A very small selection of photos from my spring trip to South America.
There's only one hummingbird that can pollinate flowers this long...and we've got pictures of it.
A male buff-winged starfrontlet...those patches looked more white than buff, though.
The sword-billed hummingbird, pollinator of aforementioned flowers. This is the female. They always sit with their heads tilted up, probably to balance the weight of that bill.
The first trail we took. That dropoff on the left REALLY drops off.
A wee bug that I found on my shirt. It's just black with red spots, but I thought it was pretty.
A flowerpiercer, possibly white-sided (I can't ID it from this angle). These birds are destructive versions of hummingbirds. They drink nectar, but they pierce the bases of flowers to get at the nectar with that curved beak, not pollinating the flowers at all. They also visit hummingbird feeders.
The fantastic male sword-billed hummingbird, showing off his long bill and sticking out his longer tongue.
A masked flowerpiercer.
A tiny mushroom I found, growing out of a leaf. Not leaf litter...a LEAF. That's a fair indication of how much rain this region gets.
Wood quails and antpittas are some of the most secretive birds in the rainforest...and thanks to a ranch owner who has developed an incredible "friendship" with some of these birds, we were able to see both of them up close. One of the ranch hands would go several hundred yards up the trail and "call" the birds, then eventually tell us to follow him. He would then toss out some worms for the antpittas or fruit for the ground quails, and the birds would slowly come out of the foliage and eat. These are dark-backed wood quail (adults on the right, young on the left).
Don't you just want to pick it up and cuddle it?
This shot is pretty blurry, but look at that black beauty on the right. That's probably the best shot we got of a velvet-purple coronet.
Shrooooooms! They looked like angel wings to me (that's a species, not a simile).
One of the places along the road where we would get out and look for birds.
A collared Inca.
The feisty and omnipresent buff-tailed coronet. Our guide told us that one of these birds once flew up to his face (which they do a lot), then stuck its beak in his nose.
More buff-tailed coronets. These two are the same species and gender; you only get that bright green flash if the bird is facing you and there's ample light. Aren't those little white "leg warmers" cute?
I thought this was just a normal, really large brown moth at first glance...then I noticed that this moth had WINDOWS in its wings.
Golden-crowned flycatcher. This may be one of the duller Ecuadorian flycatchers, but it's flashier than most of North America's flycatchers.
Fawn-breasted brilliant. Some of these hummingbirds' names are almost as beautiful as the birds themselves.
Booted racket-tail. These fellows were fun to watch. Their tailfeathers look just like a pair of tennis rackets, and when they're challenging a rival, they splay their tailfeathers and puff up those white downy patches that surround their feet. They also make this strange trilling noise that, according to another person at the lodge we were staying at, sounds like the Jestons' car.
Another buff-tailed coronet. There seems to be a correlation between how colorful a hummingbird is and how aggressive it is. While the coronets and racket-tails were constantly chasing and fighting with other hummers, there was a very dull hummingbird -- the speckled hummingbird -- that just sat at the feeder and drank, not letting itself get bullied by the other birds, and not picking fights with them or chasing them off either.
A violet-tailed sylph. I just can't put how beautiful this hummer is into words.
Green violetear.
I was casually watching a butterfly from the lodge's patio, and I noticed that when it flew, the wings looked as if they were "incomplete". Then I realized that this was no ordinary butterfly...
That's right...it's Greta oto, the glasswing butterfly, present in Central America, South America, and forwarded emails. It was amazing to see this creature in the wild.
The best picture of a tanager -- in this case, a blue-winged mountain-tanager -- that we got. The blue-wingeds were the only tanagers that visited the fruit tray, which was constantly being raided by an ambitious squirrel.
A family of white-winged brush finches also visited the fruit tray...just our luck that none of them were facing the camera in the best shot we got of them.
A banannaquit, on its way to a hummingbird feeder (with some out-of-focus hummers in the foreground).
Banannaquit again, with a rufous-tailed hummingbird coming in on the left, and a nice view of a racket-tail's tailfeathers on the right.
The hummingbird in the center is a female purple-collared woodstar. The woodstars were the tiniest hummers we saw at the feeders. They buzz like bees when they fly, and they're so small that they can't land on the perches -- they just hover in front of the feeder holes and tilt forwards to drink the nectar.
There were a lot of birds we saw but didn't or couldn't photograph. We saw a couple of guans (big, pheasantlike birds that live in trees, oddly enough), plate-billed toucans, a crimson-rumped toucanet, a toucan barbet (which I've drawn before), a crimson-mantled woodpecker, a green-and-black fruiteater, a pair of immaculate antbirds, a torrent tyrannulet (which is just like the black phoebe, but with a different color scheme), and numerous other wonders, including the incredible western race of the Andean cock-of-the-rock. We even saw and heard the elusive Andean solitaire...its song has an ethereal quality to it, and it's difficult to tell where the bird is by listening to the song.
Galapagos (Part 1) -->
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