Quito Commons

Just as on my first visit to Ecuador a couple of summers ago, this time I found myself enchanted by Quito’s city parks. The closest to our conference hotel this time was La Carolina, a long and slender strip of grass and sparse trees offering soccer fields and volleyball courts, dog runs and ice cream carts, and virtually all the common birds of the city’s urban landscape.

Like me, the participants in my introductory walks on the two days before the start of the ABA Conference found the park a great place to get used to the altitude (9,200 feet!) while getting an ear and an eye in before the formal field trips. Our first species was usually Rufous-collared Sparrow, a beautiful and confiding Zonotrichia. In the Quito area, the song of this vocally versatile bird is a sweet, simply series of two or three whistles followed by a loose trill, a bit like a southwestern Bewick’s Wren or some Spotted Towhees.

The lawns of the park, which in North America would be covered with Mourning Doves or American Robins, hosted a couple of tropical “replacement species” instead.

The aptly named Great Thrush bounced on the grass and sang, in wild tones reminiscent of a European Blackbird, from the scattered trees.  This is a very big, stout-billed bird, common not just in town but in the fields and forest edges at every high-elevation site we visited all week.

This is a male; females are a bit grayer and lack the orange eyering.

Easily the most abundant and most conspicuous bird of La Carolina was Eared Dove. Like all Zenaida, they are quite similar to Mourning Doves, in plumage and in voice, but differ in the pattern of wing, head, and tail. In Quito, these short-tailed doves seemed to occur in two morphs, normal fawn-colored birds like this one and much darker, almost chocolate-brown individuals.

Hummingbird diversity is not high in the park, but the two species present are exciting ones, and new for almost every participant on my walks. Sparkling Violet-ears, big, bright, brash trochilids, hold well-defined territories, which they defend with loud chips and flight displays.

The bird that everybody wanted to see, though, was Black-tailed Trainbearer. This is a common city bird in Quito, but turned out to be tricky to photograph. All the same, this distant shot of a silhouetted male may give a sense of why this was such a special bird for so many of us.

Not everything was quite as exotic. Among the familiar friends from home were a couple of pairs of Vermilion Flycatchers, the males a much deeper, more saturated red than our orange-tinged birds here in southeast Arizona.

Each of the walks produced only a dozen species or so, but they were a good ’soft’ introduction to birding in Ecuador. With our first field trip on Sunday, however, the floodgates would open.