A good start into 2017!!

It’s already been a month since we’ve had our last x-mas bird count for the season. And as it has become a tradition, the last count is the one in the reserve, which is part of the Los Bancos-Milpe count circle. As always, we had invited a few of our birding friends to help us and the night before the count some friends from Mindo, Quito and Guayaquil arrived. This year we had a group of sixteen participants, which we decided to split up into five teams. One team counted birds on the road down from Las Tolas, another one went to Reserva Mundo Verde of our friend Luis, another team went to our neighbor’s place: the waterfall “Cristal”, another team went down to our neighbor, and I covered the trails in the reserve.

Compared to last year’s heavy rain, we were super lucky this time, with sun and clear skies and not a single drop of rain all day. We had a very good count day and in the reserve itself I already counted 123 species. So we were all very excited to see what numbers we got and did our re-count that same night. Due to the nice weather and most importantly the efforts of all participants we managed to count an incredible number of 220 different bird species! And despite being all exhausted and tired from the day, of course, we had to celebrate the results with our friends from Mindo and few cool beers.

Here are a few impressions from the day on the count route at Cascada Cristal. Photos were mainly taken by our talented Mees Swinkels (a future wildlife photographer!)