A Tale of Two Chemists: Birding in Ecuador

Birding in Ecuador

1st - 20th April 2026

We have wanted to go birding in Ecuador for many years. Our daughter Tasha spent six weeks there as a teenager and had a great time. It’s taken us a while to get there, but we finally organized a trip to celebrate Gloria’s “21st” birthday! For the first time in our lives we chose to book onto an organized trip, partly to make the planning easier, but mostly because we thought we would get to better locations and see more birds with expert guides. We first signed up for the scheduled “Ecuador: Ultimate Amazon” trip with RockJumper birding tours. This would give us an opportunity to explore lower elevations and the Amazon rainforest. We also wanted to take the opportunity to bird higher elevations in the Andes, and so RockJumper set up a custom designed tour “Ecuador: Eastern Andes: Paramo and Cloud Forest” that we would do first and then link up with the “Ecuador: Ultimate Amazon” trip. This all worked out really well.

We flew from Boston to Quito via Miami and transferred to a lovely small hotel (Casa Alquimia) in the Old Town of Quito. We were keen to explore the city and spend a few days acclimating to the altitude (~9500ft) before beginning our birding tour. The Old Town is lovely, with several amazing cathedrals, good cafes and restaurants. We enjoyed wandering around and didn’t have any serious altitude issues. The Jesuit church, La Compañía de Jesús ,was particularly astonishing as most areas were covered in gold leaf. WOW! We did visit the national cathedral with two tall towers (giving a great view over the city) and an amazing rose window with orchid flowers in the stained glass design. We found ourselves wondering how many churches there were in Quito. Now that we are home we can look that up, and according to Google, there are more than 80 churches and chapels along with 7 convents and 6 monasteries! Also to be seen on the skyline in Quito are several of the snow topped volcanoes. Ecuador has something like 84 volcanoes (not all snow capped) with 27 being considered still active!

After three nights in Old Town Quito we were picked up by our guide Gabriel and transferred to a hotel on the edge of the city for two nights that would allow us to get out into the countryside more easily. Gabriel turned out to be an excellent guide and a wonderful person. We really enjoyed spending the following 8 days with him. We spent the first afternoon visiting the botanical gardens in Quito. As it was the Easter weekend, the park surrounding the Botanical Gardens was heaving with people. Once inside the gardens we saw a Black Trainbearer a hummingbird with a very long tail. This was one of the birds that we had taken note of in the guidebook. We had thought, “there’s no way we will see that bird.” There it was on the first afternoon! This was a recurrent event—seeing a stunning bird that had caught our eyes as we were trying to get acquainted with the guide book.

The real adventures started the following day when drove over the mountains to the west of the city and explored three different locations ( Reserva Zuro Loma , Yanacocha reserve and Albami Reserve ) on the west side of the Andes, before heading back to our hotel in Quito in the early evening. At the Yanacocha Bio Reserve we got our first sighting of the Red-Crested Cotinga. We were so keen to see a Cotinga, having selected that as the name of our boat. We also got the first real experience of the wide range of types of birds present in Ecuador. There are whole groups of birds that have names we’d never heard before we started our studying for the trip. The guide book referenced many classes that are “more often heard than seen”. These included some of which we did get a glimpse (e.g. tapaculo) and others we had good views (several antpittas). The Tinamou remained elusive!

It was an early start the following morning as we headed eastwards up to the Paramo (alpine meadows) below the volcano Antisana. There were great views in many directions and the birding in this grassland above the tree line was fabulous. We were astonished that Gabriel could pick up and identify birds by their sound whilst driving! Up in the Paramo we saw three or four Andean Condor. We also managed to spot the Andean Ibis, a magnificent bird bearing some resemblance to the white ibis of US coastal regions. After visiting Antisana National Park we drove over the Papallacta Pass and started down the east slope of the Andes. We spent 3 nights at Guango Lodge (~8700 ft) and 4 nights at San Isidro lodge (~6800 ft), exploring the local areas by car for some of the time and enjoying the grounds of the lodges and the surrounding areas. From Guango Lodge we went back up into Cayambe-Coca National Park in the high Andes. We drove up to 4,300m (> 14,000 feet) in search of the Rufous Seed Snipe, but unfortunately didn’t find it. The fact that it was blowing a gale and socked-in with cloud almost certainly contributed to this outcome, but it was nonetheless an exciting adventure! We also took a couple of hours off from our vigorous birding efforts to enjoy the Papallacta Hot springs.

The best birding is typically in the early morning and late afternoon so it was always an early start. Sometimes we would visit a hide at the lodge at dawn (~ 6 am) or walk the local trails, and then return for breakfast, before embarking on the main activities of the day. If we were planning to be away from the lodge all day we would take a prepared lunch with us. I should say that all the lodges we stayed at were fantastic. This was not a trip where we “roughed it”! The accommodation was beautiful and we had excellent and plentiful food. It was quite an intense schedule, but otherwise it was the height of luxury! You find a wildly different variety of birds at different elevations and so every time we moved location there were a whole new set of birds to add to the mix. The birding was challenging at times, particularly in the forests, but Gabriel did a fantastic job in finding birds, identifying the species and making sure that we both saw them. We visited many places that had hummingbird feeders. There was often so much activity, that it was difficult to focus on any one hummingbird. It was a true delight to see so many birds and so many different species of hummingbird. Ecuador is home to 132 species of hummingbird, about 40% of all hummingbird species worldwide! I tried to look at my life list to determine how many species of hummer we had seen, but, as it turns out there are 42 different “types” of hummingbirds in Ecuador. The names vary from Sylph to Train Bearer to Emerald and Coronet. It would take a lot of searching and addition to get any tally. At the Guango Lodge, we experienced the first “moth sheet”. This is basically a white sheet or tarp on which the lodge shines light through the hours of darkness. By morning the sheet is coated with a large number of moths. It’s essentially a breakfast bar for the birds and this was the first place we saw a blackish aguoti join the feast. The nearby hide allows the birders to get a great look at the breakfast crowd. There was a also a female masked trogon that appeared near the restaurant most afternoons!

By the time we finished the first part of our trip and said goodbye to Gabriel we had seen over 220 species of birds, most of which were new to us. We met up with the second part of our tour at San Isidro Lodge. Having spent more than a week with just the two of us and Gabriel, it was a bit of an adjustment to join a larger group. We were 8 guests along with a new guide, Bobby and driver, Dario. Bobby is from the USA and is an excellent birder and experienced guide. In fact we were by far the least experienced birders in our team, but throughout the trip everyone was friendly and considerate, and helped us see a huge number of birds.

After one final night at San Isidro Lodge we jumped in the van and headed down to Wild Sumaco (~4700 ft) and the opportunity to bird the lower sub-tropical forest. Of all the lodges, Wild Sumaco has the most impressive deck with incredible views across luxurious forests to distant volcanos. It also has a beautiful lounge with a real wood fire to counteract the damp, excellent food and a good variety of beer for purchase! Our journey from Wild Sumaco to Sani Lodge (~750 ft) in the Amazon rain forest is worth mentioning. We drove for 2 hours in the minibus to the town of Coca, where we boarded a boat for the ~ 45 mile journey down the Napo river. The boat was a large, flat bottomed, canoe-like vessel with twin 100 HP outboard motors on the back. It took 16 passengers seated one each side of the central aisle, and planed over the water at breakneck speeds! The river, a tributary of the Amazon, is about 1/4 mile wide at this point, fast flowing and full of sand bars and tree debris. It was an exciting ride as we wound our way downstream around the obstacles. After about 2 1/2 hours we pulled into the bank, disembarked and walked along paths and boardwalks for 20 minutes until we reached a jetty on a small creek. The 9 people in our party climbed into a canoe with two guides / paddlers and we proceeded along a magical stream with birds calling and monkeys jumping around in the trees above us. After another 20 minutes we emerged into a more open expanse of water and pulled into the dock at Sani Lodge, where we were met with a cool damp towel to clean our faces and a glass of fresh fruit juice. This would be how we were greeted every time we returned from a day trip! We were shown to our cottage (amazing) where our bags had miraculously appeared.

Sani Lodge is located between Cuyabeno and Yasuni National Parks, and there don’t appear to be any roads in this area. There are communities and houses along the river, but all transportation appears to be by boat. Our schedule at Sani Lodge was consistent: breakfast at 5 am, depart on the canoe at 5.30 am in the dark, paddle to the larger boat and spend the day hiking in the National Parks or birding the river islands; a mid-morning snack, packed lunch and return to the lodge mid-afternoon for a couple of hours break. Later in the afternoon we would gather for a short walk from the lodge, followed by drinks and dinner at 7pm. We made the most of our days! On one occasion we didn’t get back from our day trip until closer to 5pm and when it started to rain we abandoned all attempts to go birding in the woods. We really enjoyed the quiet time hanging around the lodge! One highlight of the Amazon rain forest was visiting a canopy tower. After the obligatory canoe and boat rides, we took a short walk through the forest until we came to an enormous tree with a metal staircase built adjacent to it. I’m guessing the tree trunk was 12-15 feet across and soared clean and vertical above the ground. We climbed up more than 100 feet and traversed across to a metal platform positioned in the top of the tree. We were interested to see the ramp over from the staircase to the platform on the tree was exactly the same as you would find on a floating dock in a marina, to allow for movement of the tree. We spent all morning on the canopy platform and saw a lot of birds.

Over the course of a trip we saw just over 450 species of birds! This would not have been possible without the skill and knowledge of our guides - Gabriel and Bobby, as well as local guides that joined us on the second half of our trip. The birding was more challenging than we expected, searching for birds by sound in the forests and then calling them in with recorded calls (using the Merlin app). In some cases we got long, detailed looks at the birds, at other times it was just a fleeting glimpse. We also saw many other animals, including a spectacled bear, mountain tapir, agouti, five species of monkeys, camen, snakes, lizards and a tarantula spider! There were a few mosquitos in the Amazon rain forest, particularly at dusk, but generally it was nowhere near as buggy as we expected.

We had a fabulous trip!

Gloria and Mike

I almost didn’t take my big camera, anticipating that photography and active birding don’t always go well together. In the end I did take it and enjoyed getting some shots of the birds from the lodges and near the hummingbird feeders. For the rest of the time I relied on my iPhone to take snapshots of our trip. I will divide the photos into two blog posts: firstly, general pictures of our journey, mostly taken with my iPhone, and secondly, bird photos taken with my Nikon camera.

Mike

Old Town Quito

Hotel Casa Alquimia

La Compañía de Jesús - (iPhone vertical panorama)

(iPhone vertical panorama)

Reserva Zuro Loma on the west slope of the Andes (Nikon D850)

Antisana National Park - up in the Paramo (iPhone)

Antisana National Park - Gabriel and Gloria (iPhone)

Guango Lodge - our room (iPhone)

Guango River (iPhone)The grounds of Guango Lodge (iPhone)Searching for rufous Bellied Seed Snipe at >14,000 ft in Cayambe Caco National Park (iPhone)