Santa Lucia Reserve: Yet Another Paradise in the Clouds

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, but I’ve been busy! The earlier part of this past week I was at the Santa Lucia Reserve, which is on the western slope of the Andes. Before making the ascent to Santa Lucia, we stopped at a stream to look at juvenile aquatic insects. While doing so, we found this guy:

Pristimantis altamnis (?) (it may be another species of Pristimantis)

From this stream, getting to Santa Lucia is quite the process. First you ride a truck partway up a hill for about 20 minutes. Then, you have to walk nearly two hours up a winding trail, with the air getting thinner with every step. Mules carried some of our gear up, because no motorized vehicle could dream of making it up that hill. But wow, the view at the top was quite nice.
While the view was good, what I was even more enthralled by these guys:

That’s about five species at a single feeder.

While Santa Lucia has “only” 26 hummingbird species compared to Yanacocha’s 36, I definitely saw more different kinds of hummers at Santa Lucia. I haven’t done an official tally, but I’m guessing I saw about 15 different kinds. They were quite literally everywhere.

In our cabin…

In the rafters…

On my hand…

One afternoon when the feeders were empty, the hummers where looking for food everywhere, and apparently my hand in a loose fist looked enough like a flower.

In addition to sheer volume of hummers, Santa Lucia has some very cool species.

The tiny booted racquettail

Some booted raquettails flirting. Look at those fuzzy boots!

A stately brown inca

Violet-tailed sylph (I think this one was younger or molting, as others had longer tails)

Purple-bibbed whitetip

A brown violetear, listed as “scarce” in Ridgely’s Birds of Ecuador, but pretty easy to see at Santa Lucia.

White-necked jacobin

An empress brilliant with a female purple-bibbed whitetip (?) headed straight for it.

The other birds where also quite spectacular. Tanagers would show up every morning just off the deck, allowing for great views.

Golden tanager

The aptly named flame-faced tanager

Andean pygmy-owl

Interesting insects also abounded, especially at night when we set up a light trap, which is basically a bed sheet with a spotlight on it.

Saturniid moth

Female rhinoceros beetle

Urmacid moth

Santa Lucia also has an orchid garden, which contains a species which has the common name of “dancing lady.”

While we were sketching orchids in the garden, one of the chefs brought down this guy, which he found near the lodge.

Speaking of chefs, the food was excellent, and we ate by candlelight every night at dinner. I did not take pictures of the food, but I do have pictures of a fruit called guaba or “ice-cream bean,” which was pretty tasty.

Our guide was also really cool. Not only did he manage to spot the aforementioned owl, but he also made a birthday hat for one of our group members out of nothing but plants from the forest and a little string.

If you couldn’t tell from the pictures, Santa Lucia today is a huge conservation success story, but it wasn’t always that way. A lot of the area around Santa Lucia was agricultural until the Ecuadorian government declared it a protected forest in the ’90s. Forests were replanted, trails were cleared, and Santa Lucia lodge was constructed to provide an alternative source of income in the form of ecotourism while providing a home for vulnerable species such as the spectacled bear (Source).

We only spent four nights at Santa Lucia, but I was honestly ready to stay for a month. I was seeing a few new bird species a day, and the other wildlife and plant life was also enthralling. As we descended the trail from Santa Lucia to the road, we met up with this snake, sitting in the path as if to say “¡ciao!”

More likely he was just sitting in the path by chance and wanted nothing to do with us, but the sentiment is nice.

If you want to learn more about Santa Lucia, check out there website: http://www.santaluciaecuador.com/

Next post will probably be in a about a week, though I may be able to come up with something sooner!

The Breathtaking Yanacocha Reserve (and its Hummingbirds)

 Well, the title of this blog post has a dual meaning. First off, check out these views from the cloud forest of the Inca Trail at Yanacocha Reserve, and how they change from morning in the afternoon.

Sunny morning…

…cloudy afternoon.

 

The place was also breathtaking in the sense that it was at a very high altitude and thus I got a little out of breath. To get to Yanacocha Reserve, we took an hour-and-a-half bus ride up from the valley of Quito into the mountains. We went up some pretty steep dirt road, which was a bit frightening both going up and going down. However, once we got to the reserve, I was greeted by a few of these guys engaged in aerial combat.

 

That is a great sapphirewing, one of the largest hummingbirds in the world at a whopping (for a hummer) six inches without the beak. (The largest, the giant hummingbird, also lives in Ecuador.) Sapphirewings have an undulating flight pattern similar to woodpeckers, and they flap their wings quite a bit slower than other hummingbirds.

Yanacocha is one of the few places were the endangered black-breasted puffleg can be found. No one in our group saw one, but I saw a total of eight hummingbird species, including two other pufflegs, plenty of buff-winged starfrontlets, and even a sword-billed hummingbird (which I sadly don’t have good photos of).

Sapphire-vented puffleg

Golden-fronted puffleg (you can see the white puffs quite well)

Buff-winged starfrontlet

 

Other bird life included Andean guans, turkey-like birds which spend much of their lives in trees. It is heavily hunted for meat in some areas, but they are protected in Yanacocha.

 

The insect life was also quite friendly, which was not always a great thing. Sandflies, which are smaller than grains of sand, inflicted nasty bites at higher altitudes. However, non-biting flies and a butterfly landed on us. The butterfly even gave kisses!

 

The plant life was also quite spectacular.

Ñacha (Spanish name; not sure of the name in English or Latin)

Gunnera. I have never seen larger leaves!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the coolest plants was a carnivorous plant of the genus Pinguicula (butterwort), which traps insects with a glue-like substance on its leaves and subsequently digests them.

You’d think it could have eaten a few more sandflies…

 

Well, that was Yanacocha! Tomorrow morning I’m off to a lower elevation cloud forest reserve called Santa Lucia, and then to the rural cloud forest village of Yunguilla. It’ll be at least a week before another post, but I hope it will be worth the wait!

The Start of the Program

Well, I had a day to explore the botanical gardens, but right now my program, SIT Ecuador: Comparative Ecology and Conservation, has a officially started. I can’t say I’m complaining, though: I get to basically go birdwatching (and listening) as an assignment, and tomorrow we’re off to Yanacocha Forest Reserve, a.k.a. a place with so many hummingbirds I might faint from excitement.

A little bit about this program: we get to travel all over (Amazon, Galapagos, cloud forest, mountains), and our classes (Spanish, ecology, conservation, and research methods) all blend together. They are taught both in the field and at a place called the Experiment in Intercultural Living (EIL). Here’s some great views of Quito from the top story of the  EIL.

That white mountain you see in the second picture is the volcano Cotopaxi, which is actually not covered in snow but in glaciers. I get to visit it (but not climb it, that requires training, a guide, and ice axes) at some point, and there’s supposed to be Andean condors there. For the unfamiliar, Andean condors are gigantic mountain-dwelling vultures, weighing a whopping 33 pounds and having wingspans of 10 feet. I hope to get a photo to share eventually, but for now here’s National Geographic’s pictures and info.

I’ve been starting to dive into the local fruit, having had batido de guanabana (soursop smoothie), various juices, and this grandilla.

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In English you would call this a yellow passionfruit. The inside is fully of juicy seeds that are very sweet and almost bubble gum-tasting; the hard portion of the seed providing a nice, light crunch. It tastes nothing like the purple passionfruit juice you get in the US, which I’m honestly not very fond of.

Well, that was a brief post, but believe it or not I have work to do to plan out my ornithology project. I’ll put up another post on Yanacocha within the next few days.

Birds and Blooms at the Jardín Botánico Quito (and Elsewhere)

Well, today was my first day in Quito, Ecuador. I could tell you about how I ate at a place called Texas Chicken twice with two different groups of people, but I’ll stick to the stuff that I found more interesting, mostly El Parque La Carolina, its botanical garden, and some common birds in Quito. I apologize for the photo quality in this post; I didn’t have my nicer camera on me as I was still trying to gauge how safe such devices would be to bring around.

I’ll start out by telling you about a dream I had last night. The basic idea was that the ornithologist at my college was in Quito with was disappoint in me for not finding any birds yet. In my dream, the first bird I saw was an eared dove, an lo and behold the first bird I found today was an eared dove.

Dream bird! (I guess…)

Eared doves are essentially  South American mourning doves with shorter tails and a slightly different head pattern/color.  They are as ubiquitous as pigeons in other big cities, but are actually native! Quito still has feral pigeons, but it’s still cool that they aren’t displacing the native dove.

That photo was taken in El Parque La Carolina, which looks like this:

It’s still the dry season here, so the grass isn’t terribly happy, but the palm trees are nice change of pace from both Iowa and Maine. The air is dry here, as Quito is in the mountains and so does not have the humidity characteristic of the Amazon and cloud forests of lower altitudes.

Within  El Parque La Carolina, there is a botanical garden with a very impressive orchid collection, which is no surprise considering that Ecuador has 1710 endemic orchid species (Source). The botanical garden has about 400 species of orchids in all kinds of colors and shapes. In retrospect, I should have taken more pictures, but here’s my best one.

The orchids in botanical garden that I found the most interesting (at least from a biological perspective) were epiphytes (plants with no roots in the soil) from the Amazon that have aerial roots. These roots not only take up water but also can store it since the plants rely on an inconsistent water source, namely rain. The aerial roots can even photosynthesize in some species (Source and a brief overview of aerial roots).

Put your roots in the air like you don’t care!

Other cool plants also had a home in the botanical garden, including a greenhouse with the ominous sign “Carnívora,” which at first glance conjured images of a jaguar.

Don’t think that’s a jaguar, but I’m new to this continent.

That would be a pitcher plant, which traps insects in a pool of digestive juices. The insects cannot climb the slippery sides and thus drown and are eventually digested. The plant does this to obtain nitrogen (an essential component of proteins) when it is not available in the soil.

Other pretty flowers included bromeliads, relatives of the pineapple. This one had a fluorescent pink flower stalk and a purple flower.

This flower of an elephant ear (aroid) was bigger than my hand!

The floraof the garden, of course attracted pollinating fauna, including the spectacular black-tailed trainbearer.

That tail!

Other birds also inhabit the garden, including the great thrush (Quito’s answer to the robin/Eurasian blackbird) and purple gallinule.

Don’t you belong in the Everglades?

Even outside the botanical garden, the flora and avain fauna of Quito is quite enthralling. Here’s a sparkling violetear (what a name!) feeding on flowers in downtown Quito. What’s even better is that these gorgeous hummingbirds are everywhere here.

What I’ve shown you is just a microcosm of Quito itself (I’ve only had a day here!), and in the grand scheme of Ecuador, Quito is but one place in a land that includes both snow-capped volcanoes and sweltering rainforests. Despite that, I’m pretty excited but what I’ve seen so far and can’t wait to explore more!