One of the benefits of a first visit to a country is that so much is new. Of the 400+ birds our group saw on this February 2018 trip to Ecuador (see reference below), over 330 were lifers for me! Not only did I want to see as many birds as possible, I wanted to document what I saw in whatever way I could. Here is a Flickr album with some of that work: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmfgazoC. The first several days of the trip had rain of changing intensity and duration that complicated some of the efforts at ID and of documentation, but had no effect on the enthusiasm of the group. The reward was much improved weather for the second half of the trip.

In addition to photos, I managed to obtain a number of videos, many of which are linked in the flickr album (others are viewable on my youtube channel, https://www.youtube.com/c/ScottRamos <https://www.youtube.com/c/ScottRamos>). Finally, I also used the audio capability of an iPhone to record several of the birds that never managed to show themselves, not for want of trying by Pablo, our determined leader. Without another means for sharing them, these audios have been inserted into the eBird checklists created during the trip (a total of 49).

A big plus on this trip was the active discussions on ID that were shared among the participants. This created a great learning experience, an experience I have managed to extend by working on putting together an album of photos from the trip. Thanks to all the other other participants who made this a fabulous journey.

Scott Ramos
Seattle



> On Mar 12, 2018, at 10:13 AM, David Cook <41cdcook at gmail.com> wrote:

>

> A group of 8 WA birders just completed an 12 day birding trip to southern Ecuador which I organized. We stayed in 4 Jocotoco ecolodges as well as a few hotels and one hundreds year old hacienda. The group species count was just over 400 birds seen and heard, including two great Umbrellabirds, 40+ hummingbirds, countless beautiful Tanagers and many other wonderful species.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman11.u.washington.edu/pipermail/tweeters/attachments/20180410/cf65343b/attachment.html>