8/24/2023 Thursday
We had breakfast at a nearby café that was very nice. I had a breakfast tamal which had chicken, pork, carrot, peas and was wrapped in a banana leaf rather than corn husk. Quite different than the Mexican style tamales that we eat in Texas, but very good. We also picked up some sandwiches for our lunch in the field today.
We drove up the mountains to Paramo de Guasca. Paramo is a word used to describe the alpine tundra and the Andes. It is above the tree line with a specific community of plants and animals. It is generally cool and often misty.
Our first stop along the road was great with excellent looks at Black-chested Mountain Tanager and Golden-crowned Tanager.
We also saw the endemic Bronze-tailed Thornbill, a high elevation hummingbird with a green and pink gorget.
A colorful Scarlet-bellied Mountain-Tanager made an appearance, along with some less flashy birds.
As we continued up into the paramo we entered a thick fog layer which made it difficult to see, let alone bird. So we drove over the top, and headed down the other side to what was planned to be our after-lunch birding area. This was at a lower elevation and out of the fog. It was a very pretty area.
As we were driving along Teri spotted a bird in a roadside tree. Daniel had to drive on a couple of hundred yards to find a parking place on the narrow road, and as we started to walk back we found a Black-billed Mountain-Toucan! It turned out to be the only one we'd see on the trip.
One of our target birds at this location was the difficult to find Brown-breasted Parakeet. This endemic is found in only a few mountainous areas around Bogota. Daniel said that we'd likely hear them before we saw them, if we saw them at all. We'd been in the area for a couple of hours when we heard a noisy racket, and sure enough a group of eight flew into a treetop a couple of hundred meters away. We never got to see them any closer than that.
Around noon we moved on to La Guajira Nature Preserve, a small property that Daniel knew of with active hummingbird feeders. We enjoyed our lunch on the porch of the house and watched a variety of birds at the feeders and in the garden.
We saw our first Mountain Velvetbreast, a hummingbird with a downcurved bill.
We got much better looks at Sword-billed Hummingbirds than we'd had the previous day.
We had a visit by a Pale-naped Brushfinch that was eating ground corn that had been put out.
In all we saw eleven different hummingbird species.
We left at 1:20, did some birding along the road. Our best find was a pair of Powerful Woodpeckers. They are over a foot tall and really striking.
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The plan was to return to the Paramo and continue birding, but it was still fogged in. We stopped at a wetland overlook for a variety of common wetland birds, as well as the only Black-backed Grosbeak of the trip.
As we approached Guatavita we checked out a tourist attraction that we noticed on our way out this morning. It is an upside down house with a little restaurant and ice-cream booth alongside. There was no real explanation for how it came to be there, but it was interesting, and the ice-cream was refreshing!
