A full day was spent at the Buenaventura reserve in El Oro Province. A short time after dawn we witnessed several male Long-wattled Umbrellabirds at a lek site, followed by displaying Club-winged Manakins, Ochraceous Attila, and then stopped off at an El Oro Parakeet nest, where a bird was seen poking its head out of the nest and revealing the diagnostic red bridge across the top of its beak!
Around the aptly named Umbrellabird Lodge we observed masses of hummingbirds, including this Violet-bellied Hummingbird and Rufous-headed Chachalacas and Coatimundis dropping in occasionally at the feeders (bottom two photos).
A pair of tits (Blue and Great) in a London park 30 years back changed my life; I became a birder, and an obsessive birder by the following weekend. Works like Bill Oddie's Little Black Bird Book and Richard Millington's A Twitcher's Diary helped in no small part to nurture this in my formative years.
30 years on I am still an avid birder but have also learnt to appreciate other sectors of the natural world, especially frogs and primates in particular, through the undoubted influence of David Attenborough The Great and others. I now work as a full-time professional tour leader for Tropical Birding Tours, and now reside in the Andes of Ecuador. I love my job, sharing birds with people provides every bit of a buzz as a lifebird, which, of course, still creates a wave of excitement every time. I have been lucky enough to see well over 6550 bird species on my travels, which does not make me any more talented than anyone else, just one that is always greedy and impatient for more, which has taken me to all seven continents, and always yearning for that ONE...MORE...B-I-R-D!
I use Swarovski binoculars & scope, & shoot with Canon 7D and Canon 400m f5.6L lens.
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