Birds

I worked my way back down the overgrown footpath through the cabuya spears, eucalyptus brush, and seven different kinds of "prickers."  By the time I realized that I was cliffed out, it was too late.  I looked over the edge to the irrigation channel twenty feet below.  I've never liked to double back, and here I was faced with scrambling back up through the brambles or working my way off the edge.   

The edge turned out to have a trail.  Sort of.  These little mini-arroyos cut straight into the side of the mini-mesa, and there was actually a set of "stairs" --  maybe more like rungs -- right down to the main trail I was trying to reach.  The steps, cut and worn into the side of the steep face, curved around into the side of the hill, and the crumbling earth did not give me much confidence in my footholds.  So I turned around and used my hands, too, figuring it was better not to trust any one hand or foot-hold.  From previous excursions, I knew there were caves just below me, and plenty of graffiti scooped out and cut into the soft surface.  

Finally at the irrigation level, I swung down into a patch of the grabbiest brambles I've ever had the pleasure of meeting (which incidentally bear a yellow raspberry looking fruit).  If you brush them with your skin at all, they hold you fast; like a huge patch of velcro, there is no easy way of unhooking the barbs -- aside from the old the rip-the-band-aid approach.  I grabbed a handful of harmless looking grass, bracing myself for ripping the barbs out of my side and arm.  The handful of grass I grabbed turned out to have serrated edges, and had I pulled my hands along the leaves, I would have easily cut myself.  (Hmm, sawgrass, I reckon.)  I let go of the unfriendly grass and eyed the span between my feet and the other side of the ditch.  The water was only a foot deep, but the channel was several feet down.  I decided I would have to jump and rip at the same time.  At least I wasn't worried about snakes here...

All this for a chance to spy on the Black-tailed Train-bearer for a few minutes, a super cool long-tailed hummingbird that resides in the canyon below Peguche Falls.  Birding usually involves more harmless walks, though I have had my share of scrapes, cuts, and bruises.  Last week I squeezed under barbed wire to follow a Scarlet Mantled Woodpecker.  More often, though, insects are the worst hazard.  Indeed, insects are an integral part of the scheme; when insects are active, so are the birds.  I've had to beat back mosquitoes with ski-poles in VT in the early spring.  Here, there are some good swarms of blackfly-like insects along the Peguche River.  Always a slow learner, I've finally started wearing long pants for these walks.

I can't really rationalize my compulsion for watching birds.  It's not like I've been some life-long naturalist -- though I have always felt more comfortable in the woods than in a city.  No doubt, it's a nerdy preoccupation.  I made fun of "birdos" before I became one myself, and so I guess I have it coming when I tell my sophomores that I like to chase through the woods with a pair of binoculars -- still, nothing matches the thrill of getting a good view of a new species.  Or hitting double-digits for warbler species on a May morning in Vermont (Oh, baby!).  Even the casual company of familiar grosbeaks or redpolls at the backyard feeder gives me a boost.  I'm really not sure why.  

If I had to guess, I figure it's a combination of factors.  For one: birds fly, and flight is amazing.  Some birds hang around all winter in North America but most birds head out when it gets cold.  I remember the cardinals and red-headed woodpeckers from childhood summers in Illinois.  The difference, I've learned is obvious: birds that feed from leaves, well, leave, and birds that feed from bark, like woodpeckers, stick around -- it's more a matter of following food than it is being too cold.  When we lived in Costa Rica, it blew my mind to learn that I was watching many migratory species from up north.  Once I'd snapped a photo of what I thought was some super-rare rainforest hawk.  It wasn't until we got back to VT several months later that I figured out it was a Cooper's Hawk, common in the northern forests.  This was the start: moving a thing from the unknown to the known column (short as that side is).

I'm fascinated by what I have missed, what might have been there.  All those years we'd played in Washington Park or on midwestern lakes in Wisconsin or Michigan, we missed dozens and dozens of songbirds.  All those colors, all those songs and calls, all those crazy adaptations moving in a stream along the canopies and along the tree-lined muddy rivers.  As it turns out, they'd been there all along.  It's a matter of tuning in to their frequencies.  I get a kick out of birding in Illinois and Iowa when I get the chance for that reason alone.  Once you become a regular in a particular habitat, you start to pick up on the usual suspects.

Then there are the surprises, the sudden appearances, that sustain a birder when things sometimes get slow, as they inevitably do.  I have a couple dozen images burned into my brain, too that keep me going: running down a path into Monteverde, CR for one last shot at a Quetzal, sensing movement above me, and looking up to see that green tail streaming over at just the right time; a Prothonatory Warbler, just after rain, on a canal tow-path in Maryland; an American Avocet working the mouth of an estuary in Western Florida at dawn; a Black-billed cuckoo dropping out of a tree on the campus of UI Springfield,  just long enough for a good look.  Just the right time, just the right place -- those moments come between long periods of looking and listening -- a little glimpse of the sublime.

Here, everything is new, and it's easy to be re-enthused.  Ecuador is one of the most bio-diverse countries on the planet, as it happens, though we are living in the northern Andes, where things are a bit slower than in the rainforest of the Amazon basin (which we surely intend to visit).  Kerry and I had the chance to take a walk this week.  I'm not sure how what the elevation was, but took a taxi about 8K out of Otavalo, straight up into the hills.  We were looking to get above the eucalyptus zone into some of the more consistent second growth forests along the road.  

Especially midweek, the cobbled road is hardly traveled and makes for a great bird trail.  The forest is intermittent, and there is definitely more clear-cut pasture and crop-land than forest -- but the higher up we were, the more forest there was.   The road also offered some great vantage points looking down into the drainages full of bamboo and flowering trees, great hummingbird habitat.  This is especially exciting since we have one hummingbird species in the Northeast; by contrast, our Birds of Ecuador book has five full pages of hummingbirds, close to 100 species!  One of the first birds we identified was a picaflor (as they call them here) the Black-crested Puffleg.  The descriptive nomenclature is another thing I love about birds -- I mean, "Supercilliaried Hemispingus" -- really?  Hemispingus is a subspecies of tanager, by the way, with a prominent eyebrow (the supercilliaries are feathers above the eye).

In the 3.5 hours we were out, I don't think more than 5 cars and 3 motorcycles passed us.  Here is what we saw:

     Scarlet-bellied Mountain Tanage
     Masked Flowerpiercer
     Black-crested Puffleg
     Supercilliaried Hemispingus
     Spectacled Whitestart
     Rufous-collared Sparrow
     Great Thrush

     Rufous-naped Brush-finch
     Black Flowerpiercer
     Yellow-headed Southern Grosbeak
     Ashy-throated Bush-tanager

Five new species for me -- sweet!  After getting to know this area pretty well, I am looking forward to heading back to the cloud-forests on the western slopes and eventually the rain-forest to the east.  

Sylvia's Circuit Training

A Walk around the Neighborhood with Sylvia

Three blocks to the sidewalk's end

Not much distinction between urban and rural, an old corn patch

An Ag college/farm project to the left, Rumiñahui, our neighborhood to the right, a guy playing an Andean flute walks toward us

Chochos grow in the fields below; a leguminous relative of Lupine, they are harvested, boiled, and sold on the streets in carts -- good with lime and salt, Sylvia loves them!

The shoulders of Imbabura in the background, we are on the border of Peguche

Pasture ahead, Don't be a pig sign in the foreground

A woman tending her cows

A "Ben and Jerry's cow" with headdress

Looking back toward our neighborhood 

On the tracks -- many people are out walking on Sunday afternoon -- a little trash-disposal in the foreground

Discs and a mysterious water leak

Looking west

Typical defense glass

A second story chicken coup

Oh Yeah

Sylvia with the camera 

Dog and advertising graffitti

Power shot

Parque de Dinosaurios

Dogs on the roof

Plastic Recycling in Cotacachi

Last week I decided to start my explorations into sustainability in Ecuador (my official work study project for the year.) I had heard that a grass roots, plastics recycling program was starting up in Cotacachi, a small town near Otavalo and that they were having a meeting for the expat community. In other words, it was going to be in English. So, I decided to attend. I haven't seen this many "gringos" since I arrived. It was actually a bit odd to be in Ecuador and surrounded by a bunch of English speakers. On the up side, the enthusiasm of the group was nice to see, and after the inspiring presentation, when a sheet was passed around for volunteers, most of the people in the room signed on to the project. I myself am likely to join some of their work days. 

Like the rest of the world, Ecuador has a problem with plastic. This cheap, and easily moldable substance doesn't ever truly break down (it can degrade into little bits with prolonged exposure to sun) so every item you purchase, eventually adds to the growing mounds of trash that cover this globe. More and more items are sold in plastic and very little of it is recycled. In fact, if you are in Ecuador, much of it doesn't even end up in the landfill, it is tossed by the side of the road, or in the closest park. This behavior is one of the things that I have had trouble explaining to my daughter, largely because I don't understand it myself. This is a beautiful country and in some ways their urban development plans are more advanced than ours. They recognize the importance of open space and there are parks every few blocks, all of which are full throughout the day and night. There are gardeners working almost every day in these parks and there are people who are hired to keep them clean. So why is it an excepted behavior to finish a drink and toss the bottle on the ground? I find it baffling, and yet almost everyone does this. In some places, it is hard to find a trash can, but not here. There are trash cans scattered all over the parks in Otavalo but many people don't bother to use them. Sometimes the trash cans are empty and the ground surrounding them is covered in trash. On the flip side, a walk through the market illuminates the fact that many types of plastic containers are reused a number of times before being tossed. For example, our honey comes in a reused instant coffee jar, or a grey plastic takeout container. This is done largely for economic reasons but it is recycling none the less. Eventually however, all of these containers will be tossed. 

Cotacachi is joining a small group of towns in the northern Andes that are trying to tackle this issue. They are collecting bottles and any other plastic item that can fit in a bottle. Each bottle will be packed with plastic bags (and any other non-biodegradable item) until it is hard enough to be used as a building material. These bottles will then be used to construct just about anything the community wants. this is not a new idea. It has been done in Africa and in many other South American countries but it is new here. Below are some images of past projects. It is pretty cool.

Using plastic bottles removes non biodegradable items from the environment and reduces the amount of other materials needed to build structures. 

Here is an example of a greenhouse made by a group of children.

I'll keep you posted on their progress.

Field Trip: Back to Cascada Taxopamba and Casa Mojanda

You might think that going to waterfalls is the only thing we do here in Ecuador -- but "we do lots of other things," Sylvia says.  Still, on Sunday we completed the Otavalo area waterfall bi-fecta by going back up to Cascada Taxopamba, and it was great.  

Cascada, obviously, means waterfall.  The common Kichwa suffix pamba, or sometimes bamba, means "place of" -- and taxo- is a fruit bearing bush common here (though I don't know which bush it is, yet).     

Taxopamba is about 5K in up in the hills outside of Otavalo.  Four bucks in a taxi to the trail-head.   After 1K the road turns from handmade tiles to hand-set stones.  (Besides stone and tile, the only other surface is dirt and dust -- along with the much more rare blacktop.)  The stones are all black, fist-sized, smooth and angular.  If you look down, you don't really see any difference in size, but if you look up the road, there are three stripes of slightly larger stones that mark the centerline and quarters -- a really cool effect.  This seems to be the standard way of laying out the nicer roads roads in smaller towns.  

The road to the trail-head climbs, either steep or steeper with few breaks.  If it's clear you can catch sight of Volcan Cayambe (5790m), a flat-topped glaciated peak, a big profile contrast to the iconic cone shape of its cousin, Cotopaxi farther south.  I've sampled the incline by bike, and it's tolerable if you ride in the concrete drainage for smoothness.  The descent is smoother with more speed, though you have to watch for missing stones, potholes, and the odd speed bump -- as well as the occasional pig or lamb.

The hike in is maybe 1 or 2K.  The trail drops into one drainage and climbs out along the contour until you drop into the second.  It's laced with bamboo -- and maybe a bunch of taxo bushes.  With kids, and stops, the tour was about a half an hour.  All the trails here -- as far as I can tell -- are footpaths for both livestock and people... very bike unfriendly.

The first people to the falls, we make ourselves at home and settled in for the stay.  The kids go for the water immediately, this being the one place we've let them swim in the Otavalo area.  The water is frigid, so I put my Coca-cola brand soft-drink into the water to chill for lunch.  (I know how bad Coke is, but I figure it's better than cigarettes.)  I boulder around the rocks.  Kerry meditates, later does some drawing.  The kids frolic in the water, insanely.  I head up the trail to find birds (encounter the Piculus Rivolii, the crimson-mantled woodpecker - oh baby!).  It is a fine idyll indeed.  

A German couple wanders up -- at least I assume they're German because the man is pale and wears a scarf.  I can't help thinking how they must have thought they were headed to a calm isolated scene -- only to be greeted by shrieking children, the family having claimed all of the awesome rocks.  They don't stay long.  A group of Ecuadorians -- three guys, one of whom sports a Ramones shirt -- and a woman are not likewise deterred by the kids' shenanigans.  One guy climbs the rocks, another takes pictures.  Later they make a fire, using a lighter after the two stones fail, and roast marshmallows.  

We eat lunch of sandwiches and awesome papi's papas fritas (chips), worry about the kids' exposure to the equatorial sun, finally leave after a couple of hours of not worrying about much beyond the immediate surroundings.  Finally we head back out the trail.  I am baffled by some yellow bird that won't give up his location except for fleeting backlit moments.  K and the kids move on to Casa Mojandas, a great hostel, where I later catch up to them.

After some confusion regarding whether of not she is really around, we find Betty, and she immediately invites us in out of the heat for some refreshment.  Her campus in beautiful, and we spend an hour and a half talking and touring.  K -- in her inimitable way -- ends up being offered a massage table for loan. Eventually, Oakes falls into the fish pond (from the screams, we though bee-stings for sure), and we commence the midwestern goodbye (which by definition takes no less than half an hour, but may consume up to two) and head back down the hill.  

Oakes is soggy, both he and Sylvia are ragamuffin dirty, but we know these as signs of a good day.  Both hiked and held up well.  We all crash early.