Ecuador Adventure I

Trogan - San Isrido near Yanayaku Research Station

For the last two weeks I have had the amazing experience of visiting the beautiful country of Ecuador and with the help of a couple of incredible guides, see over 400 species of birds. The trogons, toucans, and hoatzin are fantastic, but you simply can't imagine the diversity of hummingbirds, tanagers, and many other birds endimic to this remarkable place.

We (BYU Business School Dean Ned Hill, Robert Parsons of Maryland and his son Daniel and myself) hired renowned bird guide Rudy Gelis to show us birds in all of the primary habitat. Starting in Quito which sits in the saddle between the east and west spines of the Andes mountains, we climbed up to about 14,000 feet and then eventually descended to the Amazon basin. Along the way we stayed at "Lodges", which were specifically set up for wildlife exploration. Most of them are associated with one or more research stations where students and scientists live and work on a variety of projects. While Ecuador has greater bird diversity than virtually any other place in the world on a per sqare mile basis, I was surprised to learn that most of them have not been studied at all. Rudy was constantly noting the location of nests, leks and other locations to come back and study.

I was shooting these pictures with my new Nikon D700. Most of the time I was using an 80 - 400 VR lens. For birds I usually use A-priority. I set the f-stop one up from full open, in this case at 5.6, and tried not to use any flash at all. Sometimes under the jungle canopy it was a bit dark, but we still got a lot of good shots. If I had wanted to carry a tripod and a larger lens around, it would have been possible to get a lot more of what we saw on film, but much of the time we were trudging along on very muddy, sometimes swampy trails, often for several hours, and I just didn't want to lug it. The 400 mm is hard to hand hold, but with the VR it worked out ok. The D700 allows you to shoot up to 6400 ISO without significant degradation, which was a big help!

Here we are (from left to right, Ned Hill, Rudy Gelis, Carlos (our native Kichua guide in the Amazon basin at Sani lodge), me, Daniel and Robert Parsons. We are in an oil town on the Napo river, just after a 3 hour motorized canoe trip back upriver from the lodge. These oil towns dot the banks of the Amazon and it tributaries, and are evidence of the real battle that continues between progress and protection. The towns have the feel of a true frontier enviornment. In this case the flight to Quito was only 40 minutes, whereas the trip by road had taken about 6 hours! The oil companies are mostly owned by big multinationals of course and the local labor works very cheap. For young men like Carlos, the increased interest in eco-experience is a real blessing as it provides an alternative to working in the oil fields.

This is an example of the beautiful Tanagers that are found throughout the country. We saw more than 50 species of them (remember Ecuador is about the size of Colorado, and there are only a half dozen or so tanager species in the entire US!) Here an enterprising local hung banana's in a tree with the idea that folks like me would stop by and buy a soda or something. Except that no one knew that tanagers would eat banana's! In the meantime, it ended up attracting a newly discovered species of tanager (not this one) which all of the guides are really excited about.

All told, this was a very full experience, one which I intend to do a few more posts on in the next few weeks. It certainly left me pensive about the poverty of our brothers and sisters in many places in the world which are so rich with natural beauty and life.