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.