Maquipucuna Trip

This past Thursday and Friday, my whole program (consisting of 36 students) took a class trip to Maquipucuna. This is a 'cloud forest' about 2.5 hours north of Quito. We took two separate charter buses, along with our two professors to get there. Now, how I imagined a cloud forest to be was nothing like how it was in reality. It turned out to look like any other Ecuadorian forest, very close in proximity to Mindo, where I went last weekend, actually.

This is a picture of my class doing field work at Maquipucuna. The class we are in is called Wildlife Conservation & Management, as I may have stated earlier in the blog. So the main point of this trip was to observe and identify the different types of wildlife found at Maquipucuna. Specifically, the birds.

So this is what bird watching should look like. This is our professor Andres. He has some absurd gift for finding these birds and identifying them in seconds. It's crazy. Obviously, he's spent many years doing this, and is obsessed with it.

And this is how our bird watching lookd. We all just look confused, as we probably were. It was much harder than I ever thought, and although I don't forsee me ever becoming an avid bird watcher, I certainly have a new found respect for those that do it. Among some of the birds we saw, the Toucan was always a favorite. I'd say we saw almost 10 toucan's over the two days we spent bird watching! Besides that we saw a lot of Tanagers, Swifts, Swallows, and a couple Cock-on-the-Rock's which were these pretty awesome relatively big red birds.

This is my friend David and I sitting down at one of our observation spots. We spent 30 minutes at each spot, which was about 27 minutes too long for my lack of patience. So I found my self sitting quite often. We had to wake up and be in the field by 6am our second day, so naturally we were quite tired.

Sitting... once again. Although this time we found a bench! I've met a lot of friends here in Quito, and my closest ones are the other students in my class. We spend every day together in class and on field trips, so it's kind of hard not to become close with one another.

This one is a bit dark, but after our first day of bird watching, a couple of us hiked to the nearby cascades and got to see an awesome waterfall. Unfortunately none of the pictures of the waterfall turned out because it was to dark, but this one of our group sort of turned out.

After our second day of bird watching, I think our professor kind of realized we had had enough. So he took us on a hike up the mountain where we got to search for other types of animals, including the Andean bear. These are very prevalent in Maquipucuna, and are similar to our North American Black Bear. They're not very dangerous and if you make some noise, they usually get scared away and run off. We didn't see any bears, but we did find some Armadillo tracks, some interesting bird's nest, some reptiles, and some sort of large rodent that ran across our trail but I don't remember the name of it. After the hike, we ended up at a river and got to swim in some cool rapids and jump off a short cliff into the river. It was a great time, and a good way to end our bird watching weekend. As soon as my friends add pictures to facebook from this international student party we went to on Saturday, I will add a post about it. It was awesome.

That is all for now. I got a lot of homework to do, and so little time! Chao!