By Art Evans
He flows through the cloud forest so silently I’m not sure his feet quite touch the ground. Three feet behind him, camera at the ready, it’s dead certain I’ve never met such a talented stalker. He points to a spot in the high forest canopy. All eyes strain. . . nothing. Seven sets of binoculars scan the many layers of rainforest foliage until, aha!, a female Masked trogon, sitting still as a stone, materializes. Someone whispers, “How could he see that?”. Like in my own profession, you see what you know. He knows the jungle well. His name is Angel Paz (Angel Peace, in English).
Señor Paz is descended from the Inca people and speaks the Quechua language at home, Spanish in town, and English to us. He farms a few acres on a steep mountainside. Along with a few goats and chickens, he tends a passion fruit vineyard and a tree tomato field to supply the specialty fruit market in Quito.
The North side of his farm fronts on a sizable remnant of the original mountain rainforest of the Andes. In the heart of it is a dance arena, called a lek, used by a fabulous bird called the Cock of the Rock. The size of a small chicken, the splendidly scarlet males gather at the lek each morning at first light to sing and dance for all the females they can attract by their cooperative display. It’s a noisy, colorful, jumping, jiving, Saturday night disco show, and it is a jaw-dropper for an amateur birder like me. At most the show lasts 30 minutes, so we need to get there well ahead of the show to get a good seat.
Charlie Vogt of Andean Birding, our professional birding guide, hauled us through many miles of steep, rutted, mountain roads in the dark to Angel’s little house made of rough planks. The hum of his generator supported a weak porch light under which Señora Paz served us a welcome cup of very strong, hot coffee. An hour before first light, we started single file down the precipitous staircase into the ravine. Away from the porch light we depended on the pale, blue glow of our LED pen lights. The rainforest at night is as dark as the inside of a cow. No moon or starlight penetrates to the forest floor. A slip on the wet split-log staircase could mean pinballing off the trees for 100 yards down into the canyon.
Led by Angel, Crow, Shane, and a couple of British birders who call themselves “twitchers”, we quietly crept down the trail into the muddy cathedral. In about 45 minutes we came to the little palm-thatched blind with a view of the lek. Angel inspected the blind very carefully for the deadly Fer-de- Lance, scorpions, and tarantulas as big as your hand. Satisfied, he smiled and motioned us to shuffle in and be seated. We squinted and strained for another half hour until we could focus on the squawking, fluttering dance display. Most of the time there wasn’t enough light to do stills or video, but for the last 3 minutes of the disco, I did get a shaky telephoto clip of the flamboyant, scarlet dancers. Then they were gone. I leaned over to Crow and whispered, “They are never going to believe this back at the feed store!”
Angel thought the Cock of the Rock lek would be the main draw for his ecotourism experiment, but in the process of building the trail and the blind to see the lek, he met some even more remarkable birds with whom he established a personal relationship and who gave him the reputation as the “Antpitta Whisperer.”
Antpittas are a family of medium-sized birds of the forest floor which are rare, stick to deep cover, and wear perfect camouflage. Like a copperhead, they depend on that camo and allowed Angel to approach fairly closely. Being quiet and making no sudden moves, he was able to see them often until they seemed to ignore him. He watched what they did and what they ate, and he gave them names. They like the large, fat, white grubs which they scratch up from the wet leaf litter. He dug up some of the grubs and when he saw “Maria,” he tossed one to her. She eyed it for several minutes, floated over to it, grabbed it by the butt, whacked its head on the ground a few times, and slurped it down. Maria is a Giant antpitta, about a foot tall, the largest species of the family. She looks like a big brown egg with a bill on top and longish toothpick legs below, no neck and no tail. Though profoundly odd looking, that’s no stranger than the fact that she now comes when Angel calls her name. In his always gentle voice, he almost whispers “Maria, Maria”, and she steps from behind a single leaf which hides her so well. This time there is enough light, and the little camcorder hums softly in front of my delighted smile.
When Maria is satisfied, Angel turns a different direction and calls, “Willi, Willi”. Another antpitta appears. Willi is a Yellow breasted ant-pitta, and he is justly wary of Maria. She chases him away, even though she has had so many grubs she can’t quite swallow the last one. Angel finally has to chase Maria away with his boot so Willi can have his breakfast. To my further amazement, Angel later called up Esmerelda, a Moustached antpitta. Many birders come to Ecuador looking for antpittas, yet fail to find them. Angel showed us 3 species in 2 hours!
Back at the house we joined the Paz family. Senora Paz was cooking breakfast for the kids, and she insisted that we have some of her breakfast specialty, deep fried plantain banana balls with a cheese surprise in the center. Yum! Each of the beautiful but shy, barefoot kids had a plantain fritter in each hand, and they seemed delighted that we liked them just as much as they did.
We were unbelievably fortunate to meet Angel Paz and see his special corner of the world. He calls his place “Refugio Paz de las Antpittas”, Peaceful Refuge of the Antpittas. It is barely accessible from the village of Nanegalito, Ecuador.
As a postscript, next year there will be a big birding convention in Quito, and hundreds of birders from all over the world will trek to Refugio Paz de las Antpittas to touch the hem of the cloak of an Angel.
If you would like to read more about Angel Paz, there is an excellent article about him and the antpittas by the famous bird authority Kenn Kaufman (who still doesn’t believe in Ivory-billed woodpeckers) in the Jul/Aug 2006 issue of Bird Watchers Digest. www.birdwatchersdigest.com
You can also Google up Angel Paz, antpitta, Ecuador.
If you are interested in birding Ecuador, it would be hard to overstate our enthusiasm for and gratitude to Charlie Vogt and his company, Andean Birding. www.andeanbirding.com We recorded 494 species, seen or heard, in less than two weeks. At times, we were seeing new species faster than we could write them down. No doubt, some of them got away unrecorded, but not the Great potoo! But that’s another story.