Birding Mindo

I first heard about the Refugio Paz de Las Aves — which translates as Birds of Peace Refuge — from Noah Strycker, an ornithological writer and big year birder at a talk he gave at the Biggest Week in American Birding Festival in Ohio in 2016. He told the story of a man in north-west Ecuador who had trained rare, strange looking, tropical birds to come out when he called them. It sounded amazing to me, but I had no idea that only two years later I would be going to the same place.

I watched the shadows of the predawn forest from a bamboo blind, eagerly waiting for my first views of an Andean cock-of-the-rock at the Refugio Paz de Las Aves lek. Andean cock-of-the-rocks are one of the many species of birds that form communal displays, called leks, where multiple males gather to display for females. In most species of birds that lek, the males don’t help with nesting or raising the young, but they sure do put on a show.

As the sky began to lighten, I heard faint croaking noises coming from the trees. The sun rose, revealing five or six huge, striking, red birds with black and white wing patches in the trees in front of the blind. They began to jump and flap their wings while making loud squawking calls.

Andean Cock-of-the-rock (Rupicola peruvianus)

Once the sun had completely risen the cock-of-the-rocks continued to display, although a little less vigorously. Apparently, if a female were to show up, they would go crazy with their displays again. We took a last look at them, and walked up the path out of the forest. A brilliantly green bird with a red breast, a golden-headed quetzal, flew over us and landed in a tree. As we emerged from the forest onto a dirt road, clouds drifted overhead. I thought I caught a glimpse of a swift in the clouds several times, but it would always disappear before I could identify it. The founders of Paz de las Aves, Angel and Rodrigo Paz, met us at the road, and than disappeared into the forest to look for the giant antpittas Angel had trained.

Antpittas are a very secretive family of large tropical birds that like to hop around in dense brush and eat worms. The giant antpitta, especially, is a skilled hider, and on top of that, a very rare, range-restricted Choco endemic. Landowner Angel Paz didn’t know this information, though, when he first noticed a giant antpitta eating worms on a recently made trail years ago. He had already discovered the cock-of-the-rock lek on his land, and begun showing it to tourists. Angel spent the following days studying the bird, learning about its habits and what it ate. He tried feeding it worms, but at first it wouldn’t accept them. Finally, one day the bird ate the worms he offered. He named her Maria, and trained her to come out whenever he called in exchange for worms. When he realized that there were other species of antpittas on his property, such as chestnut-crowned, yellow-breasted, ochre-breasted and mustached, he worked on training those as well. Now birders travel from all over the world to see Maria and the other antpittas, and he makes a much better living from conserving the forest and all the species that depend on it than he ever did logging it, as he once did.

We stood in the road listening to the loud low whistles of Angel’s imitations of the giant antpitta’s call. Our guide said that the antpittas were not as reliable in the rainy season, because it was easier for them to get worms on their own. Despite his pessimism, I began to hear a whistled response to Angel’s imitations. Sometimes the antpitta’s call was just barely audible above the chorus of frog noises, and sometimes it seemed like the bird might hop out into the path at any moment. Just when the bird began to sound particularly close, a motorbike roared by, and it didn’t respond again for several minutes. Finally, after almost an hour of tense waiting, a large bird with a rufous belly barred with black, and a big, thick, bill hopped out onto the path where Angel had set down worms.

Giant Antpitta (Grallaria gigantea) Angel told us this bird was Maria’s mate.

I watched with fascination as the giant antpitta ate, thinking about how so many birders, including Noah Strycker, had seen this bird or his mate before me. Eventually, he finished his worms, looked up at us for the last time, and hopped back into the forest.

We continued up the road, where Angel had once again disappeared into the woods. When we arrived at the end of a dirt trail off the road, Angel and Rodrigo were waiting with a family of dark-backed wood quail eating a banana. Dark-backed wood quail are another secretive endemic that was nearly impossible to see with any certainty until Angel trained them to come out.

Dark-backed Wood Quail (Odontophorus melanonotus) This is a link to a video I took of the wood quail family on youtube: https://youtu.be/AvA-ufjqlxA

The wood quail and their chicks ate the banana voraciously within three or four feet of us before slowly wandering down the slope.

The next stop, on a steep, densely wooded hillside, was to see the yellow-breasted antpitta. Angel called for it, and threw worms into a clear space amid a tangle of branches and roots below us. It wasn’t long before a small, brown-backed, yellow-breasted bird emerged from the brush, and started gobbling down the worms.

We walked through the Paz de las Aves lodge and past signs saying “ochre-breasted and mustached antpittas that way” and onto a trail that followed the top of a bluff into the forest. We followed the trail down the steep, muddy slope of the hill. Monkeys hooted and climbed in the huge palms in the distance. Eventually the trail leveled out, and we stopped to call for the ochre-breasted antpittas. We soon saw three of these tiny, adorable antpittas eating worms and hopping on the sticks in front of us.

I believe this individual Ochre-breasted Antpitta (Grallaricula flavirostris) was named Chiquira.

As the ochre-breasted antpittas began to retreat into the forest, Angel began throwing nuts he had picked up earlier onto the ground. Apparently, the mustached antpitta that he had trained, named Jose, was attracted by the noise of the nuts hitting the ground. Jose soon appeared, hopping with much more dignity than the tiny ochre-breasted antpittas, who backed up to let him pass.

Jose the Mustached Antpitta (Grallaria alleni)

We took our final looks at the antpittas and walked back toward the lodge, where we had a delicious breakfast of mashed and fried green bananas filled with cheese and empanadas. While we ate, we watched toucan barbets and blue-winged mountain-tanagers eat at a banana feeder. Violet-tailed sylphs, velvet purple coronets, and fawn-breasted brilliants buzzed and swooped around the hummingbird feeders.

Paz de las Aves shows how effective ecotourism can be as a conservation tool. Now, instead of logging patches of forest, planting crops, and then moving on to the next forest — while there is still forest left to clear– Angel and his brother can conserve the area just by being able to show a couple of birds to visitors. Not only is Paz de Las Aves financially important for the Paz family, but it’s one of the main attractions in the wider Mindo region, where visiting birders and other tourists spend money on numerous goods and services.

I woke at 6:00 AM on my first day in Mindo, Ecuador to the sound of hundreds of unfamiliar birds chattering and singing. My brother Theo and I got out of bed, and together we walked out onto our deck, peering through the half light at the backlit forms of singing birds. The large elegant shape of a motmot caught our eyes sitting in a fruit laden tree in front of us, but it was still too dark to make out enough color to identify it. As the sky lightened, we began to notice tanagers foraging in the flowers of the same tree. We identified flame-rumped, blue necked, bay-headed, and golden tanagers, which were all lifers. I noticed a tiny, richly patterned hummingbird, reminiscent of a bumblebee, buzzing on some purple flowers and I called Theo’s attention to it. We later learned that it was a purple-throated woodstar. Other common hummingbirds that we saw that first day included rufous-tailed hummingbirds, western emeralds, and the green crowned brilliant.

Western Emerald (Chlorostilbon melanorhynchus)

After breakfast, we decided to bird the popular waterfall trail, a road leading up into the mountains above the town of Mindo. We had heard that white-capped dippers and torrent ducks could be seen in the white-water and waterfalls accessed along the road. Fifty foot tall dirt banks loomed over us as we walked up the road, their sides adorned with lush, dripping vegetation. Mosses carpeted everything, from the huge trees and tree ferns to the occasional well lit patch of forest floor. The forest was so dense it was hard to see beyond a few feet from the road. As the road climbed onto ridges, we were able to look down at the canopy on either side of us. Here we encountered our first large tropical foraging flock. We came around a bend, and suddenly birds were everywhere — tanagers of all descriptions, wood-creepers, spinetails, flycatchers, and warblers. Some warblers familiar from home like blackburnian and Canada warblers, and tropical parulas, were joined by new species like slate-throated red-starts and three-striped warblers.

After several more exciting flocks, we turned off the road onto a small dirt trail that descended swiftly down into a heavily wooded valley. The trail was slippery and muddy, cut into a steep cliff with metal railings on one side. A small flock exploded in the trees over our heads. The brilliant, golden orange faces of flame-faced tanagers stood out in the dark leaves. Soon we saw our first white-winged tanagers and blue-winged mountain-tanagers of the trip. As we descended into the valley, the air grew noticeably warmer and more humid. An agouti, a large, rabbit-like rodent, ran across the path in front of us as we entered a clearing.

We crossed a rickety metal bridge with rotting bamboo hand-rails at the first river crossing. The water churned beneath us, rushing over rocks in white clouds and crashing back into the river-bed. Despite the rough water, we could not see a dipper. We came to a place where cement had been lain on the banks of the river, changing and channeling the water into a deeper slower spot. An incredibly steep-looking water slide made of crumbling cement was positioned on one of the nearly vertical banks of the river. We continued until the trail ended just past another river crossing, and turned around. As we began climbing the slope away from the river, I looked back and saw a white blob on one of the rocks in the turbulent stream below. I raised my binoculars, and saw it was a white dipper with a black mask. We had found a white-capped dipper after all.

White-capped Dipper (Cinclus leucocephalus)

During our visit to Mindo, we had many opportunities to bird the grounds of Las Terrazas de Dana Lodge, where we were staying. We found that in the early mornings and late afternoons the birding was often good in the trees around the edges of the cabins, with larger and more frequent tanager flocks there. All the common tanagers, thick-billed euphonias, yellow-tailed orioles, green-crowned brilliants, and red-headed barbets also fed at the lodge’s banana and hummingbird feeders in the late afternoon. When we tasted the Ecuadorian bananas, it became apparent why the birds appreciated them so much. They were the sweetest, creamiest bananas I’ve ever had, and they were never hard and green or brown and rotting. We asked the lodge for some to put on the platform banana feeder directly behind our cabin, and we soon had all the brilliantly colored tanagers and barbets visible from our private deck.

Red-headed Barbet (Eubucco bourcierii)

On several occasions we walked out of the entrance of the lodge and went right on the road, away from the town of Mindo, and the turnoff for the waterfall trail. We twice encountered a scarlet-backed woodpecker on this road, as well as an olivaceous piculet, which is an exciting little tropical mini-woodpecker of sorts. Southern lapwings flew about in the field across the road from the lodge, and roadside hawks were also often present. One day we made the trip down this road while it was raining, and we lucked upon a torrent tyrannulet hunting over a little trickle. We also saw a striated heron, variable and yellow-bellied seedeaters, and a cooperative pale-legged horneo.

Pale-legged Horneo (Furnarius leucopus)

Another location in Mindo that we birded multiple times was the Yellow House Trails, a 494 acre reserve of secondary and primary cloud forest. From the Yellow House Lodge at the beginning of the trail, we climbed up over cow pastures and scattered guava trees towards the top of the mountain, where the forest started. From the exposed vantage point the slope gave us, we could look out on raptors flying in the valley below. We saw roadside hawks, hook-billed kites, and even a rare snail kite. Once we reached the rainforest, smaller trails numbered one through five branched off the main trail. These trails wound right through the heart of the cloud forest, giving a close up view of it. Huge trees towered over a dense understory of bushes and vines, which were carpeted in mosses and epiphytes. The forest was so dense that it was often hard to see far enough to spot birds, but despite this challenge, the trails were still very productive. Pale-mandibilled aracaris and yellow-throated toucans squawked and flew about in the canopy. On the way back towards Mindo via the main trail, we saw a crested guan slowly walking about in the top of a tree.

In the first mixed flock we encountered on the Yellow House trails, we spotted a cerulean warbler, a beautiful and endangered songbird that breeds in the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States. Seeing one so far from where I’ve experienced them in the summer in Virginia highlighted for me the importance of such far flung places as habitat, even for a songbird as representative of the southern Appalachians as the cerulean. It also helped to complete my picture of the species, adding a memory of it foraging in the cloud forest canopy with species like fawn-breasted, golden and blue necked tanagers to visions of cool early spring mornings when the buds are just opening and the trees are full of bird song back home.

Mindo is located in the Choco-Darien moist forest ecoregion, a biodiversity and endemism hotspot that ranges from southern Panama through north-western Ecuador. Almost 70 species of birds that live no where else in the world can be found in Mindo and the surrounding mountains. When I first became interested in going to South America a couple of years ago, I wasn’t sure whether I would rather travel to Peru or Ecuador. In the end, Mindo’s incredible birding and ease of access – its only 2 hours from Quito international airport by car – won the case for us. After more than a week in the Mindo area, I definitely felt that we made a good choice. If you have any questions about Mindo or the region, or information to share, feel free to email me or leave a comment.