Happy Birthday Tree Ferns

It's May 2nd 2014, the day I turn two decades old! What present do I give myself?

Tree ferns.

The plant in which pterodactyls like to hide.

But let me back up. Last night, the day after finishing my Salkantay Trek to Machu Picchu, after not nearly enough rest and relaxation in Cusco, I flew back to Ecuador. It was an evening flight to Lima and then to Quito, where I landed at 12:15 in the morning.

"Happy birthday," I told myself quietly as the Ecuadorian customs officer checked my suitcase.

It wasn't until an hour later that I arrived at my hostel's lobby. There, in the middle of the night, I pulled my extra luggage out of storage and rearranged my belongings. I wanted to leave all my wool garments, alpaca-themed gifts, and winter clothes in Quito. In the Amazon I would be needing quick-drying pants, long-sleeved shirts and plenty of socks -- plus my Birds of Ecuador book, of course!

Without showering or brushing my teeth, I stumbled into my assigned bunk bed in the eight-person dorm room. It was with great sorrow that I yanked myself from bed a mere three hours later. Juan Carlos, the driver from my next destination (a research station in the Amazon called Estación Científica Yasuní) was scheduled to pick me up at 6:30am.

I sat on the curb eating a grand birthday breakfast of peach yogurt, the kind which comes with a little plastic cap full of powdery frosted flakes and a two-piece miniature plastic spoon. Just the thing to ring in my second decade of life.

Juan Carlos showed up an hour late due to traffic, or because of the thermos of coffee he had brewed, or maybe just because that's still "on time" in Ecuador. I got the backseat because another volunteer was in the front.

During our twelve hour drive to the research station, I got to know the two friends who would keep me company for the next twenty days: the jovial Ecuadorian man, Juan Carlos, and the sarcastic Dutch girl, Renate. We played loud music, stopped for bathroom breaks, and ate a delicious lunch of fish grilled in leaves and jungle green tea in the Amazonian city of Coca.

Arriving at the RepSol oil company checkpoint reminded me of last September, when I first visited Yasuní National Park with my study abroad program. This journey was much the same.

Even the friendly mama dog was still there, begging for love as usual.

Juan Carlos, Renate and I wandered around the barely-existant settlement of Pompeya while we waited for the RepSol canoe and barge to take us and our truck across the Napo River. We attempted to deliver a box of medical supplies to a house of nuns, but nobody was home.

The RepSol motorized canoe docked at Pompeya.

As we arrived to the other side of the river, I noticed the gorgeous wall of tree-ferns you saw at the beginning of this post. I wasn't with family or even people I knew on my birthday, and I wouldn't be unwrapping any presents, but I soaked in those elegant tree ferns and gave them to myself as a gift.

We bumped along the gravel road for a couple hours. Juan Carlos stopped the car to cheerfully greet every Huaorani by name, reaching out to touch the children and clasping hands with the adults. He speaks fluent Huao-terero.

Finally we arrived at the research station, just in time for dinner and desert of grape jello. It sure wasn't my grandma's famous chocolate birthday cake, but it was a fabulous end to my twentieth May 2nd on Earth. What better way to celebrate a birthday than to enter the lungs of the planet, the largest jungle in the world, the home of jaguars and river dolphins, the Amazon Rainforest?

The five buildings of Estación Científica Yasuní, as seen from the back.

Estación Científica Yasuní seen from an overlooking cabin.

I hope we humans manage to curb our tendency toward destruction so this place will be around for many more birthdays to come.

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What's for Dinner... Alpaca or Guinea Pig?

After I had spent a month longer than expected in Puerto López, I finally accepted the reality that I wouldn't be going back to the Galápagos Islands for my planned research job. Who knows what went wrong behind the scenes, but the fact was the my visa never arrived, and it wasn't going to.

With that in mind, I had a choice: to remain as a volunteer for Equilibrio Azul for the next month, or to explore somewhere new and spontaneous. It would have been easy to become an official volunteer and hunker down in Turtle House with my friends, but I knew I would always feel a little bitter about missing the Galápagos, so I decided to do something big: I bought a plane ticket to Peru!

I had a couple days to prepare and say goodbye to Puerto López, go birding one last time, take the EcoClubbers on a hike, and complete my first night dive. Then I took a thirteen-hour bus to Quito. Sadly, I propped my backpack at my feet for one hour of the journey, and the opportunistic thief behind me stole all my cash and my camera. Thankfully, he/she left my passport, debit card, and iPhone behind! He/she also left about $2.00 worth of coins which allowed me to buy lunch at a bus stop. There's always that silver lining, right?

I stayed at my favorite hostel in Quito and shared an airport cab the next morning with a couple of Australians. One of them, it turned out, was heading to the same destination as me! Soon enough, my plane was touching down in Cusco, Peru. My taxi friend and I settled into a nice, cheap hostel outside of the main square, Plaza de Armas, and headed out in search of dinner.

For once I was hanging out with a young professional instead of a starving student. We bypassed the $3.00 dinners and made our way to a fancy balcony restaurant with a live Andean pan-flute band in traditional costume. Neither of us could decide between the media cuy (half a guinea pig) and the alpaca en tocino (bacon-wrapped alpaca sirloin), so we ended up splitting both. Good call -- it was the best food I've eaten in my memory!

Photo credit: Joel Cummuskey.

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Birds of Machalilla: A Photo Gallery

I have seen a lot of birds during my time in Machalilla National Park on the coast of Ecuador, many of which didn't make it into blog posts yet...

There was that trip I took with Barbara to Isla de la Plata, otherwise known as "Poor Man's Galápagos." Then there was that time I went back to Rio Blanco for a weekend of birding with Gastón, but I was too sick to move the whole first day. Or, there was the time I met a man named Rene while on a field trip to Ayampe with EcoClub, and we decided to meet up for a birding tour the following day at 4:30am. Then again, there were all those beach walks and turtle captures and odd moments when I happened to see a neat bird.

I hope you enjoy this photo gallery of all the random birds I saw around Machalilla!

And remember... you can always scroll through a high-definition slideshow my clicking on any of the photos.

Isla de la Plata with Barbara

A bright vermillion flycatcher stood out on the dry, grassy island.

A juvenile blue-footed booby objected to its photo being taken. Must be those awkward adolescent years...

This puff-ball baby booby was still in the cute stage.

A short-tailed woodstar! We heard her chirping for a while before she finally revealed herself.

Muyuyo, a plant I remember well from the Galapagos.

And the muyuyo berries. They taste sweet until the pure rubber texture begins to set in...

A collared warbling finch taking a break from its melodic, liquid, trilling song.

Snorkeling was fun until the jellyfish got me... :( My arm looked as if I had just had an allergy test!

Return to Rio Blanco for birding with Gastón

The exotic yet abundant blue-crowned motmot.

A gray hawk (yes that's its official name) in a secropia tree.

A Pacific hornero scratching in the dirt road.

A buff-rumped warbler hopping from rock to rock in a dry stream bed. I had help identifying this one from the folks on www.inaturalist.org, the coolest website ever. Check it out!

A yellow-rumped cacique.

An olivaceous woodcreeper. Look how the end of its tail seems to cling to the trunk.

We found a giant freshwater shrimp (crayfish?) in the nearly-dry stream. Gaston brought it home for lunch.

A tropical kingbird perches in the open, just like the kingbirds on wires back home. 

Early-morning birding in Ayampe with Rene

A pair of preening Pacific parrotlets.

A scrub blackbird with a characteristically pointy beak.

A tropical gnatcatcher, or perlita tropical, the first bird I learned to recognize this morning.

A rufus-headed chachalaca.

A male crimson-breasted finch among seed pods.

A female tanager or warbler of some kind... Rene identified this bird with no problem by memory, but looking at my short list of candidates and a bird book I still have no clue. I have a long way to go before I am a master birder in Ecuador!

A yellow-billed cacique.

A northern violaceous trogon, FEMALE...

And a northern violaceous trogon, MALE. Notice the different patterns on the undersides of their tails.

A yellow-tailed oriole.

A streak-headed woodcreeper.

Guayacan, a yellow flowering tree with good wood for making furniture.

After hours of slow bird-hiking, we made it to the entrance of the famous reserve!

An exciting bird: an orange-crowned euphonia. The first time Rene has seen this species here! Rene made me promise to e-mail him this photo.

I was walking along the road when suddenly Rene yelped and grabbed me. I had nearly stepped on this dead snake!

It was an equis, or fer-de-lance viper -- a deadly venomous snake. It was probably hit by a car. Thank goodness it wasn't just injured and ready to strike! 

A long-billed starthroat. Hummingbirds have the best names!

A Baron's hermit, swishing his tail back an forth.

An above-ground termite tunnel crossing the road. The orange insects poured out to repair this one break.

A wounded, starving, orphan foal which whinnied and followed us along the road.

This shimmering hummingbird literally fell at our feet.

She was injured and too exhausted to fly away.

We identified her as a violet-bellied hummingbird.

She drank a little from my water bottle cap, and she managed to open her crusted eye when we bathed it, but in the end she was very ill and we had to leave her in the leaf litter by the side of the road.

This streaked xenops was my favorite bird of the day for its pug nose, its extraterrestrial name, and the way it looked straight at me.

What a weirdo!

These shiny, skittish lizards kept running away before I could get a decent photo. Once I said aloud, "I wish it would run toward me instead of away!" and voila, the lizard ran a loop and ended up frozen right in front of me, posed for a photo.

Nearly six hours into our hike, we ran into this character -- an Austrian expat wearing a pink bonnet and carrying a machete. She invited us down her perilously steep concrete steps for a tour of her property, an eclectic garden of plants and stones.

A gray elaenia, technically too far south for its range. I wonder if I should report all my out-of-range sightings to the bird book authors?

Odds and Ends Around Town

I noticed an adult black vulture standing curiously close to the sidewalk. It was bolder than usual, so I looked around for a reason...

... and found this fuzzy orange chick hunched in a corner. He was too young to fly. I think it was only a matter of time until a dog or cat got the better of him.

A blue-gray tanager watched as I photographed the baby vulture, so I photographed it too.

A pair of hungry Baird's flycatcher chicks gets a grasshopper from mom or dad.

A scrub blackbird sits on a Puerto Lopez wall at sunset.

An aptly named croaking ground dove making ridiculous croaking sounds from the ground.

I was excited to identify this stripey little songbird until I discovered it was just a house wren.

A turkey vulture scavenges a meal of dog-slaughtered ghost crabs on the beach.

A magnificent frigatebird watched over us when the axle fell off our bus and we were stranded in the middle of nowhere.

I came upon this juvenile brown pelican during a turtle beach patrol. She was too sick to move or even flinch when I got close.

This isn't a bird, but you've probably realized by now I have a broad definition of a "bird photo gallery." I held this squeak bug up to my ear and heard its steady stream of squeaks!

The gray-breasted martins lined up on these wires by the thousands at dusk. The locals know to never walk under these wires at night!

A close-up of a sleeping martin.

A willet that seemed reluctant to fly, but I didn't chase her to find out if she was able to.

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