Ecuador - May 2026

This was going to be a part of my Galapagos collection, but looking at it, it just seemed like a completely separate trip. We stayed at Las Terrazas de Dana Boutique Lodge & Spa. Accommodations were excellent and we even ran into Trevor from BCJ who would be one of our guides on the BCJ tour of the Galapagos Islands. Our birder guide was Julia and our driver was Anthony. Both were great!

Birding is big business in Ecuador and the setups that they guided us to were uniformly excellent. They know what they are doing. We did not always get the target species, but it was not for lack of effort. In the end I got 4 out of the five Toucans. I didn't get the Yellow-throated Toucan which Anthony felt was likely to be easiest. I did get the Chocó Toucan which he thought would be most difficult. I got it at the lodge from the restaurant on day one.

I did not get the mature male Long-wattled Umbrellabird. I did get the female and immature male, but not the big daddy. Oh, well.

I did get the Andean Cock-of-the-rock. This bad boy was way back in a dark jungle. I used the 2x TC on the 300mm f/2.8 lens to get out to 600 mm. this is the only time I really missed my 600mm f/4 that I left home. It would have been nice to have that extra stop of light in the forest. At any rate, I got a few good shots that DxO made useable despite the high ISO.