Author: myip2014

Ecuador has about 134 different species of hummingbirds. Compared to 1 in Maine and 0 in  England, this is really quite overwhelming. They are not good at staying still for photos, and they are also not easy to identify, but the variety is astonishing. I have been completely unable to exercise self-control and limit my number of photos, so stop when you get bored.

Different shaped beaks to fit into specifically-shaped flowers:

with whip-like tongues:

“Ears”,

Crests,

or tails that Isadora Duncan would envy, like these:

Some have fluffy pompoms round their ankles.

 

They are also very territorial and engage in frequent spats:

And most of them are iridescently glorious, with what is called “structural color”. The iridescent colors  “are the result of the refraction of incident light caused by the microscopic structure of the feather barbules. The refraction works like a prism, splitting the light into rich, component colors. As the viewing angle changes, the refracted light becomes visible in a glowing, shimmering iridescent display.” (Cornell University All About Birds website). If the light angle is wrong, the feathers just look black.

PS: My title today is a line from Emily Dickinson’s poem, The Hummingbird.

…A route of evanescence
With a revolving wheel;
A resonance of emerald,
A rush of cochineal;..

PPS: If you are interested in their behavior, this recent article calls hummingbirds “bees with feathers”, and argues for treating them as an example of convergent evolution:

http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/13/12/20170610

 

Seeing mammals in the rainforest is tricky. The easiest are probably monkeys, because many species travel in groups, and you can hear them coming.  But mostly you get just a glimpse as they move swiftly through the treetops, or leap acrobatically overhead to cross a trail or a stream. Magical, but not a long look. Here are the best photos I managed in Ecuador.

(A confession: from time to time Marcelo, our guide at Napo Wildlife Lodge, grabbed my camera and disappeared. Somehow, he always found a tiny gap in the foliage and managed to get the monkey shot I would never have got. I can’t always tell you which Napo monkey shots he took, and which were mine, but he really liked my camera!)

These are Black-mantled tamarins, at Wild Sumaco:

And their Golden Mantled relative, near Napo Wildlife Lodge:

The most common monkeys around Napo (in the Amazon basin) were the Red Howler Monkeys. At dawn, the males set up the most evocative chorus drifting through the forest as the sun rises. The young one in this photo is nicely showing off his prehensile tail, something found only in New World monkeys. (Taken from a rocking boat, by me!).

Also common were the squirrel monkeys (who don’t have prehensile tails)

Finally, we saw one group of Woolly Monkeys. They need primary forest, and our lodge was in an area protected by the local Kichwa people from all hunting, development, and oil extraction, so we were lucky enough to see them. It is not clear that he was so happy to see us…

 

Wake the serpent not—lest he
Should not know the way to go,–
Let him crawl which yet lies sleeping
Through the deep grass of the meadow!
Not a bee shall hear him creeping,
Not a may-fly shall awaken
From its cradling blue-bell shaken,
Not the starlight as he’s sliding
Through the grass with silent gliding.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

On a narrow trail at Wild Sumaco lodge on the eastern slopes of the Andes, the guide behind me suddenly gasped. Unseen by me, a slender snake had apparently slithered right between my legs into the leaf litter. It was just showing, in a shadowy corner, so I took a rather bad photograph from a respectful distance:

At the time, we didn’t notice, being rather focussed on the snake itself, but there seem to be eggs next to it. Whether they are the snake’s own eggs, or those of something else, I have no idea.

My guide then took a long stick, and gently moved away some leaves, and the snake emerged into daylight, allowing us to see its startling coloring, and changed its demeanor entirely, swaying its head side-to-side in a positively cobra-like manner:

Back at the lodge (by a different route!), we tried to identify it. The reassuring consensus was that it was a false coral snake, non-venomous. More specifically, the best match I can find is Lampropeltis triangulum, one of the milksnakes, though the yellow band across the back of the head is not typical (most of them have a whitish band). They are oviparous, so that fits too.

The coloration is an example of Batesian mimicry: with their spectacularly vvid coloring, they aim to deceive potential predators into confusing them with the truly poisonous Coral Snakes.

 

As you know, I like looking at creatures from every angle, bottom as well as top. This tiny butterfly when its wings are open has those astonishing iridescent morpho-blue stripes, something almost impossible to capture on camera. If you look closely, there is tantalizing glimpse of a rather different-colored underside:

And when it closes its wings, a entirely new butterfly appears:

I found it hard to believe that these were the same butterfly, but they are. The guides call it the “89” butterfly, though its real name is Diaethria clymena, a type of Brushfoot.

Backs are not always a good clue to fronts either. All these photos are the same bird, the Masked Trogon, common in the cloud forests on the lower slopes of the Andes. From the back, the female (here feeding a moth to her young fledgling, just visible behind her) is a mousy brown color, not very exciting.

But then she flicks her tail:

And turns around:

As for her partner, as usual he is even flashier. Handsome from behind in a fairly restrained kind of way:

But altogether brasher from the front:

Especially when he puffs up his chest to impress the girls.

Quito, the capital of Ecuador, is exactly on the equator (the name of the country rather gives the game away). But near where the bears live, at over 14,000 feet, it is much colder (Mt. Whitney, the highest mountain in the continental US, is 14,500 feet).

The plant life has evolved for this unusual combination of very strong sun, but high altitude. They are often low to the ground, and many are spiky, succulent, almost plasticky cushion-plants, forming great mounds in which the growing medium for the living plant is its ancestors’ decayed foliage underneath:

To my eyes most of them were completely new, so when there was a lull in the bear hunt I pointed my camera at the leaf patterns and the flowers instead:

And this tiny gentian:

At slightly lower altitude there was also a rich, still unfamiliar, but rather different flora, but more on that another time.

No, it’s more closely related to a horse…

We were watching a salt lick at Napo Wildife Lodge in the Amazon Basin, waiting for the parrots to descend, and instead we were incredibly lucky to get a front-row viewing of a young male tapir.

Like the parrots, they need the minerals in the clay, especially sodium, to supplement their diet of leaves, shoots and fruit. He stayed for a long time (despite being aware of our presence) the size of a small pony, and apparently not yet full grown.  They have a mournful face, with a long floppy proboscis made of their nose and lips, and a fleshy crest running from the top of the head back to the shoulders.

And a very pink tongue.

The Quichua guides who helped us find bears also help a biologist to collar tapirs (the mountain tapirs are slightly smaller), and Rodrigo proudly showed me this photo:

PS: The flock of parrots never came, because a hawk came down and took one, and spooked the rest. But watch this space for a different salt lick.

I seem to be stuck on children’s book themes, first Paddington and now Roald Dahl…

In the same area as the Spectacled Bears there are these beautiful foxes:

Called the Paramo Fox by my guide, they are the local variant of the Andean Fox, or Culpeo. The Latin name is Lycalopex culpaeus. These two hang around the ranger’s station at the park, and are unusually tame, which is why I got good photos!

Foxes interest me, because although they all look very similar, they are only very distantly  related to each other. For example, in Maine we have the Gray Fox, Latin name Urocyon cinereoargenteus:

This one raised five kits under my porch one summer. Rather astonishingly, the Gray Fox climbs trees:

Foxes are all canids, and have evolved to fill very similar niches in their local environments, but they belong to different genera, so that the red fox of the UK is Vulpes vulpes, different again from the two above.

I try to keep my posts short, but this one is longer than usual. I have just returned from Ecuador, having seen some beautiful, fascinating natural wonders, so there will be a series of posts as I organize my photos and my thoughts.

The main driving force behind my itinerary was my desire to see a Spectacled Bear, otherwise known as Paddington, who lives in both “darkest Peru” and darkest Ecuador, being no respecter of national borders. Rather than keeping you in suspense, let me tell you that I found one (actually seven):

So here is the story. They live high in the Paramo climate zone of the Andes, in this case at 4,300 meters, or 14,500 feet, in the Papallacta Pass in Cayambe-Coca National Park. There is a road through the middle of the park:

But other than that it is gloriously wild, with a few gravel roads, and the very occasional trail:

The park ranger hadn’t seen any bears that day:

But over the course of three days with the help of my guide Andrea, and local Quichua guide Rodrigo (at left) and his father and brother we found them. (Despite their solemn faces, they were actually a cheerful, smily family, and very good at finding bears!)

Only one was close enough to photograph; the others I saw through binoculars or indeed Andrea’s scope, including the highlight, a mother and two tiny cubs, the mother with perfect spectacle-shaped face markings.

The bears’ favorite food is a type of spiky bromeliad, which they eat just like we eat artichokes, discarding the leaves and going for the soft centre, which also contains their favorite grub.

Getting closer to the bears is very hard because the terrain is composed of huge thigh-high clumps of grass, with no space between for your feet. It is steep, and you gasp for breath every few minutes because of the altitude.

 

But Andrea spotted this young male bear, who moved out of the open into a clump of trees, but then he emerged on top of one eating the berries, and stayed there, watching us closely, as we trekked through the grasses to get a closer look.

So I succeeded in my mission,  and can tell my grandson that I took Paddington to visit his family in South America.

Also hunting for the bears were two young German wildlife film-makers, who had not got a single shot in 8 days before we arrived. I am glad to say they eventually caught up with the mother and cubs and apparently got some footage, but meanwhile they left their hat on their tripod, and so Paddington indeed seems to have come back home… (thanks to Andrea for noticing this, and for the photo!).

As you know the BBC broadcast Autumnwatch from Sherborne last week, and they really  wanted good footage of the local deer in daylight, not just on infrared, but they found them quite elusive. So I thought I could supplement their coverage with these shots, both taken in 2013 in Sherborne.

The first shot is of fallow deer, a single buck and a lot of does!

The second shot is of roe deer, with fresh antlers still covered in velvet, in the grounds of Sherborne House en route to eat our rose bushes. Judging by the way he is licking his lips, the daffodils also tasted good.

I do admit, however, that the BBC caught footage through the trees of a pair of deer rutting in the woods, so not surprisingly they win this lop-sided wildlife photo contest.

My usual way of learning to look carefully at wildlife is to take photos, but last night I tried something new. I went to Shoreditch (London’s Brooklyn, but cooler) to a drawing class run by Wild Life Drawing, http://www.wildlifedrawing.co.uk, a wonderful idea started by Jennie Webber. They bring wild (or wild-ish) animals, give you paper and pencil, and let you draw them for a couple of hours. In the past they have had raptors, and wolf cubs, but this time it was snakes.

They are all rescue snakes abandoned by their owners for some reason. This is Peanut, a 14-foot long Burmese Python, investigating one of the artists.

As some of you know, our son Andrew once had a boa constrictor, so I am comfortable around snakes, but this was the biggest one I have ever handled. Luckily Burmese Pythons are typically quite docile, and if it was your first snake experience you would never recoil from them again.

Harking back to an earlier blog post of mine, his underside is pretty stunning too. Notice the large horizontal scales that he uses to grip as he moves.

There were also four smaller snakes, including two Royal Pythons, and a Corn Snake. (The pumpkins were in honour of Halloween).

I was 30 years older than anyone else in the room, and some of the others did beautiful watercolours or charcoal sketches. My drawings are not as impressive, though this smaller Royal Python seemed to like it:

The larger one got bored:

We gathered a substantial crowd outside the windows who couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing. One small child came in to pat the biggest snake.

Many of these drawing sessions support wildlife trusts, which in addition to rescuing animals perform an important educational service, with open days and school visits. If anyone would like to know more about this reptile rescue centre, they are called Snakes Alive, http://www.snakesalive.co.uk.

PS: All these are iPhone photos, but they came out OK.

PPS: Since this is a posting from London, I decided to use British spelling!