BIRDING ECUADOR: A WEEK AT LA SELVA LODGE
2011
Friday 14 January to Sunday 23 January
Guided by Gary Rosenberg
Price: $2700
Short ten day tour designed to stay at comfortable (and newly renovated) La Selva Lodge for seven nights. Concentrates on Amazonian lowlands. Visits beautiful oxbow lake, canopy tower, parrot clay lick, Amazonian river islands, and terra firme forest. Great diversity of antbirds. Specialty birds such as Zigzag Heron, Cocha Antshike, and Long-tailed Potoo. Fun canoe rides around oxbow lake. Gourmet food. Serene atmosphere. Easy to moderate trails, boats, and canoes.
The Amazon Basin is the richest environment on the planet for bird diversity. Giant rivers such as the Napo River in Ecuador flow into the Amazon, which eventually makes its way to the Atlantic Ocean, a journey of more than 2500 miles from the base of the Andes, with a drop of less than 100 feet elevation! Pick any single location within the basin, and the bird list will likely exceed 500 species! One hundred years ago, it would have taken months to travel from the United States, or Europe, to reach a birding location on the upper Napo, but today we are much more fortunate. La Selva Lodge is easily accessible from Quito by way of a short jet flight, and two and a half hours down river in a motorized Canoe. La Selva was the first birding lodge on the Napo, and remains, in our opinion, the best for birds. Situated on a stunning oxbow lake, guarded by Hoatzins and Side-necked Turtles, the lodge itself has a rustic charm, but at the same time is comfortable, has private baths with hot water, cold drinks and ceiling fans to cool us during siestas, practically gourmet food, fantastic service, and an impressive bird list.
Our short tour will spend seven nights at La Selva, which will give us ample time to explore the many birding habitats easily accessible from the lodge by foot or canoe. Being located on the shores of an oxbow lake, we’ll spend a great deal of time serenely being paddled around the lake by our local guides, searching for a number of lake-edge specialties always under the watchful eyes of Hoatzins. We’ll visit a canopy tower that the lodge has constructed, which will allow us access to an amazing environment 100 feet above the ground! When one is birding from the forest floor, it is often frustrating hearing birds in the canopy, or catching glimpses of a mixed-species flock working the tops of the trees. For a canopy tower (a secure staircase and scaffolding surrounding a giant Ceiba tree) we can expect to see a wide variety of canopy species, including several species of Toucans, cotingas, canopy flycatchers, brightly-colored tanagers, fly-by parrots and macaws, and possibly scarce raptors. A visit to the canopy is always different and uniquely rewarding. We’ll visit a well-attended parrot clay lick where parrots come to eat clay, to counteract their highly acidic diet of fruit. We’ll visit a couple of Amazonian river islands, where we’ll search for numerous riverine specialties that specialize on the early successional habitats found on the ever-changing sandbars. And finally, we’ll have lots of time to walk forest trails in search of antbirds and mixed-species flocks. Our week long stay will provide us with an excellent introduction to the richness of the Amazon rainforest.
