Day 4, Cabanas San Isidro, 3/11/16

The couple from California had told me they had some good birding activity at Cabanas San Isidro which is about a forty minute drive to the south on the highway to Tena.  One of the good things about staying at Rio Quijos Ecolodge is you can make day trips to good birding areas and still have comfortable and inexpensive lodging. Cabanas San Isidro is another well known birding lodge that charges $135 for an overnight stay with meals and taxes included and has the same owners as the Guango lodge.  However a day visit and use of the trails is only five dollars which is the same as at Guango Lodge.

So after another good breakfast I made the run up hill to the south to Cabanas San Isidro.  On the way just south of Baeza, I passed the a road with an arrow pointing to the town of Borja and looking like it passed through good habitat.  Unfortunately I had forgotten that was a hot spot on eBird and I failed to bird it on my trip.  Guess I'll have to go back.  I arrived at Cabanas San Isidro at 8:20 found there were plenty of hummingbird feeders around the attractive cabins.   Later in the trip other birders told me the cabins were pretty plain but they looked nice to me.  It didn't take long to find a new bird for the trip, Long-tailed Sylph.

Chestnut-breasted Coronet was present in numbers as it was at Guango.

At the time I thought this Fawn-breasted Brilliant was a lifer but I had seen one at Guango and had not identified it.  The pink gorget usually just shows at a dark spot on the throat.

Speckled Hummingbirds usually layed low in the the shade.

Flycatchers were in short supply on this trip.  I think I only saw two Cinnamon Flycatchers while on my previous two trip they were common.  This was my only one at San Isidro.

Well, then it got boring.  I walked a beautiful mile long trail through outstanding old growth cloud forest and saw precious little.  High above me I could make out Slate-throated Redstarts and Black-burnian Warblers and and occasional furnarid.  There was an ever present vireo like song that I could never pin down.  The trail came into an opening and I got my only Streak-necked Flycatcher for the trip.  Olive-striped Flycatcher is very similar but I think the unstreaked belly makes this a Streak-necked.

After finding little in the refuge I drove and walked the entrance road and saw a few butterflies but not much else.  Russet-backed Oropendola was in the area but they were pretty much everywhere else also.

So either I'm not a very good birder or it has something to do with the season.  Cabanas San Isidro and the Cosanga area annually have one of the highest Christmas Bird Count totals in the world and I could not break 20 species for the day.  This period in March is proving to be a bit wet and cool with little blooming or fruiting.  So that will be my excuse.

After five hours of birding Cabanas San Isidro I decided to run up to Guacamayos Ridge which is only about 15 minutes to the south. Here at the mountain pass is a parking area with a shrine and an ancient Inca trail that runs for miles through the cloud forest of the Antisana Ecological Preserve.  There is a cabin at the trailhead where you sign in and pay a fee.  No one was there when I arrived in the afternoon and the fog and rain was starting to roll in.  The overlook normally allows to a great view of the cloud forest and possible Gray-breasted Mountain-Toucans but all I saw was the common Great Thrush.

I drove a few miles downhill to the south and saw plenty of great habitat but few places to park to access it. All the time the fog was thickening and it started to rain harder.  Eventually I found a place to turn around and poked back uphill through the fog to the pass and back down the other side.  It was a little scary at times with practically no visibility and being worried about the Ecuadorian drivers who say a prayer and then pass on blind curves.  I finally made it back to the Rio Quijos Ecolodge and relaxed some and had another great dinner, pollo a la plancha.  Now I needed to figure out was I was going to do tomorrow.