Northwest Ecuador is teeming with birds of subtle charm: Brown-backed Chat-Tyrant, for example, was my first lifer this time around, and Yellow-bellied Chat-Tyrant my last; both are absolutely beautiful flycatchers, but perhaps not what most people think of when they imagine birding the tropics.

Tandayapa Bird Lodge is ideal for getting to see many of those more colorful birds. The couple of days I had there were great for such birds as Red-billed Parrots in fast-flying flocks and tanagers in the treetops.

Blue-winged Mountain-Tanagers were among my favorites: big, bright, and conspicuous, even visiting feeders over breakfast (theirs and mine) for great views.

A common sound in the cloud forest was the hawk-like keening of Golden-headed Quetzals. We didn’t actually see many of these rather reclusive birds, but this one sat for its portrait, nicely showing off the fringed upper-tail coverts that nearly conceal the black rectrices.

And Tandayapa was a wonderful place for watching Plate-billed Mountain-Toucan, to my mind the Choco endemic: beautiful, big, and classic in its tropical beauty.

Now that’s the cloud forest: fog, epiphytes, and toucans!

One of my favorite afternoons in Ecuador earlier this month was spent at Tony and Barbara’s place in the upper Tandayapa Valley. Their hummingbird feeders were going great guns, with Mountain Velvetbreasts and Green-tailed Trainbearers a common sight right at the house, and small tanager flocks worked the edges while we watched from the comfortable porch.

Tony took a few of us around to see their resident star, a female Common Potoo brooding a chick atop a snag.

The eerie light, the awkward angle, and the abundant vegetation made it difficult to get clear pictures of this amazing sight, but that oddly placed white bump to the right beneath the adult’s belly plumage was the chick. Tony told me that both mother and child will occupy the snag until the youngster has grown large enough to displace the parent, at which point the adult will seek a new roost, leaving the old one to the fledgling.

Everywhere we turned in Ecuador there were birds to gape at, but once in a great while one of the abundant butterflies paused long enough to be admired, even photographed. Here is a selection of what we encountered; leave a comment if you know what any of them are.

This one was feeding on a sort of woody Eupatorium at Tandayapa Lodge.

And this one…well, let’s just say that not all leps are terribly discriminating in their source of minerals.

This was quite a common butterfly in the upper Tandayapa Valley; we took to calling it a sister.

This next one may even be a sister.

 

These were all over the roads in the cloud forest.

I felt very smug when I recognized this one as an eighty-eight; of course, there are many, many different eighty-eights, so it was sort of like recognizing a bird as, oh, a tanager. Michael suggested that this one was really an “eighty-nine,” and I’m happy to go with that.