Pasochoa

We have spent a lot of time looking across the valley to Pasochoa and wanting to make a trip there and Saturday was the day.  Nadine from Australia came with us as she's a mad keen photographer and we hoped to see plenty of birds.

The decision was made that we needed to leave the hacienda at 7am to be there early enough to see some birds.  In a straight line Pasochoa is very close, but it's a surprisingly long way by car - the last 6km are incredibly rough.

Pasochoa means "Lonely Widower" and is an extinct volcano with a collapsed crater in a long semi circular shape.  There is a track all the way to the top but apparently the last part is very steep and involves a lot of scrambling - plus we didn't have that long as we wanted to ride the horses in the afternoon.

The crater itself is a wildlife refuge and due to it's inaccessiblity has some of the last original high mountain forest  in the area.  Unfortunately there is a lot of introduced bamboo in the park.

As we set off we could hear a huge number of birds, but seeing them proved to be more of a challenge.  The path climbed part way up the crater wall, so you can look into the tops of trees lower down.  We had seen some small, fast moving birds and were sure there would be more when Ben spotted something in a tree top.

It was a gorgeous hawk, who obligingly sat there for a very long time before soaring off to find some breakfast.  Even with a 300mm zoom he was right on the edge of range, and very hard to focus on with all the branches.

We walked for about three hours, saw plenty of birds - but many weren't so obliging for photographs.

A slight diversion into a little grassy clearing produced some nice shots:

Some kind of tanager:

Scarlet Bellied Mountain Tanager:

                                                 
And of course there were hummingbirds, but they proved to be quite ellusive to photograph.  The Saphire-vented Puffleg below obliged us by sitting on a low branch just above the trail and allowing us to get very close.  He was very pretty, with blue feathers above his beak, nicely complimenting his lovely irredescent green plummage.

                                 
Ecuador has an enormous amount of biodiversity, due in part to it's geographical diversity - everything from the remote Galapagos Islands to the coast, the cloud forest, the temperate forests, the Andes and the rainforest .  An astonishing 18% of the world's total bird species live in Ecuador!  There are 1800 species of birds - even though we're not really bird enthusiasts it's not hard to be impressed - especially when there are so many gorgeous kinds.