Field Guides Birding Tours

JEWELS OF ECUADOR
HUMMERS, TANAGERS & ANTPITTAS

Survey tour of Andean Ecuador; transects the north from Pacific lowlands to east-slope foothills and includes stunning Podocarpus and Cajas national parks in the south; diverse avifauna dominated by colorful hummers and tanagers and more subtle and haunting antpittas.
2009
January 24-February 10 with Mitch Lysinger

$4575 (2009 fee). 18 days
From Quito. Limit: 8
Fine to good accommodations, two internal flights to reduce driving; easy to moderate terrain (some hilly trails); cool to warm climate; several days of (cold) high elevation. Our staff travel agents can book your air travel for this tour. Contact us at (800) 728-4953 for more information. This tour may be combined with our ECUADOR'S AMAZONIAN RAINFOREST: SACHA LODGE trip.

See our triplist for March 2008 or January 2008 or 2007 or 2006.

See a slideshow of photos from this tour.

Sword-billed Hummingbird
by participant Hop Hopkins
Tiny Ecuador, covering only 1.5 percent of South America’s landmass, supports more than half its avifauna—about a sixth of the Earth’s bird species!  Its incredible avian diversity, totaling nearly 1600 species, is a direct reflection of its habitat diversity.  Its two Andean cordilleras transect the equator and stretch from the humid Colombian Andes in the north to arid foothills and semi-desert in the southwest and to the upper Marañon valley in the southeast.  The complex climatological interaction of the Andean massif with the cold Humboldt Current to the west and the moisture-laden trade winds to the east has fostered an incredible diversity of habitats in a very small space.  Cactus-clad desert in the southwest gives way to some of the wettest of the world’s rainforests just 200 miles to the north.  Vast Amazonian rainforest of the Oriente lies but a few tens of miles from páramo grassland and glaciers at 20,000 feet!

Centered around the lush, forest-cloaked slopes of the Ecuadorian Andes, the world’s stronghold for tanagers, hummingbirds, and antpittas, this tour visits both outer slopes of Ecuador’s cordilleras, from páramo and treeline down to the rich upper tropical zone along the eastern base of the Andes and the tropical Chocó lowlands in the northwest.  We fly south to include fabulous Podocarpus National Park, itself spanning habitats from treeline to the tropical zone; El Cajas National Park in the páramo near Cuenca; and a nice sampling of the geographically restricted Tumbesian avifauna in the arid intermontane valleys near Loja.

A few of the 500 or so species we hope to see can include Bearded Guan, Rufous-bellied Seedsnipe, Golden-plumed and the endemic White-necked parakeets, Rufous-banded Owl, the “San Isidro mystery owl,” both Lyre-tailed and Swallow-tailed nightjars, Coppery-chested Jacamar, two quetzals, three species of mountain-toucans, five to six species of antpittas, Ocellated and Chusquea tapaculos, Elegant Crescent-chest, Club-winged Manakin, Scaled Fruiteater, Andean Cock-of-the-rock, Tit-like Dacnis, and Giant Conebill.  But the real showstopper is the almost constant procession of tanagers and hummingbirds (more than sixty species of each are realistically possible!), a truly dazzling array of gemlike beauties, some very scarce or threatened.

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