Colombia Day 1.5 - 2 (06-07Aug2024)

To finish off the first full day in Colombia, we headed a little further into the Eastern Cordillera to a farm where an intrepid man has trained a family of Muisca Antpittas to come in for worms.  The famous Angel Paz of Ecuador was the first known person to develop this practice and was dubbed the Antpitta Whisperer for it.  This was revolutionary for birders looking for Antpittas to add to their lists because they are notoriously difficult to see.  Angel was a farmer that learned that he could lure in the Antpittas by slowly developing trust with a mixture of calling to the birds and providing them worms reliably each day.  Our local Colombian guide replicated this with the Muisca Antpitta.

We birded the road while we waited for our local guide to show up and found a few birds.

Pale-naped Brushfinch - we did see more of these later in the trip.

Golden-fronted Redstart - These are relatively common but something to note for potential future splits as the Eastern Cordillera birds have white around their eyes.  The Central or Western Cordillera birds have yellow around the eyes.

Once we hooked up with the guide and hiked to the spot for the Muisca it didn't take long for it to show.  These local guides know the individual birds and name them, I think this one was Señorita or something like that.

Muisca Antpittas were once part of the Rufous Antpitta complex which was split into 13 distinct species back in the early 2000s.  The word Muisca comes from the indigenous peoples that inhabited this area of Colombia before the Spanish conquest.

The cool thing about these "trained" birds is that they teach their offspring to do the same thing so even if the trained bird dies off, the offspring will continue coming to the worm feedings and then all the time the local guides have invested can continue to benefit the locals for generations.

Speaking of subsequent generations, this is Senorita's offspring which is evident from the brighter rufous coloration.

The cows weren't impressed but I was.

It started to rain but we didn't let that stop us and birds don't seem to mind either.  I suppose they have to keep foraging and are used to daily rain in Colombia even in the "dry season".

Brown-backed Chat-Tyrants were common throughout many places we visited in Colombia.

Mountain Caciques apparently have a wide distribution in the high elevations of the Andes but we only saw these once on the trip.

That was a wrap for the first day and we headed back to our hotel which was the Hilton Garden Inn by Bogota Airport where the rest of the tour participants joined us for dinner.  I think that was the night the hotel we had our first power outage and also water restrictions imposed.  That was something we would experience a couple times during the trip despite being in the largest metropolis in Colombia (7.7 Million people).  However, the staff at the hotel took it in stride and made some good eats for us.  I think we had our first taste of Ajiaco which is a Bogota regional soup kind of similar to Sancocho which I love.  The soup is made with 3-4 different kinds of potatoes, chicken and a special herb called guasca.  They usually serve it with a side of rice, corn, capers cream, and half an avocado.   

The hotel was great, but I do think it was a bit of a mistake using a hotel in the middle of Bogota as a base for the first 3-4 nights.  Traffic in Bogota is a nightmare, with motorcycles zipping all over with no apparent rules of the road.  However, I get that it made sense due to arriving guests coming from the airport and it had all the amenities so I suppose I can't complain.  We battled the traffic out of Bogota super early in the morning and made our way up to the famous Sumapaz National Park which is a high elevation site characterize by Paramo habitat.  

The landscape is windswept and predominated by low scrub vegetation. 

It looks like something out of a Dr Seuss book and is beautiful.

Apolinar's Wren!  A Colombian endemic and very restricted to this paramo habitat.

Although superficially they look kind of like House Wrens, they sound very different.

The lifers started coming in fast. Basically every bird up here was new for me.

Red-crested Cotinga - we saw these only a couple times on the whole trip and they were both seen at a long distance.

Boyaca Antpitta - the interesting thing about Antpittas in Paramo habitat is that they seem to have lost their inhibitions with the lack of forest to hide in. They frequently can be seen out in the open.  Boyaca Antpittas are another species we saw which has benefitted from a somewhat recent split.  They previously were lumped in with Tawny Antpittas.

Andean Tit-spinetail is another high elevation species throughout the Andes.

The plants all the birds were perching on are almost as interesting as the birds.

Plumbeous Sierra Finches aren't really true finches but actually tanagers (Thraupidae family) that have developed into the same way of living as the finches.  This species actually behaves much like a Junco.

Black-chested Buzzard-eagles are the most common raptor at this elevation and are interesting because the  young ones don't just look different in coloration, they look different morphologically.  Mainly the tail which looks like a normal raptor rail when young, but then something more vulturelike when adult.  The above was a young bird.

And here is a beautiful adult bird.  The tail almost blends in with the wing line.

Usually they are seen at a great distance so this look was exceptional. 

The default Cinclodes species up here in the Eastern Cordillera is Chestnut-winged Cinclodes.  Cinclodes are in the ovenbird family (no not the warbler Ovenbird, but the true ovenbirds in the family Furnariidae) and there are about a dozen or so species in South America.  

We traveled a bit further into the park and ran into a Military Checkpoint.  They made a few of us get out of the van and frisked us and our Colombian guide got really annoyed at the young soldiers for hassling us as clearly we were birders and not terrorists.  

This Streak-throated Bush-Tyrant was super high up on a wire but the photos came out ok.

A Boyaca Antpitta out in the open!

A Many-striped Canastero was seen earlier but I missed a photo so I was jazzed when this one popped up and obliged.  We never saw them again after that.

The real target for the day was the endemic Green-bearded Helmetcrest which is a stunning bird if you get the male in the right light.  We unfortunately only found a female but the bonus was that we found a nesting female on nest!  

The nest could only be seen if standing at the perfect angle from the road on an overhanging cliff-side.

Green-bearded Helmetcrest

Rufous-browed Conebill is a near-endemic which only a couple birds making into Venezuela.

Scarlet-bellied Mountain Tanagers are a huge crowd pleaser and we never got tired of them despite their relative abundance in a multitude of habitats throughout the trip.

White-throated Tyrannulet is a species I had seen on my last Colombia trip but it was good to get re-acquainted. 

At around lunch time we left Sumapaz and headed down to have an authentic Ajiaco lunch at a local couple's house.  I will pick up from there in the next post.

Colombia Day 1! (06Aug2024)

Firstly sorry for the prolonged silence from me.  The good news is I have been in Colombia for the past 3 weeks and have tons of material to share.  I signed up for this trip with Otus Asio Tours about a year ago.  Previously I visited the Santa Marta area in the far northeast of the country so this time I was interested in a tour that focused on the 3 Cordilleras in the central part of Colombia.  These three mountain ranges within the Andes are the reason why Colombia has the greatest bird diversity of any country on earth.  You have these mountains that separate populations of birds and allow them to evolve in relative isolation.

This map shows nicely the 3 Cordilleras with the Eastern Cordillera being separated from the other two by the Magdalena River valley.  The Western and Central Cordilleras have a less pronounced valley (Cauca Valley) but enough to separate populations of birds. The highest peak in the Western Cordillera (Cordillera Occidental) is about 13,500 feet.  The Central Cordillera is the highest with one of the peaks being 17,600 ft high.  The Eastern Cordillera (Oriental) is the fattest and has a peak that clocks in at 17,500 ft.  The focus of this bird tour was in these mountain ranges and the valleys separating them.  We did not venture into the Llanos (tropical grasslands) in the east or the Pacific lowlands.  The tour stared in Bogota and ended in Medellin.  Fun fact, Colombians don't pronounce the double L with a Y sound like other Latin Americans, they pronounce it with a J sound.  So Medellin is pronounced Medejeen.  Bogota has an elevation of 8500 feet so it is higher up than Denver.  Medellin is lower at about 5000 feet, but in general we were anywhere from 5000 to 13,000 feet of elevation for the whole trip.  This means that although you are close to the equator, temperatures are generally mild.  

Since my flight landed in Colombia earlier than some on the trip, the trip leader (Jan Hansen of Otus Asio) along with his local guide (Cristian Daza) arranged for a day trip east of Bogota to focus on a couple of endemics.  Our first stop was the Observatorio de aves los Andes just outside of the northern limits of Chingaza National Park.  Although the land was mainly local farmer owned, they had some kind of agreement with various organizations in Colombia to preserve essential habitat for certain species.

As with most of the trip, we woke very early and had to drive for a couple hours to get to our destination.  Bogota itself is kind of a traffic nightmare so it was wise to get up early and try to get out of it before the traffic started up.

Upon unloading the van, our guide immediately recognized the boisterous calls of a gang of White-capped Tanagers.  White-capped Tanagers are far ranging in the Andes in elevations of 1600 to 3200 meters, but they hang out in nomadic groups so it is hard to find them in one place.  You just have to be lucky and run into them.  This was the only time we saw them.

The female are a little more subdued in color but essentially look the same.

The males have bright red throats and the white cap offset by the black nape makes it a challenge to photograph.  The camera doesn't know whether to under or overexpose the subject.

Andean Guan was another good bird that we only saw a couple of places.

I am glad I took at least one picture of this Bluish Flowerpiercer because it is the only one I saw on the trip.  The more prevalent Masked Flowerpiercer was seen many times after this and looks similar but has a  larger mask.

We saw Whistling Herons on my previous Colombia and Brazil trips, but these were much more cooperative.

One of the targets at this spot was the Black-billed Mountain Toucan so we were happy to find some.

A huge flock of Speckle-faced Parrots flew into a tall tree nearby but they were super backlit so I only took 1-2 record shots thinking we would see more later.  Of course we never saw them again.

Speckle-faced Parrots

But the main target was the endemic Brown-breasted Parakeet and our local guide spotted them way up in the canopy eating something among the epiphytes and bromeliads.  

This heavily cropped image was my only passable shot but we got great scope views.

Our next stop was Reserva Bosque Gujira just a little further east.  This ecostation had some hummingbird feeders which allowed for some good geri-birding.

Sword-billed Hummingbirds are huge!  I was not prepared for how big the bird was not even considering the bill.

Some of the female birds were a little harder to ID but I think this was a Glowing Puffleg.

The purple throat on this shot was a little more evident as were the "puff legs".

This was the only place we saw Longuemare's Sunangels.

Likewise for Blue-throated Starfrontlet.

Usually profile pics are the best pics for birds, but for some hummers you only get the full effect when the bird is facing you.

I can't recall if we saw any male Mountain Velvetbreasts but we had plenty of females on this day and I think 1-2 two other occasions. 

Tyrian Metaltail was a species that I was already familiar with from the Santa Marta trip.

Great Sapphirewings are also quite large and in charge.

Great Thrushes were the most common bird throughout the whole trip at a range of elevations.

A Smoky Bush-Tyrant was another nice find but we did end up seeing this species again later in the trip.

For those of you that have been to South and Central America, you will know that Tapaculos are frequently heard but rarely seen well.  So I was really happy that we actually got some good looks at one of these enigmatic species and I managed one half decent shot.

Pale-bellied Tapaculo - Sometimes I wish I had burst enabled on my camera so I could get at least one good unobstructed frame from these hard to see birds, but I hate having to go through and delete all the bad shots, so I tend to only shoot one by one.

The Sprinter Van we were in got stuck in the mud so we ended up staying a little longer at this spot. The driver was a little proud and stubborn and wanted to get himself out so I just took the opportunity to bird a bit more.

I was very pleased to have found these Slaty Brushfinches but we ended up seeing more at different spots later in the trip.

Finally the driver accepted our help to push the van out of the morass it was in and we got it out pretty quick.

We had a couple more stops on Day 1 but I will cover them in the next post.