Birdwatching in La Josefina

Masked Water-Tyrant

I have mentioned before that COVID-19, in conjunction with a beautiful board game, was the impetus for our family's burgeoning interest in bird watching. The game, Wingspan, prompted us in early 2020 to buy a Western United States bird book; then, weeks of camping in our pop-up trailer during the pandemic summer shutdown sealed the deal. We are so far from real birders, it's laughable. But we have a lot of fun!

Spotting birds creates a never-ending family game of "I Spy" when we are out and about; it's particularly handy when we are hiking or otherwise adventuring in nature, but really you can bird watch anywhere. In fact, we were running errands in downtown La Maná last week, and Dillon and I spotted a pair of the most striking bright yellow birds we've seen yet in Ecuador. We are pretty sure they were Saffron Finches.

There are plenty of cool birds to spot in California, but the quantity and variety in Ecuador are truly spectacular. Our guide book says that there are 1600 species of birds here, and I recently read that 15% of the world's birds live in Ecuador, which -- need I remind you -- is the same size as Nevada. Living in the tropical foothills of the cloud forest, below the great Andes Mountains, we get the best of all bird worlds. We get mountain birds, tropical birds, coastal birds and all the birds in between. This region isn't known for birds, but we are in a relatively similar geographic and climate zone to Mindo, a bird watching mecca. Not too far from Quito, Mindo gets a lot of tourist traffic and has won the international Audubon Society's Annual Christmas day bird count many years in a row. We are beginning to wonder if the bird count happened in our tucked away corner, could we give Mindo a run for its money?

***

Today, after homeschooling, we tried another new swimming hole on the larger Quindigua River a few miles from our house. Dillon had spotted it a couple weeks ago on a bike ride with his dad. The sun, which had been shining strongly all day, kindly dropped behind the clouds as we sauntered down the unpaved road to the river's edge, then revealed itself again in time to warm us for our swim. It was a lovely spot under a bridge, not terribly deep, with just the perfect amount of current for Brynna (in her floaties) and Jonah (with his floaty head) to float down, and for Paul and Dillon to battle to get under a small white water drop off. I also got a chance to swim freestyle upstream for a few minutes, my first few hard laps in a couple months. It was a good little workout!

After an hour or so, we left the river content and relaxed.

On our walk back to catch a pick-up truck home, Jonah spotted a foot-long lizard literally walking on water at the edge of the river. It was an awesome sight! Later, in consultation with our "Wildlife of Ecuador Book" by Andres Vasquez Noboa, Dillon determined the cool lizard was definitely a Western Basilisk, otherwise known as the "Jesus Christ Lizard" because of its ability to run across water surfaces without submerging. Per the book, it relies on speed, two legged locomotion, and special scaly flaps on its toes to stay afloat. Oh nature, you are so amazingly crazy!

As we were standing on the edge of the bridge, oohing and aahing at the lizard running across the water, the bird watching got real. Mind you, we had no bird book with us, no binoculars, and we are total novices. But all of a sudden, there were cool birds everywhere-- sitting on wires, hopping from tree to tree, standing at the river's edge, crossing the road. Birds, cool tropical birds, everywhere!

This is how our bird watching experiences usually go down: 1) First, someone starts shouting, "Look, a bird!" 2) We all jump, "Where? What color? Where?" 3) The person who originally saw the bird continues giving instructions, "Over there, on the orange tree, see it? It's up there, on the third branch. No not that tree, that one. See?! It's head, it has a black stripe over its eye." 4) Brynna joins in on the shouting, "Where? Where?! I don't see it, I can't see it." 5) By that time, Jonah has either found the bird and is whoahing about it, or he has moved on due to lack of interest, but 6) Paul, Dillon and I start trying to verbally note obvious landmarks, colors, and features, so we can look it up later in our book and discuss at length. "Did you see its beak? Its tail was curved? I think it had a red cap", etc. 7) When we get home, we pore over our bird book and argue over what we think we saw and didn't see. Nine times out of ten we come to some level of agreement; without a resident expert, that is where it ends. I am noting (in pencil) the date and place of each bird encounter that we can agree on next to the image in our book.

Unfortunately, despite our scholarship, we mostly cannot remember the names of even our most frequently-spotted birds, so we wind up giving them long nicknames rather than using their real names. "Remember, that's the reddish-orange one, the one we saw on the way to Mirian's finca?" and "Oh, look mommy, it's that yellow breasted wire-sitter guy!" and "Those are the black ones that huddle together with the ridged beaks, or is it smooth?"

We are a rudimentary team. Dillon definitely has the best eyes. Sometimes Jonah's artistic sense adds details the rest of us didn't notice. I feel like I am particularly good at being the initial bird spotter, but then I seem to lose them pretty quickly (I probably need glasses because the details definitely get blurry). I also suck with binoculars. Paul, absent his contacts, making it hard for him to participate at all, often pulls out a phone to snap a picture; most of the time, the birds are way too far away, and it just becomes a picture of a tree or a wire that we later delete, unsure why it was there in the first place.

The Wildlife of Ecuador book we have is pretty good, though not totally comprehensive. The text is sometimes spot on, other times it seems disorganized and lacking in important details. I bought it because it includes amphibians, reptiles and mammals in addition to birds. It has a little painted map of Ecuador next to every image, so we can see whether its a bird we should/could be seeing in this area, and it is not organized taxonomically but rather shows similar species next to each other, which is helpful for us non-bird bird people.

The local kids, particularly our most frequent guest, Leandry, enjoy looking through the book and pointing out all the birds they have seen in this area. Leandry is almost always spot on, at least in accordance with the map showing the geographic distribution. He has looked through that book at least twenty times in the last couple of months. In addition, all of the kids love taking our binoculars out to watch birds and wildlife from our front porch, and Leandry frequently calls Dillon outside to share birds he has spotted.

For you birders out there, below is a list of birds we believe we have seen (so far) in La Josefina. This doesn't include the blue footed boobies, magnificent frigates, yellow mangrove warblers, and other cool coastal birds we saw on our trip to the playa.

• Striated Heron
• Cattle Egret (I wrote about these elsewhere)
• Red-masked Parakeet
• Smooth-billed Ani
• Squirrel Cuckoo
• Pale-legged Hornero
• Tropical Kingbird
• Rusty-margined Flycatcher
• Masked Water-Tyrant
• Blue and White Swallow
• Thick-billed Euphonia
• Blue-gray Tanager
• Flame-rumped Tanager
• Saffron Finch
• Variable Seedeater

Our coolest bird encounter so far was at the start of Brynna's nap one afternoon this week. I was putting her down, when I heard a tap-tapping at the glass in the window above her head. I pulled back our homemade curtains, and sitting on the window cage were two little birds: on the right, a striking blue-black and yellow bird (about the size of a swallow) with bright yellow on his belly and crown, on the left the same sized bird but this one olive-green with a hint of yellow on her belly. They both sat there long enough for me to grab Dillon, so he could observe them with us, as though we were at a viewing window. Amazing. A pair of Thick-billed Euphonias! We think they must be either mating or working on a nest. We have since seen them one additional time, but they weren't so still and near.

As I read this post aloud to my family, we all laughed at our inadequacies in bird watching, our inability to remember these birds by name, our (at times) ridiculous family dynamics, and mostly, Paul's myopia. Luckily he is not offended. . . most of the time.

PS. We haven't even tried to start identifying hummingbirds. There are too many (our book has 42 different ones), and they are too fast.

PPS. I do have the Cornell Merlin Bird ID App, and I liked using it in the US, but it seems pretty useless in Ecuador.

PPPS. We are thinking about getting an Ecuadorian bug book next. . .

Dillon enjoying the River Quindigua

Bravely crossing the rickety old bridge

Jonah, river rat