Early morning in Mindo in northwest Ecuador felt surreal: the plaza lit under sodium lamps, tropical kingbirds hunting in the artificial light, and the town’s giant “MINDO” letters—toucans and orchids painted on every surface—gleaming like something almost alive.
Our small group—bird guides, local residents, and a nine-year-old—traveled 15 km to a river site marked for a hydroelectric project. We logged species along the way, recording guans calling from the canopy, warblers filling the understory, and a few endemic species at the river itself.
We made eBird and iNaturalist records during the trip:
These cactus were rescued from a 600-acre solar farm in New Mexico. Flower photo from this year in my garden. The desert is fragile and treated poorly in most of the USA.
We know some of the same people, Rudy. I went to Nangaritza in the Ecuadorian Amazon near the Peruvian border with Nelson Apolo. I saw rare endemics like the orange-throated tanager:
The area is Amazonian rain forest surrounded by tepuys, tabletop mountains like the famous Roraima in Brazil and Venezuela, each containing unique species. All land belonging to indigenous people.
But the rivers are devastated by unchecked gold mining. Hundreds of kilometers of what should be high quality aquatic habitat reduced to carrying enormous loads of silt released by dredging and sluicing.
There is no recovering ecosystems this damaged, even in the heart of untouched Amazonian forest. It will take more time than human memory to return the streams to a natural state.
Hi LostInCR–thank you for sharing. Nelson stays so busy, we hardly see each other–pretty typical, I guess, for those of us who spend so much time in the field. I am happy to see you are documenting moths; I keep swearing to myself I’ll do a sweep of the hottest moth spots near me. And by sweep and mean visit, and repeat as much as possible :)
Years ago a friend and I were trying to track down the nest of that spectacular tanager; it’s still undescribed as far as I know. And the gold mining in southern Ecuador is a thing of nightmares. Did you see that poor river near Jorupe/Macará? The whole river bed turned upside down and left in bulldozed ruins. Are your photos from the Rio Nangaritza? That is just…shocking.
Yes, Rio Nangaritza. If you look at aerial photos, the devastation runs for hundreds of km into Peru. No stream of any size is untouched yet the surrounding forests are unvisited except by ocasional indigenous people. It is shocking TBH.
There many lodges near Mindo that have moths lights to attract birds in the morning. It just takes a 3:00 am alarm clock. That’s how I got started with them. But the IDs can be tedious. So many undescribed species and so many others with few records on iNat or Leps .fieldguide.
I have never witnessed an ecosystem at risk of catastrophic environmental degradation, but every year I witness increasing amounts of habitat destruction and limited habitat creation. There is a streambank a stone’s throw from my home that harbours young, I would guess 15-25 year-old trees to which I inevitably attached myself. Every year adjacent homeowners cut a few trees here, mow some of the herbaceous vegetation there. To what purpose? That’s a question I wouldn’t dare ask them, maybe because I know the answer wouldn’t satisfy me.
Nature is only asking to be contemplated and shared, not destroyed. It is, I believe, supposed to feel stable to us short-lived humans. Nowadays it is disturbed at such a rate that it doesn’t feel so stable, at least not to me, and that makes me sad. The tree in whose shade I shall never sit might be gone before anyone else does
Are you on good terms with the neighbors? It couldn’t hurt to try to start a conversation about it. Unless you’re as anti social as me, and can barely string two words together.
Do you have room on your property for any gardening? Maybe you can add some of the very plants that the neighbors are trimming. Make it asthetically pleasing as a way of starting that conversation.
I appreciate your suggestions! Unfortunately I am only 20 and live with my parents, and they are very protective of their manicured lawn. I have a tiny patch of goldenrods, sunflowers and milkweed in the backyard though, which they recently trimmed back without telling me . I’ll be out of the home as soon as I can!
As for my neighbours there are way too many of them who live immediately by the streambank, and I am tired of trying to convince people whose values don’t align with mine. Of course my negative apprehensions are based on the assumption that people with fundamentally different values from mine would cut trees and herbaceous vegetation in areas where it isn’t ecologically beneficial to do so. I haven’t spoken with most of my neighbours
Our oil or gas is offshore - so marine life, the Atlantic Sea Forest (kelp), fish, whales, penguins. But - fracking the Karoo (semi-desert). Open coal mines instead of baobabs up North.
This is the sorrow I was trying to express in my now-defunct thread about freshwater fishes. Fishes in aquaria may not be as good as fishes in a stream, but they are better than no fishes at all.
. I’ll be out of the home as soon as I can!