Reserva Las Tangaras

With already 3+ weeks gone on our stay here, it’s already going by way to fast! We had a strong push of visitors through the end of December, but perhaps the incessant rains are keeping them away now. Despite the lack of people here to enjoy the rainforest, this place has not stopped bustling with biodiversity. I’m still seeing different species of birds on nearly every walk I take out into the forest and I’ve already seen nearly 200 species since arriving on December 12th, all within walking distance of the reserve. Whenever I run into bird watchers I town, I tell them about this place and several of them have shown up later and been mightily impressed. I have been many places around Mindo and this is undoubtedly the best place I have birded. Not only do we have the best Andean Cock-of-the Rock lek around and 12-15 species of hummingbirds at the feeders everyday, but many uncommon and hard to find species also occur here. Here is a list of some of the unusual and hard to find birds I’ve seen at the reserve: torrent duck, fasciated tiger heron, bicolored hawk (seen on same perch daily), black and chestnut eagle (the locally famous guide Marcelo Arias told me he has seen this bird once in his life), white-throated quail dove, white-capped parrot, little cuckoo, green-fronted lancebill, wedge-billed hummingbird, velvet-purple coronet, barred puffbird, ringed kingfisher, crimson-bellied and powerful woodpeckers (both large and spectacular), streak-capped treerunner, uniform antshrike, rufous-rumped antwren, esmeraldas antbird, ochre-breasted antpitta (I got an incredible long long at this very shy species!), narino tapaculo, pacific and fulvous-breasted flatbills, caerulean and canada warblers, glistening-green, rufous-throated, beryl-spangled and white-shouldered tanagers, black-winged saltator, chestnut-capped brush-finch, olive finch, buff-rumpled warbler, white-throated spadebill and thrush-like schiffornis. Slaty-capped flycatcher is apparently a new species for the reserve. Other wonderful species that can be found here on a regular basis include: golden-headed quetzal, toucan barbet, strong-billed woodcreeper, white-capped dipper and yellow-collared chlorophonia. We also have a club-winged manikin lek and their bizarre display can be viewed every day!

We are Ryne, Jenny and Cypress, the new managers of Reserva Las Tangaras. We are excited to spend the next 6 weeks taking care of the lodge and exploring the precious rainforest that surrounds it. We arrived here December 12 when Dusti and her crew of volunteers were here to participate in the Christmas bird count and also to band birds! We shocked everyone by arriving with a baby in the dark, but quickly meshed with this fun and conservation minded group. Well over 300 birds were banded during their stay here. Their research, which they graciously donated their time and money to make happen, will broaden our knowledge of many rare little known species. Many thanks to all!
On December 14th the biggest event of the year in Mindo occurred, the annual ChrIstmas bird count! Out of all the Christmas bird counts in the world, this one routinely has one of the highest counts. Our team (8 volunteers, Dusti and Ryne) alone had 139 species all within a short walking distance of the reserve! Although the numbers are not in yet this count can get around 500 species for one day all within 15 miles of Mindo!
Since their departure we have been graced with the company of several interesting guests which are keeping us busy!

Well our time here at Las Tangaras is sadly drawing to a close.  We feel lucky to have been given the opportunity to manage this place and all the beauty it contains and will miss it very much.  For our last blog post, we thought it might be nice to give a rough idea of what daily life is like out here.

Most our days start at dawn when the birds start singing, but once a week (sometimes twice) we get up just before 5AM to get to the Lek for the Cock-of-the-Rock data collection.  The mornings up there are really unique, beautiful, and peaceful.  Previous manager Tom Lord created a new mapping system for monitoring the displaying males´ locations, which Emme is adding to below.

Recently we have had some help on our avian front! Las Tangaras has had a volunteer whose excitement and knowledge of birds combine to create a very motivated and valuable lady! Nikki spent a little over a week with us and we very much enjoyed having her help, excitement and expertice around. Thanks Nikki! Check out Nikki¨s blog  http://onehealth47.blogspot.com/ to read more about her time at Las Tangaras, see pictures of the lodge, delicious food, birds,  the property and lek as well as her work in Conservation Medicine.

After the lek has been visited it´s time to pay attention to our other, much bolder avian friends, and feed the hummingbirds.  This gets combined with recording their numbers and eating breakfast which ends up equaling potentially the nicest and most relaxing “job requirement” either of us can really remember having, so on slow days we like to put in a moment of overtime on this one.

When breakfast and hummingbirds finish, we start the mornings work.  Although we´ve been blessed with an unbelievable stretch of clear weather in November (over 15 days without a rainstorm!) we are still in the habit of expecting afternoon showers so try and get the work away from the cabin finished before that happens.  Our mornings thus get filled with lots of work on the trails and property.  This work doesn´t lend itself very easily to being photogenetic but here is a picture of Andrew clearing out the orchard (the care and preparation of which has been a fairly big priority for us during our time here)

A huge part of living on the Reserve is finding personal hobbies that can keep your mind a bit challanged.  We often take time for this during the afternoon rains.   Andrew has been keeping up with his Spanish Studies, making his way through language textbooks as well as Ecuadorian Readers to get a better understanding of the country we are living in. Emme has been working hard on botanical illustration, practicing her watercoloring of various species and techniques as often as possible.  We thank the pace of life at the Reserve to give us time to enhance our skills! Below Emme sketches an apple before painting.

A post lunch swimming break

It would not exactily be a full day without taking advantage of the abosolutely beautiful Rio Nambillo and its many swimming holes. We have explored up and down this river, but often find it helpful to take a post lunch dip to get the blood flowing again.  And by this we mean, Andrew likes to take a dip… a little too cold for Emme.

We feel it would not be right to skip a mention about a task we dedicate many hours to… washing laundry. We have both lived in quite a few places that require handwashing laundry, but this place is by far the most luxurios. Fresh, extremly clean water right at our finger tips from a stream far up hill on the property helps to get our laundry sparkling clean.  A woman in India once told us that she believed she could get laundry cleaner than a washing machine, and this was using water from a muddy creek… with our water here at Las Tangaras, this statement just might be true!

After the afternoon comes to a close, we enjoy the resurgence of all the hummingbirds feeding on the porch, while listening to the evening sounds of the cloud forest. Life out here does not sound half bad does it? And for this reason, we are sad to leave, but thankful for our time here. Thank you Las Tangaras! We hope you find the time to come visit this very special place.

Until next time,

Andrew and Emme

Hello everyone!  We are the new managers here at the beautiful Reserva Las Tangaras.  After a really helpful orientation from outgoing extraodorinaires Tom and Freya we´ve spent our first week brainstorming, planning, and getting started on the projects we´d like to create and contribute to during our time here.  We just wanted to post a quick introduction to both ourselves and our projects.  Updates will be following!

Our first task was putting up the lovely new sign for the reserve that Tom and Freya created.  Here´s a look at the new sign and us (the sign is better looking)

We also spent a fair bit of time creating and distributing new flyers (not featured) for the reserve around town focusing on our accomodations.  Andrew and I have both worked in international eco-friendly and conservation minded tourism in the past and are hoping to increase awareness of the efforts and research of the reserve.

Our first personal undertaking, and one that we´re most excited about, has been to identify some of the native plants in the reserve.   With her experience and interest in native plant conservation and education, Emme, with Andrew´s help, will be trying to accomlish three goals:

– First, add drawings and information of more plants to the existing reserve manual.

– Second, create signage and identifiers for various species along the reserve´s trails so that guests can view them as they walk.

– Third, create a native plant garden focusing on useful, edible, and flowering plants.

Here she is identifying:

Another main project we´re hoping to do is some overhaul on the existing hiking trails for the reserve.  Prior to being here Andrew was part of a trail crew in the US maintaining and creating different trail systems throughout Arizona, so we´re hoping to put some of his knowledge and experience to use.

Other than these projects, we also have plenty  of ideas for smaller scale improvements we can add to the reserve.  Two things we have started on are improving the orchard (botanical sprays, nutrient mulch, ground growth clearing, etc.) and creating a new covered information booth at the entrance to the reserve in front of the lodge.  Here we hope to have copies of bird lists, information about the reserve and the Cock-of-the-Rock Lek, trail guides, etc. to make information more accesible to visitors.

As always there is lots of work just in the upkeep of the lodge, hosting of guests, and avian data collection, and we are sure to have many more ideas for future projects.

Further updates to come!

 For the past few weeks we have hosted the reserve’s yearly bird-banding party. This is a two week stint in July where volunteers arrive from all over the world to mist net, categorize and take vital statistics from some of the 305 species of bird to be found in what we like to refer to as ‘our garden’ – all 50 hectares of it!

For Tom and I the work started early as we were tasked with helping to catch, measure and take blood samples from the resident Cock of the Rocks at the lek. Written down like this, it really looks like a straight-forward brief, but the Cock of the Rock are not partial to flying at ground level so you have to raise nets as close to canopy as you can; they are angry when you catch them so will happily take a chunk out of your finger with their talons; and they learn extremely quickly, seemingly to enjoy flying within an inch of the nets purely for the fun of it. 

 For a week Tom, myself and our brilliant jeffes Pascual and Mauritzio Torres could be found sitting in the jungle in a cloud of insects watching Cock of the Rocks whizz around our heads and, most often, straight past, over or under our nets. We did manage to catch 4 ‘new’ birds and place colour bands on their legs as well as take measurements and blood from them. The reason for this seemingly irrational behaviour was in fact very scientific and I will explain what I can here. Every week Tom and I sit at one of the three research points at the lek and observe which males attend the lek, who they display with, how long those displays last and if any females birds stop by to watch or to mate. The colour bands placed on the right leg of the bird allow us to construct a very clear picture of the interactions going on between the birds attending the lek . We can clearly see which birds are most dominant and monitor their breeding success. In this week we also took the measurements from the birds including weight, wing length, beak length, length of tarsus and the size of their crest. Doing this allows us to monitor the condition of the birds as well as keep track and test the specific idiosyncrasies in a birds’ measurements which arise in the measuring process.  Taking blood from the birds also allows us to keep track of genetic trends within the group. For example are the dominant birds at the lek related in some way? We are told there is very little scientific data being collected on this species of bird so all the data we collect is vital to understanding the behaviour, genetics and condition of these bizarre creatures.

After a week of climbing up the ridge at 4.30am and sitting in the dark being mauled by birds we were pretty ready for a lie in, but instead we trotted into town to get ready for the bird-banding groups arrival. As we left the ‘internet’ shop we ran straight into a crowd of people all with binoculars pointing straight up to the the trees in Mindo’s main square. Here they were!

 2 mules and 6 dogs arrived the next morning carring supplies and bags (the dogs weren’t carrying anything to be honest but they helpfully ate all our bird food) followed by 7 volunteers for lunch. So we were now a group of 13 people in the cabin.

 The schedule was a tough one. We had 1 day of surveying different areas of the reserve to see what birds we could both see and hear, 2 days mist netting the top of the ridge line, another days survey on the grassland surrounding the reserve, 3 days mist netting in the grass edge, another survey and then 3 days mist netting around the house.

This way we could catch and collect the maximum number of species and compare the species diversity of riperion, primary growth, secondary growth and pasture/forest edge. Similarly to the Cock of the Rock’s we took measurments of weight, brood patch if female, beak, wing, tail and tarsus as well as looking at plumages and parasites the birds were carrying. This data collection is vital for looking at the condition of the birds at the reserve, for example we had at least 2 birds with bot fly infestations which was thought only  to be a problem for birds living at lower altitude. Also the study is vital for seeing exactly which birds are thriving where. This year in particular we saw a rise in the numbers of birds that should be living at lower altitudes being caught in our nets. Examples were the South Yellow Grosbeak and the Slaty Antwren, pictured below.  We speculate that the disturbance at lower altitudes caused by slow deforestation and, more locally, the rise in Mindo’s tourism as well as the possibility of climate change, are the two main factors in the changes we are seeing in Las Tangaras’s Bird life. Saying that, we did catch more birds than have been caught in previous years and have added 4 new species to the bird list (Thrush-like Schiffornis, White-throated Spadebill, Buff-rumped Warbler and Streak-necked Flycatcher) so the positive story is that we remain a safe haven for birds to retreat to.

A young Slaty Ant Wren

Southern Yellow Grosbeak

 We also caught a huge number (over 35) of Andean Solitaires pictured here, which is not unusual, but 3 years for 2 years running, we caught absolutely none whatsoever. So for some reason the population at Las Tangaras is booming. It is trends like this in the data that pose questions that we can look into in more detail using this type of scientific research.

Andean Solitaire

 We caught the most diverse range of bird species in the pasture/forest edge. The reason for this being that the nets were ideally located to catch both forest and pasture specialists. For example this is where we caught most of our tanager species as they enjoy foraging on pasture edges. Below we have pictures of the Beryl Spangled, Flame Faced and Bay Headed Tanagers.

Beryl Spangled Tanager

Flame Faced Tanger

Bay Headed Tanager

 In other areas such as the primary forest the species diversity of caught birds was lower. The reason for this is that our nets were only high enough to catch understory birds and forest floor specialists so often missing birds who stay in the canopy (to catch the Cock of the Rock we had used higher nets). Here we did catch a Blue-winged Mountain Tanager which, although not a first for the reserve, is more commonly seen at higher altitudes and a Barred Forest Falcon, pictured below.

 Around the house we caught both Mot-Mot species, Rufous and Broad-billed, pictured below. It is difficult to see but the Rufous Mot-Mot is significanly bigger than the Broad-billed, more rarely seen and note the serrated beak used for catching a killing lizards and the like. Around the house is the only place we caught the Orange-billed Sparrow and Rufous-rumped Antwren pictured below.

Broad Billed Mot Mot- Smaller with rufous chest only coming half way down. Also no serrations on bill.

Rufous Mot Mot – Bigger bird with serrations on the beak.

Rufous Rumped Antwren

 In every habitat we caught the Andean Solitaire, Tawny-bellied Hermit and Three-Striped Warblers in large numbers. The numbers of Tawny-bellied Hermits caught personally suprised us both as they are rarely seen at the feeders and we only see fleeting glimses of them in the forest. Another reason why mist netting sometimes provides us a more accurate picture than simply just looking and listening!   

Tawny Bellied Hermit

Three Striped Warbler

 Some of the rarer or harder to see birds we had in the nets were the Olive Finch, the Rufous-breasted Antthrush (common but hard to see) and the Southern Nightingale Wren (again, one of the hardest birds to spot in the jungle!).

Olive Finch

So after three weeks of good, hard work we were all done and had collected collected an impressive amount of data. This data can now be used not only to inform the management of the reserve itself, but to built our knowledge of the massive diversity of bird life in Mindo’s incredible cloud forests. If we know exactly what is here and thriving we can act as advocates of keeping more of the forest undisturbed. Mindo’s tourism has boomed over the past 10 years, but this boom started as a result as being one of the best places in the world to see and experience incredible bird life. It makes sense to understand and protect it.