Day 2--Un Poco del Choco

SUNDAY, JANUARY 20
Up at 4:45 am; breakfast at 5:30 am
Depart 6:00 am for Un Poco Del Choco
Return early to rest before next day's flight
Night at Quito Sheraton Hotel

We ate breakfast at the Sheraton's buffet, which contained everything one could possibly want to eat for breakfast. The bread selection alone took up one whole wall. I grabbed what I thought was a container of yogurt to put on my museli, but it turned out to be watery oatmeal that people and babies like to drink. Oh well, tasted fine on the cereal nonetheless.

Part of the Sheraton's breakfast bread selection

After breakfast, we boarded a big rental bus and got a taste of the kinds of roads this big bus could navigate. We climbed up and out of Quito on a busy paved road and crossed the equator in the process. No equator party. All were single-mindedly intent on seeing the cuckoo. We descended a couple  of thousand feet and abruptly turned onto a narrow, muddy, rock-strewn dirt road, barely wide enough for the bus and the cows that were being milked at roadside along its length. Willy explained that it was much easier and cleaner to milk the cows at roadside for milk pickup than to haul it from the fields. Of course this meant that in early morning, the road was filled with cows. No need for barns in this year-round growing climate, so the cows remain in the fields day and night. They looked very fat and healthy, unlike some of the sad, bony, pest-riddled cattle I have encountered in Nicaragua and farther north in Ecuador.

We drove up this sometimes cliff-hanging road until we got to a little town called, I think, Las Tolas. Here we debarked and some young guys from the village came to pick us up in three pickup trucks. Only two had 4-wheel drive, so when the going got too rough for the 2-wheel drive, the people in it crowded into the other two trucks--bear in mind that there are 11 of us. We bumped and skidded up the road for another half hour before getting out and walking down the very deeply muddy road to the entrance of a trail. Just before the trail was a deeply muddy spot that sucked off boots and was difficult to navigate. One had to balance on roots or spider walk it.

The dashboard of the pickup I was in

Un Poco del Choco is situated at 3,937 feet and has trails down to the Pachijal River 821 feet below. We hiked a quarter mile along the trail, and then it descended steeply toward the river. Each time I'd try to support myself on my walking stick, the bottom shock-corded section would stick in the deep mud and separate, and I'd have to bend down to wrench it free. The walking stick was less than useless for this kind of terrain . . . and very frustrating. I eventually left it at trailside to pick up on the way out.

Willy helped me when he could, but he was moving at speed, anxious to get to the site himself to see the bird that he had never seen before. Nicole Buttner had discovered the Common Ground-Cuckoo at her new refuge just three months prior to our visit. Today, Nicole was tossing grasshoppers to it to keep it in view for us. Her husband, Wilo helped us down the trail also.


Nicole Buttner and Wilo Vaca

Here is part of an Internet interview with Nicole:
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Q. What is Un Poco del Choco and when did you start it?
A.  Un Poco del Choco is a 15 hectares reserve in the Northwest of Ecuador, two and a half hours from Quito. In 2008, Wilo and I came back from Germany and bought this nice piece of montane rainforest. As it is a small piece of land inhabited by a lot of Choco endemics, we named it Un Poco del Choco, a little bit of the Choco. First we started with construction of our own house, and in 2009 we received the first volunteers to help us build a small biological field station that we opened in 2010. We now live here full time and work mainly with biology students who come to do their own research projects. I also supervise interns and teach tropical ecology courses for undergraduates. This station has always been open to visitors, although we never really promoted it this way. But, now, with the ground cuckoos around, of course we are happy to have birders , photographers, and nature lovers visiting and to host them at the station.

Q. Tell us more about the discovery. Did you realize that it was such a hot bird for the birding community?
Wilo discovered the bird one morning right next to the station. The army ants were swarming there and he noticed on the forest floor this big bird that he had never seen before. Wilo isn't a birder, but he had seen the cuckoo before on a poster. I was working with some students when Wilo came into the lab and told me about his sighting. He described the bird and when I showed him the Banded Ground-Cuckoo in the field guide, he was sure he had seen that one. I couldn't  believe it because I knew this bird was very rare. But, after a few minutes next to the army ant swarm, I also saw it! We observed it for about an hour. Our presence didn't seem to bother it. It even came to feed on a trail and we took some photos. In the same afternoon, I put the photos on the database Roger had mentioned. I knew that the bird was rare, but honestly didn't know that it is normally so difficult to see that even the majority of Ecuador's best bird guides and ornithologists had never seen it.
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The cuckoo was in mountainside shrubs in the dark cloud forest. It follows army ants, eating the insects that they scare up. The army ants go through a nomadic stage and a stationary stage, staying in one place until the food supply dwindles and then moving on. This was day 19 of the ants' 17-day cycle, but Nicole was keeping the cuckoo there by throwing grasshoppers to it, so we were able to see this rarely seen bird well and at length. 

Iris's knees and my knees and hip were very uncomfortable while balancing on the steep, muddy mountainside to view the cuckoo. Going back was really rough on the knees and hip--uphill and in deep mud. In one place it was so steep that when I loosened a small rock, it fell to the shoulder of the person behind me, fortunately doing little damage.

After seeing the cuckoo, we returned to Un Poco del Choco, washed our boots, visited the composting toilets, washed up at the outdoor spigot, and ate our lunch sitting on the porch or on little benches out front. Wilo made each person a cup of coffee or tea. I enjoyed the respite.


Sally, Jim, Margaret, and Nicole eating lunch and taking a break ar Un Poco del Choco

We birded along the road a bit on our way back to the village, all observing a roosting Common Potoo. Soon however, heavy rain drove us to  wait in an old chicken house for the pickup trucks. Willy's pickup group saw a crested Quetzel on a fencepost. I, for one, was envious of that sighting, but we would have three other good quetzel sightings before the trip was over.

Common Potoo; Internet photo by Jim Ownby, a Payne County Audubon member

Because it rains a lot in this area, many of the small villages have erected large metal covers over an area for outdoor cooking, soccer, basketball, etc. It was still pouring when those of us in the first pickup arrived in the village, so we waited under such a shelter. Two small boys approached and showed me a bedraggled Atlas Moth they had found. They were learning young the advantages of ecotourism when I took a photo of it and gave each a stick of gum.

That evening we enjoyed another artfully presented, pricy, so-so Sheraton meal and then completed our bird lists. We had seen 73 bird species, including, of course, the banded ground cuckoo--an excellent though strenuous first day.

Rose Ann's photo of the Banded Ground-Cuckoo