can get disappointed by going back. In fact, that is usually the case. Not only would I be wasting time and money for myself, but this time I was trying to share with my new friends from our around-the-world cruise what a special place this was.
Our ship would be in Ecuador in December and would be in Guayaquil for three days. That would give us a chance to jump off for a week and go back to my little Shangri-La, Tandayapa Bird Lodge. https://tandayapabirdlodge.com/ Andy and Alicia had spent a lot of time with Dusty and me. Basia was someone we knew but hadn’t really gotten to know, if you know what I mean.
Andy and Alicia were not really bird watchers, but they loved an adventure and were in from the time I brought it up to them. Basia is a very serious bird watcher. And from the camera with a 600mm lens that frequently hung from a harness she wore, it could be surmised that she was into photography as well. She was a bit slower to buy into the trip. It seems that when she looked at the pricing for five days of birding in the Andes, the cost for one person was a bit prohibitive. But later she realized that when there were five of us, it was less than half the price. She was definitely in then.
We flew from Panama City to Quito. It was the first time that we had left the ship for more than a day trip in nearly three months. That was part of the magic of traveling around the world the way we were. The ship could be our transportation, our home, or both.
We came by a couple of different flights and all stayed at the Quito Airport Suites.
https://airporthotelquito.com/ It was a neat little compound with small clean rooms and farm animals inside the walls that kept the world outside. Farm animals in Ecuador include rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens, llamas, and alpacas. And, of course, a few dogs. Since we would be leaving so early in the morning, I asked if they could put together a few breakfast bags to take with us. They said they would be waiting for us at the front desk when we left at 6:00.
When the appointed hour arrived, we were told we would have to take our bags to the front gate because the van could not fit through it to come down to us. When we got to the front gate, it was open, and Ernesto, our driver, was waiting at the side of it with the doors open and apologizing as he hurried to help us with our bags. Alicia, in turn, apologized for being the last one to get there as she had mistakenly thought it was 6:30. (Originally, they had wanted to pick us up at 5:00, but I begged for the later time.) We laughed it off, and she said to just tell her our scheduled time was always earlier than it really was to keep her from making the same mistake in the future. No harm done. We had the next five days to relax and take it all in. Just down the road, we picked up Alex, our guide, at a nearby hotel, and we were officially on our way.
The traffic in Quito was pretty bad, but Ernesto knew how to get our surprisingly large van through it all and to the last stop before driving out of the city. Gas and coffee had everyone fueled up, and the roads subsequently got less busy and then less paved. As we crested the mountains to the west of Quito, the moisture from the Pacific Ocean was milked from the clouds to create the cloud forest where we would spend the next five days.
The first place we would stop would be the same as we visited on our last visit: Zuro Loma Birding.
The area around Zuro Loma had been cleared of all trees for farms and grazing. Silvio, the owner, started to get a very uncommon bird to come out of the forest through behavioral conditioning (he fed the bird regularly). The antpitta became the draw for photographers to come to the site, then he set up hummingbird feeders to really put on a show. This proved the value of maintaining the old growth forest and was a big part of the tourist industry for the area and environmental awareness.
What had been a very rough but beautiful location had not withered since our last visit. They had improved the signage and some outbuildings, as well as the landscaping of the area where you parked (basically a grassy field with some muddy ruts surrounded by a low barbed wire fence). It seemed that Silvio was doing alright and would be able to continue to maintain his little piece of paradise and share it with the world.
I recognized the zigzag path down to the thatched roof that would keep us out of the sun while we watched for hummingbirds. To the right was the moss-covered log where the antpitta would come to look for the grubs provided by Silvio.
By the time the five tourists and their guide made it to the bottom of the little trail, the first of two different antpittas was scoping out the mossy log and looking for breakfast. The Chestnut-naped Antpitta was soon followed by the Equatorial Antpitta. At this point, I found out that Basia was not only a serious birder, but she was within striking distance of her one thousandth bird on her life list.
The last time that Dusty and I had been here, there were a couple of very serious photographers from Germany with tripods and mammoth cameras, buzzing off thousands of shots of every bird they could find. This time it was just us, and I was happy to see that although Basia had the camera for obsessing over pictures, she was quite calm in her approach to capturing the moment. Well, she was calm until the moment a hummingbird landed on her hand. Her jaw dropped for the first of many times over our five-day mountain birding journey.
Alicia was actually the first to try holding a little nectar in her hand to entice the little buzzing visitors. They were flying between us and around us, and occasionally they would take the bait and sit for a while to lap up the liquid offering. She was a statue as one after another came to either do a quick flyby or look her in the eye while they parked on her hand as a perch.
I asked if Silvio would put out a local flower with a bit of sugar water to make it a bit easier to get a natural shot of one of the sword-billed hummingbirds that I had seen racing around us. He obliged, and it wasn’t long before one of them took the bait, so to speak. Focusing on a flying hummingbird can be a bit tricky, but if you know where they are going to be, you can focus on the flower and press the shutter when the bird arrives. And if you take a whole bunch of pictures, maybe one or two come out as a keeper.
We carried on like this for a couple of hours before it was time to move on. The climb up the little path was a fair bit harder than on the way down, but we had a little extra pep in our step from the great experience we just had. We chatted about what we had seen and posed for a couple of goofy pictures to memorialize the first stop of our trip before moving on.
The drive down the Pacific side of the mountains revealed a changing ecosystem for every 500 feet of elevation change, and sometimes from one side of a ridge to another. Bigger trees and bigger leaves. More and larger bromeliads filling the branches of the trees. Moss and vines increasing. The colors and numbers of flowers changing. It was a never-ending show of biodiversity.
When we finally got down to the road leading into Tandayapa Lodge, it was much as I remembered it. Past the small village was a trail that led to a driveway made of smooth stones with moss between them, leading steeply up into the dense cloud forest property. The wheels of the big van slipped a bit as we took the four quick switchbacks to the spot just below the stairs that led up to the now visible lodge in the woods. The concrete steps were each a bit different in size and the amount of rise between them. You had to pay attention and watch your step as you ascended. At the altitude, you felt your heart working overtime and your lungs trying to keep up with the task.
Our group took up three of the eight rooms in the lodge. The rooms were nothing chic, but everything you could want to come home to at the end of a long day walking in the woods and smiling at the birds. My two favorite parts of the lodge were just outside. In the front, where we had just walked up, was a moss-covered log that sat elevated above the forest floor. On it, the staff would place a bit of fruit and loose seed. It sat about twenty feet from the windows of the dining room. The windows had no screens on them, and we were invited to open them whenever we wished to get a better look at the birds that came to perch on the log and take advantage of an easy meal. I spent a lot of time at those windows because the bright, big, beautiful birds spent a lot of time on that log.
In the back was a big wooden porch. In the center was a large covered area with seats provided to keep the rain off visitors. The reason one would want to sit outside in those seats was the dozen hummingbird feeders set up around the perimeter of the porch. The hum was nearly constant, and the variety of hummingbirds that came was significant. They would whiz past your ear and race out to chase another one off the feeder that they had decided belonged to them. The ballet of birds was an unchoreographed chaos that only they seemed to understand. At one point, we saw two of the little devils face each other and smack their bills against each other so hard that you could hear the crack of contact. The force knocked each of them in a different direction, only to be lost from sight by the others filling the spot vacated by them.
Yes. We were back in Tandayapa, and paradise was not lost!
What are the hummingbirds with the long, thin, forked tail that has a rudder-like feature at the end?