CHOCÓ LATER

May 18, 2025

*Giant Antpitta, Refugio Paz de las Aves (Mike Watson)*

In 2005 I made an epic visit to Ecuador with János Oláh, targeting birds he had not seen on his previous visit, but this meant lots of tough-to-see species, particularly antpittas. We had an incredible time, but my tripod broke on day 1 so no digiscoping or any kind of photography for me. This was one year before I got my first DSLR and as time went by, some of the rarer birds got easier to see and to photograph with the explosion in feeding stations at lodges. I had a couple of days to fill in Quito before my Galapagos tour this year so, where better to spend them than the cloud forest of the west slope of the Andes? Unfortunately, the timing of my visit did not coincide with recent sightings of some of my most-wanted Choco specials, like Banded Ground Cuckoo, Rufous-crowned Antpitta and Tooth-billed Hummingbird but there were still plenty of new ones possible and it would be great to photograph some old favourites.

Arriving in the afternoon, tired after a long journey I got biffed instantly by Europcar at Quito airport for ‘their insurance’. They refused to recognise the insurance I had bought with the car rental via booking.com. So, don’t bother with the booking.com insurance was the answer and don’t use them again. A disappointing scam. Also, I should also have hired a more powerful car than the little Chevvy Groove SUV, there are some long uphill climbs and goodness me, the entrance drive to Tandayapa Lodge is steep and has some wicked turns. It was interesting to do this now unfamiliar drive in the dark and 20 years after I was last there! The staff at Tandayapa are excellent and looked after me very well, the food was great and it was simply magical to stay at a lodge in the cloudforest again, surrounded by hummingbirds! Tandayapa Valley is the world capital of hummingbirds and one of those true world birding Meccas that everyone goes to eventually. It had lost none of its charm in the last two decades and in fact it has got even better, more of this later.

*Rose-faced Parrot, Mashpi Amagusa (Mike Watson)*

With so little time, this meant a 4AM start next morning bound for Mashpi Amagusa. This lodge was not on the established birding circuit last time, but it has gained a reputation for birds that are more difficult in the Mindo area, including some that I missed in 2005. After at least one million bends, dodgy mapping and some sketchy tracks I finally rolled up at 6.30AM. Without trying to drive up a path to someone’s house and in daylight it was much quicker on the way back! My local birding guide Sergio, the owner of the lodge met me at the gates, and we got down to birding immediately, starting with the moth trap. This is another modern phenomenon that offers an opportunity to see insectivorous birds very easily, attracted to a large white sheet covered with moths. I can’t imagine that moth lovers like it though, watching a wide variety of stunning moth species being eaten for breakfast in front of them, there goes another hawkmoth down the gullet of a woodcreeper. It is a very efficient way to see birds in a short space of time. This was not the only feeder here though, there were bananas and papaya too for fruit lovers. Bird activity was great before my own breakfast! I added some good new birds: Purple-chested Hummingbird, Rose-faced Parrot (at least 12 came in to the bananas first thing, something of a Mashpi speciality now and such a welcome catch up as I had missed it at Rio Bombuscaro in 2005 with stomach trouble while my pals all saw it), Uniform Treehunter, Bronze-olive Pygmy Tyrant, Choco Tyrannulet, Black-billed Peppershrike, Choco Vireo, Golden-collared Honeycreeper, Indigo Flowerpiercer and Glistening Green and White-winged Tanagers. Best of all were the three Black Solitaires we found in the forest away from the lodge. Hanging around the feeder for Dark-backed Wood Quail or trying for the solitaire was an easy choice. Jonas had shown me a log on which a Black Solitaire had perched 20 years ago, and we failed to find it, so I had wanted to see one ever since. What a smart bird it is too. The white pectoral tufts came as a surprise. Other good birds on what ended as a 95 species day were two of the best hummingbirds: Green-fronted Lancebill and Velvet-Purple Coronet (from the breakfast table), plus Golden-headed Quetzal, Bicolored Antbird, Orange-breasted Fruithunter, Golden-winged and Club-winged Manakins, Lemon-rumped, Flame-faced and Black-chinned Mountain Tanagers and the excellent Bangsia, Moss-backed Tanager, which I had seen in the mist 20 years ago. Here it was a couple of metres away while eating breakfast! Thanks to Janet and Doris too, for making my short visit a very enjoyable one. I will be back! I love watching the mist swirl up the forested hillsides, with occasional gaps revealing a wonderful tapestry of cloud forest trees. It is the steep slopes that cannot be cultivated that has saved this precious habitat. I had a little time back at Tandayapa spent watching the hummingbird feeders, which were incredibly busy. No lifers but a cool 12 species including Sparkling Violetear, Violet-tailed Sylph, Fawn-breasted and Green-crowned Brilliants and White-necked Jacobin. What a way to spend your time!

*Green-fronted Lancebill, Mashpi Amagusa (Mike Watson)*

*Ornate Flyctcher, Mashpi Amagusa (Mike Watson)*

*Dusky-capped Flycatcher, Mashpi Amagusa (Mike Watson)*

Velvet Purple Coronet, *Mashpi Amagusa (Mike Watson)*

Moss-backed Tanager, *Mashpi Amagusa (Mike Watson)*

Black Solitaire, *Mashpi Amagusa (Mike Watson)*

Black Solitaire habitat, *Mashpi Amagusa (Mike Watson)*

Next day saw another modern classic world birding hotspot, Refugio Paz de las Aves. Everyone who is interested in world birding goes here at least once in their life! Accessed by another rutted, bumpy track this place shot to fame soon after my visit to Ecuador with its habituated antpittas. We had toiled in the forest, hiding on precipitous muddy slopes in the hope of luring them into view and although I was thrilled to see them, including Giant, Moustached, Scaled, Crescent-faced (all the tough ones) I have nothing to show for it 20 years later bar some sketches and fading memories. So, I was keen to take some photos! The action-packed morning starts with a visit to one (!they have more than one!) of their Andean Cock-of-Rock leks. Another annoying gap from 2005! Janó had seen it before of course and we only heard it on his second visit. They are difficult to see away from their leks. It was a noisy and exhilarating experience to finally set eyes on this bird! At least seven males were spread around the trees in front of the hide, with one dominant bird in the centre, who had several scraps with potential usurpers, kicking them back out to the periphery. The light was poor, the distance was too great, the birds often facing away, excuses, excuses, excuses but I loved it. They are laser dot red in the darkness of the forest and what a racket they make, constantly screeching at each other. Cotingas really are the Birds of Paradise of the Neotropics! Crested Guan was new here as well but apart from these two, everything else was an old friend.

*Andean Cock-of-the-Rock, Refugio Paz de las Aves (Mike Watson)*

Angel Paz and his brother Rodrigo have created something very special here and their ‘show birds’ are a classic example of what can be accomplished in grass roots conservation. The reserve is a working farm with steep, forested slopes and gullies, where the special cloud forest birds cling on. Rodrigo was down one of these slopes already and was joined by Angel. After a tense wait Angel returned with the news that Maria was there. We descended at least one million steps into a world of mossy, bryophyte-covered trees and slippery, muddy slopes to a contour trail where Maria was. She is actually at least Maria III, all their Giant Antpittas are called Maria after the first bird they started feeding around 20 years ago. We enjoyed some terrific views of her as she came for the food put down for her, she didn’t eat it but took it back into the undergrowth where we could just about see her well-grown chick. Fab-u-lous! A tip. Don’t push the ISO up too high. Lower the shutter speed instead. The antpitta will freeze for you every now and again and you can rely on IS and super-steady hands instead.

A pair of Swallow-tailed Kites circled the valley, and we broke off for breakfast at the Paz restaurant. More unexpectedly great facilities and especially great locally grown coffee! How times have changed in this region. After breakfast we had another couple of antpittas to see. First on the agenda was Yellow-breasted. Another I had seen very nicely on the old Nono-Mindo road all those years ago but no lasting memory aid. I don’t think the Yellow-breasted has a name, but it showed beautifully. ‘Where do you want it?’ ‘The middle of the waterfall would be good’ and so it was, with a watery background. Incredible! Shakira was next on stage. That is what they call every Ochre-breasted Antpitta. They use a nice mossy branch for this one, great for close ups. It had started to rain now. Exactly what they taught us about rain forests in school. ‘How long do you think it will rain for?’ ‘No idea’ ‘Could it rain all afternoon, or could it stop soon?’ ‘Yes’, to both. Back at Tandayapa, where it also rained all afternoon, the hummer activity was intense and Lesser Violetear was a new one I’d missed in ’05.

*Yellow-breasted Antpitta, Refugio Paz de las Aves (Mike Watson)*

*Ochre-breasted Antpitta, Refugio Paz de las Aves (Mike Watson)*

*Rodrigo, KC, some other guy and Angel at Refugio Paz de las Aves (Mike Watson)*

I had hardly stepped outside the lodge garden at Tandayapa, so it was time to explore here a little before heading back to Quito this afternoon. There are still a few birds I haven’t seen in the valley even now after adding Crowned Woodnymph on the hummer feeders, Pallid Dove and the very sneaky and tiny White-throated Spadebill. I also had some very nice looks at the lovely Toucan Barbet, Strong-billed and Spotted Woodcreepers and Russet-crowned Warbler at the all-you-can-eat moth buffet. The local form of Red Brocket Deer was a surprise. So ended my time in the Choco, it must be one of my favourite habitats. One of the most diverse in the world and there are still plenty of birds left for me there. It is also just a terrific way to spend your time watching the endless comings and goings at the lodge feeders. Next time! I won’t look forward to the sodding one million enormous speed humps on the road back to Quito though.

*Violet-tailed Sylph, Tandayapa Lodge Mike Watson)*

*Strong-billed Woodcreeper, Tandayapa Lodge Mike Watson)*

*Fawn-breasted Brilliant, Tandayapa Lodge Mike Watson)*

*Toucan Barbet, Tandayapa Lodge (Mike Watson)*

*Pallid Dove, Tandayapa Lodge Mike Watson)*

*Russet-crowned Warbler, Tandayapa Lodge (Mike Watson)*

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STILL GOT IT

October 2, 2024

*A Powerful Owl, doing its best to keep the local population of possums under control*

MY PAL ALAN MCBRIDE always used to joke that he’d still got it, well I am happy to report that he still has! I spent a great couple of days birding around Alan’s newish local patch of Melbourne before my recent Birdquest tour downunder mostly in search of a day roosting Powerful Owl for the incoming group. Well, it took us longer than anticipated but almost 20,000 steps later we found one, with a little help from another friend Field Guides’ Chris Benesh. Using eBird can sometimes be frustrating as recent waypoints are not always accurate and sightings are not up-to-date enough, so it is often a good idea to go and take a look first. One site we visited was a nest hole, which had been vacated in the previous week and was now occupied by a Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, another day roosting spot had simply been deserted. So it was a relief when we set eyes on this massive creature peering down at us in a public park in downtown Melbourne, early office workers passing by under it, morning coffee in hand. It ultimately stayed put for the group and almost as good was the excellent Garden View Cafe right next to the park! We love a good pie shop! A tour of Alan’s local patch, the Western Water Treatment Plant at Werribee was also very worthwhile, producing some ace views of trickier species like Musk Duck and Baillon’s and Australian Crakes. This spot also has a great cafe within easy reach, no wonder Alan spends so much time here. There are kilometres of drivable tracks around pools, many of which are filled with birds. What a brilliant place! We stopped at another excellent bakery, Oaks in Anglesey on our way to Point Roadknight, where by chance we bumped into Chris, Jesse Fagan and their Field Guides group, watching Hooded Plovers and Pacific Gulls, it’s a small birding world indeed. Thanks Alan!

Musk Duck, another of Australia’s unqiue avifauna

*Australian Crake at Werribee, very confiding!*

*Baillon’s Crake seems to be easier to see in Australia than anywhere else I’ve been*

*The primitive Cape Barren Goose is a weird bird indeed, it has established a small foothold at Werribee*

*A pair of Pacific Gulls hanging around a fur seal at Point Roadknight*

*It’s amazing where you can find Inger Vandyke’s images! Here’s one in Alan’s apartment.*

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MOUNTAIN PEACOCK PHEASANT

September 29, 2024

MOUNTAIN PEACOCK PHEASANT is a ‘one site bird’, although it occurs more widely throughout the highlands of Peninsular Malaysia, it can only be seen regularly at one place in the world - Bukit Tinggi in Pahang state, around an hour and a half drive from the Kuala Lumpur’s international airport. In a nutshell it took me three days to see one! Things have changed at Bukit Tinggi. Whether it is the fact that fewer Malay bird photographers now visit this spot (so the food put out to lure the peacock pheasant has diminished), or the disturbance caused by a large fallen tree, or the establishment of an ill-considered second screen (where any watchers are silhouetted by the rising sun), or simply that the birds’ behaviour has been changed by some other factor, who knows? What I can say is that it did not appear on two of the days I spent at the tiny feeding station screen. I had seen so many images of these beautiful birds against the backdrop I was now looking at, that it felt like I had already seen one. Imagining what it would be like if and when one turned up during the many hours I spent staring at the same scene, it was a very exciting moment when a fine male finally walked out of the forest and onto the old trail. WOW! The traversing of KL’s ridiculously complex traffic system (I did wonder if it might be possible to go round and round and run out of petrol before following the correct off ramp), the very odd accommodation in Bukit Tinggi’s Colmar Tropicale resort (modelled on the Alsatian town of Colmar!) and many hours of sitting on the muddy forest floor watching nothing most of the time proved worthwhile. I do wonder how long it might last at Bukit Tinggi before something brings this wonderful opportunity to a close, so sooner rather than later probably applies yet again.

Every now and again there were some nice distractions while waiting for the peacock pheasant. A beautiful male Siberian Blue Robin was present each morning (but not in the afternoon), freshly arrived for the winter from Russia, Buff-breasted Babblers and Ochraceous Bulbuls also showed an interest in the feeding station and Brown-backed Needletails zoomed around high over the forest. On one afternoon a group of gorgeous Dusky Langurs moved noisily through the trees overhead. On another occasion a small mammal was rooting around under the fallen tree trunks, I thought it must be a rat of some kind but I was surprised to see that it had a long snout like a treeshrew. It was actually a Gymnure, a soft-furred hedgehog, presumably Max’s Hylomys maxi on distribution/altitude. It was nice to be back in the forest in this region after 20 years! I also met some very nice birders from Singapore, Sebastian Ow, Eunice Kong and their friends. All incredibly quiet and polite! Unlike the couple who spent one morning blasting playback from the other screen, seemingly oblivious to the main position and I heard later from James Eaton that Ferruginous Partridge does not like incessant playback anyway. The partridges have not visited regularly in recent months. There were also some flashy butterflies around, but unfortunately not the big one I was hoping for, that would have to wait until Fraser’s Hill in a couple of days time. I could hear Siamangs calling while up on the ridge and I descended down through the Japanese Garden in their direction but their far carrying whooping calls were coming from somewhere out of reach way down in the valley below. Driving back to the highway I was happy to finally catch sight of a family group of this impressive large black gibbon, the huge male swinging through the trees.

Leopard Lacewing *Cethosia cyane,* Bukit Tinggi Japanese Garden

Dwarf Crow *Euploea tulliolus,* Bukit Tinggi Japanese Garden

Presumed Max’s Gymnure *Hylomys maxi, Bukit Tinggi*

Stormy skies over the forest ridges at Bukit Tinggi

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MINAHASA HOODED PITTA

January 3, 2024

AS A BIRDER, if you were only allowed one book, then ‘All the Birds of the World’ by Josep del Hoyo, published by Lynx would be it! I bought a copy during the first pandemic lockdown, with the intention of copying my pal Pete Morris’s idea of adding gold stickers to the birds I’ve seen. Spectrum alert! First of all I would have to figure out which birds I’d seen - I’ve never kept a world life list but I do have all my records consisting of various notebooks and papers so it was a feasible task. Then I would be able to use the iGoTerra list to know which stickers to add to the book. In the end I never got around to this during the pandemic, there were too many other things to do with the extra free time, like birding itself. However, time ticks away and I find myself thinking there’s not so much of it left as there used to be. So, I sat down one day and finished the task of uploading sightings to our favourite listing service iGoTerra, taking until 3am next morning. It’s not that difficult if you just add fast track ticks (my next task is to add the details of the first observations, at least, later) but there’s no way I could remember all those fancy-named hummingbirds and obscure tryant flycatchers (the world’s two largest bird families) so I had to do a lot of checking of notes and paper checklists. Can you imagine how many taxonomic and name changes there have been since my first visit outside the WP in 1990? It’s been great fun reliving past trips and checking how taxonomic changes have affected what I have seen. I reached my favourite bird family, pittas and saw the page in ATBOW almost filled with the new species resulting from the splitting of the Red-bellied complex. Why had we not tried harder to see one on Sulawesi, or Halmahera, or New Britain? Oh dear! Another spectrum alert! I did see one on Batanta island though - now Papuan Pitta - the same species, some of which spend the Austral summer in Australia’s Iron Range.

I fared better with hooded pittas, by chance seeing three out of the new four species. Western Hooded Pitta in Thailand and Eastern Hooded Pitta in PNG and to my surprise, the hooded pitta we saw way back in 2006 on Gunung Tangkoko in Northern Sulawesi is now split as Minahasa Hooded Pitta. I mentioned this to Pete at work, and he hurriedly checked his list to find that he had not seen the former subspecies forsteni! Surprising as there are hardly any birds I’ve seen that he hasn’t among his 9000+, including almost 40 pittas. Even more surprising, there are hardly any records of Minahasa Hooded Pitta on eBird, and no photos. The headline photo is even of some vegetation, from which one was calling by Pam Rasmussen! There are a few scattered records of it all along the octopus tentacle-like Minahasa Peninsula of Northern Sulawesi and I am sure that now it is split as a separate species more effort will be made to look for it.

A little about our encounter on 13 September 2006. Juhász Tibor and Ványi Robi, along with Stuart Warren had arranged to camp on Gunung Tangkoko through local birder Untu Baware, primarily for Scaly-breasted Kingfisher. We staggered about three quarters of the way up the mountain and camped overnight, completing the next hour or so to the forested summit before dawn the next morning, where we saw the kingfisher. We descended slowly back to the camp for something to eat around lunchtime, and there was simply a hooded pitta in the forest around the camping area. It was quite obliging and allowed some decent photos but the morning belonged to the kingfisher. Fast forward 18 years to the present day and it seems the morning really belonged to the pitta, although we had no idea of this at the time. Happy memories of an exciting trip to the forest paradise of Indonesia with friends, some of whom are no longer with us - Robi, Kris Tindige and now dear Theo Henoch, who passed away last month. ‘Time is shorter than you think so let’s go’ Nick 13.

*All the Birds of the World (which was too early to see the Minahasa Hooded Pitta split)- buy some gold stickers and have some fun!*

*The dormant volcano, Gunung Tangkoko towers over the surrounding landscape (Ványi Robért)*

*Scaly-breasted Kingfisher, Gunung Tangkoko (Mike Watson)*

*Stuart Warren (front), Ványi Robért and Juhász Tibor on Gunung Tangkoko (Mike Watson)*

*Tropical rainforest on the slopes of Gunung Tangkoko (Mike Watson)*

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STILL GOT IT

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