Our birding trip to Colombia: endurance edition

Harvey and I returned to Canada on Sunday March 1st, after a whole month travelling in Mexico and Colombia.  I wrote 4 blog posts about our first two weeks in Mexico. So, why no blog posts for the last two weeks?

Short answer: OMG. Birding trips are exhausting.

Harvey and I have done day trips with birding guides in Mexico, Germany, Canada, and the US. Our longest continuous stretch was a 4 day specialty birding trip in Germany, where "4 days" meant two solid days of birding preceded by a meeting day and a wrap up morning.  

Our Colombia Birding trip was 14 solid days of bird-watching, preceded by a day tour of Bogota and a slower wrap-up morning before catching a plane.  The latest start time for those 14 days was 6 am and we got back to our hotel rooms as late as 9 pm.

The birding was incredible.  Between the two of us, we observed 421 species of birds in Colombia (90% or so of which we saw, not just heard).  Each of us had 327 'lifers', or birds that we saw for the very first time on this trip.  Many of those birds are spectacular.  I can add more of Harvey's photos later, but here are links to internet photos of few of the most memorable:

• Hummingbirds: 
• White-booted Racket-tail: The male of this tiny hummingbird species has a long tail with a 'racket', just like the impressively large MotMots, which is endearing all on its own. But racket-tailed hummingbirds also have fluffy white feathers on their legs, giving them fluffy white trousers!  Hands down the cutest bird going.
• Violet-tailed Sylph: On hummingbirds, the colours that you see are 'structural', created by light interacting with the physical patterns of their feathers. That's why you'll sometimes see an astonishing flash of bright metallic pink when the light catches the throat of an Anna's Hummingbird just right, while at other times you just see the throat patch as being 'dark'. That's why photos of this stunning bird don't really do it justice even if it's easy to see its dramatically long tail.
• Purple-throated Woodstar: When I first spotted this beautiful little bird I mistook it for a huge bumblebee moving from flower to flower on a large flowering shrub.  Nope, despite its striped rump it's definitely a hummingbird.
• Tanagers:  In Vancouver, our only tanager is the bright and beautiful Western Tanager.  They have a few more in Colombia (apparently 179 species?)  We did not see anything like all of these colourful birds, but we saw more than 40.  Which seems negligent of us, but many of these spectacular bird species live only in very specific areas. They also tend to travel in groups high in the forest canopy, making them hard to spot.  
• Rarities: Andean Potoo!  Potoos hunt insects at night and spend their days entirely motionless, relying on their excellent camoflauge for safety.  Honestly, in person they look exactly light tree branches, lichen spots and all.  The Andean Potoo was thought to be possibly extirpated from the region near Bogota until our local guide, Freddy, found this nesting bird last year. 
  
  (If I posted the zoomed out version of this photo, there's no way that you would be able to pick out the bird. From a moderate distance, it looks entirely like a broken off stump.  The nest is a hollow on the top of the post. Freddy showed us photos from last year of a baby poking its head out from his Mom's belly, and thinks that the bird shown here is sitting on an egg).

Over the next few days I'll be posting additional thoughts (and photos) from our time in Colombia, but I thought I'd give you all a quick update now that I'm back in Canada (and a little less jet-lagged).