Arriving in Quito

---

I flew to Quito, Ecuador in South America to participate in an Earthwatch expedition, "Ecuador Cloud Forest Birds". We were going to spend two weeks in a Cloud Forest on the Western slope of the Andes, catching birds in nets, measuring and banding them, and then releasing them. Through studies like this scientists can find out about what species inhabit a particular enviroment, as well as get an idea about the birds numbers and health. I was armed with The Birds of Ecuador Field Guide by Robert S. Ridgely and Paul J. Greenfield, a 740+ page doorstop of a book that really brought home the staggering number and variety of the birds of that country. Roughly the size of Colorado, Ecuador is home to approximately 15%!o(MISSING)f the world's bird species, some 1600 total.

They have so many birds it is almost as if they have run out of names for them. Many of the birds have three-part names, consisting of a descriptive adjective, a part of the bird, then a family or type name: Smooth-billed Ani, Fawn-breasted Tanager, etc. Many of the hummingbirds have very poetic family names: sicklebills, lancebills, emeralds, woodstars, brilliants, starthroats, woodnymphs, etc.

For the sake of convenience I had my copy of Ridgely separated and re-bound in two sections: the plates (pictures) in one section and the text in the other. This lightened the load in the field because I mostly only brought the plates, but of course it always seemed like I needed to consult some point in the text when I didn't have it with me. I also had a brand-new pair of Nikon Monarch 8x42 binoculars, and a borrowed Minolta XTsi camera with a 52mm and 70-300mm lens, the use of which I was far from expert in.

I arrived in Quito at about 9:00 pm local time from Miami. The Quito airport was busy but not chaotic. Ecuadorean customs was the merest of formalities: young ladies took the forms the passengers had filled out on the airplane and put the checked bags through x-ray machines. I'm not sure anyone was even looking at the resulting images, I didn't see anyone's bags being searched.

I had arranged a ride through the hotel I was staying at. When I approached the driver who was holding a sign with my name on it he was talking to a young man who turned out to be Matt, who was also a volunteer on the expedition I was on. Matt was an undergraduate at a famous New England university. We chatted during the cab ride, Matt had been birding in Central America but like me had never been to Ecuador before. Also like me, this was his first Earthwatch expedition.

At street level Quito seemed very flat, few buildings were more than one or two stories high. The impression was of a lot of concrete. There were people about in some areas in spite of the late hour, waiting for buses and such.

---