John and Mary Kormendy: Third Birding Trip to Ecuador -- Scenery

This shows scenery pictures from our 2021 December third birding trip to Ecuador. The present version is preliminary -- more pictures will be added in late February and March 2022. This notice will disappear when the pictures are complete. Pictures are copyrighted and should not be used without permission.

Sacha Lodge

To get from Quito to Sacha Lodge, Juan Carlos first drove us over the 4000 m pass over the Andes to the city of Coca. From there, you ride in an open boat for about 2 hours downstream on the Rio Napo, a tributary of the Amazon river which merges with the Amazon just downstram of Iquitos in Peru. After landing from the boat ride, there is a roughly 1-mile walk generally NE to a canoe landing on a stream that takes you to a blackwater lake shown here. Across the lake is Sacha Lodge; the first building that you see -- shown here -- is the breakfast and lunch deck. The rest of the lodge spreads out behind this building into the jungle, with most buildings built on stilts over the swamp. Perhaps surprisingly, the blackwater swamp smells good -- it smells of growing things -- and mosquitoes and other insects are not a big problem. High Island east of Houston or, indeed, the forests near where I grew up in eastern Canada are enormously worse for mosquitoes in, say, April and May.

Breakfast and lunch deck just after sunset, as we return from a canoe ride in the middle of our 11-day stay.

This is the open-air dining hall, just upstream from the breakfast deck.

Dinner with our guide, Juan Carlos Calvachi, in the middle of our stay at Sacha.

About half of the excursions at Sacha were canoe rides like the one getting started here. There is a network of cleared streams through the swamp around the blackwater lake.

About half of the excursions were hikes through the jungle, one of which ended up at this canopy platform that surrounds an emergent Kapok tree. However, the tower can also be reached by canoe, and that's what we always did when we birded there. The platform is about 32 m or 105 feet above ground and is reached by these sturdy but "airy" stairs. We birded here for several hours each on three days.

Panorama view of the canopy platform at the top of the stairs and connected to a platform that surrounds the tree by a narrow walkway. Scroll right to see the whole panorama.

This is by far the best bird viewing site at Sacha -- you get to see canopy birds in their natural habitat, and you can see far over the forest.

Mary on the canopy platform. I took this picture to further capture the wonderful mood of the place and to show how almost every part of the tree is covered with epiphytes.

Here's an emergent tree that survived the windstorms at Sacha. Thanks to Juan Carlos Calvachi for this picture.

From Sacha, we twice took rides on a bigger canoe down the Napo river, intending to go to two "salt licks" -- mud banks where parrots comet to feed on trace chemicals that they don't get from their regular diet. On the first try, we were hit by a truly torrential rain, which forced us to abort -- there were no parrots in the rain anyway -- and which subjected us to a cold and very wet ride back to Sacha. We trie to protect my camera, but water leaked in and killed it. Fortunately, I had two camera bodies with me, so all the rest of the trip pictures -- maybe 3/4 of them -- were taken with the other camera. Fortunately, this Canon 1DX body takes slightly better pictures. The disadvantage is that a 400 mm lens plus 2x extender plus the 1DX camera is heavy enough so that hand-holding the system -- which is necessary most of the time -- was difficult. I got lots of exercise on this trip!

Wildsumaco Lodge

This is the porch at Wildsumaco Lodge, where we stayed for 6 nights and 5 days. It is at 1400 m elevation on the east side of the Andes, almost exactly along the N-S line where the bird species density is the highest on Earth. Great birding. Many of the hummingbird pictures in the bird pages were taken at the left end of this porch. Scroll right to see the complete > 180-degree panorama.

On the porch at Wildsumaco Lodge.

At Wildsumaco, we enjoyed a fire for a few minutes before dinner almost every night -- wonderfully relaxing after an intense day of birding.

Sunrise on Antisana volcano (5753 m or 18,875 feet high) on December 21, 2022, the morning we left Wildsumaco to drive over the crest of the Andes to Septimo Paraiso, near Mindo. It rained for much of the time that we were at Wildsumaco, so we did not expect to see the mountain.

Continental Divide -- The Pass Through the Andes

This picture looks east from the 4000 m pass through the Andes between Quito and the Amazon basin. John got a life bird (White-chinned thistletail) and pictures of a male Viridian metaltail -- both hummingbirds -- a few feet from where this picture was taken.

Our bird pictures from around the world follow standard ecozones approximately but not exactly:

Birds from the USA and Canada: our house, Hornsby Bend and greater Austin, Texas, California, Hawaii, Canada,

Neotropic birds from Central America and the Caribbean: Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Trinidad and Tobago

Neotropic birds from South America: Ecuador 2004, Ecuador 2017, Brazil.

Western palearctic birds: Europe: Germany, Finland, Norway, Europe: United Kingdom, Europe: Spain, the Canary Islands, Europe: Lesbos, Greece, Israel

Eastern palearctic birds: China

Birds from Africa: The Gambia, South Africa

Indo-Malayan birds from India: North-west (Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand) India: North-east (Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya) India: Central (Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh)

Birds from Australia, New Zealand.

For our 2014 December trip to India, see this travelog.

For our 2016 May-June trip to India, see this travelog.

For our 2017 April trip to High Island, Texas, see this web site.