Three black birds

In the last few weeks, one of our projects at the station was the bird monitoring. For about four to five hours we counted all the bird species and individuals we could find around the station and on the road from Las Tolas to Ayapi. Despite the fact that the students had to get up early, they actually showed a lot of interest in this activity….always keeping in mind that there was a second breakfast awaiting them back at the station!! Some of our interns already left the station last weekend, but we are sure that one day some of them will come back as real bird watchers….

Of course, everybody beginning with bird watching wants to see the colourful or big exotic birds like tanagers or toucans, for example. No wonder, they all liked the Toucan Barbet, the Chocó Trogon, the parrots, the Quetzal and so on. And they still more or less liked the Moss-backed Tanager, but they couldn’t really share my enthusiasm for big black birds…

During our first monitoring, while we were actually following the noises of some Chocó Toucans, three black birds flew by and perched for some seconds in a tree. But nobody really understood why I started to “freak out” looking at one of these (boring) black birds in front of us. Only I knew that I was looking at a male (Long-wattled) Umbrellabird!!! In the same moment, the birds flew off again and afterwards everybody blamed me that the birds left because of my enthusiastic and noisy screams….

This blog post was written by Nicole