1/11/23 - 05/11/23 :  Updated on 22/11/23

We arrived in Quito which at such high altitude meant that the first day was taken up with eating and trying but failing to sleep! The second day we embarked on a cultural tour of the capital city in the old colonial quarter and then on the third day, we were beginning to get used to the height and so we set off to the rain forest by taxi in search of Humming birds and other native species.

We were told to go to a small lodge where the family had been putting out feeders for the humming birds for 2 generations. Two hours later our taxi pulled up to an old single story lodge where the owner was busy filling the feeders with sugar syrup, and the air was litteraly buzzing with flying creatures, at first we thought from a distance it was bees, but as we got closer it was clear they were Hummingbirds, dozens of them.

The Hummingbirds were everywhere at the lodge and it was easy to be distracted from the other birds and wildlife hiding around them. The most obvious one was a Guayaquil Squirrel, a sort of grey / red hybrid endemic to the area, this looks very much like our UK squirrels but this one tend to favour fruit and ours today was munching on bananas picked direct from the trees.

The other birds were small and exotic and with few exceptions very colourful, which I guess fits the rain forest environment. The final treat before we headed back to Quito was an Andean Vulture flying overhead , hard to see in the bright sun but it was overhead for a long time before we lost sight of it.

We left Mindor excited, if a day trip could be so full of wildlife what would we find at the Galapagos