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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JWN Andrewes" data-source="post: 1662889" data-attributes="member: 7131">4th December 1989Another jaunt, this time south, rather than east. Perhaps a bit of back story first though. We were in Ecuador as our placement from college; one of the lecturers had a some friends who had just bought some cloud forest to turn into a reserve, with a lodge for eco-tourism etc. we were doing a very basic survey of what was there (myself and a friend looking at the birds, obviously). We’d done three months of birding on the reserve and were now splitting our time between checking out other parts of the country and writing up in Quito. December 4th found us in the village of Pondoa on the lower slopes of Tungurahua; an Andean volcano. We’d caught a bus to Banos the day before, spent the night and then headed up the mountain. I don’t recall why we’d decided to come to this particular spot, but here we were anyway, wondering where we were going to stay, when we bumped into a young Paul Newman. Not the real one, but a dead spit, enhanced by the fact that when we first met him he was riding a horse and wearing a cowboy hat. He turned out to be an American Peace Corps volunteer (Robert Jacks was his name I think), and we ended up staying with him for a couple of nights. It was at his house that we saw a copy of a magazine (Time maybe?) with a picture on its cover of the Berlin Wall coming down; current affairs had finally caught up with us. The area around Pondoa, being much more open high ground than we’d had a chance to linger in before, had a whole suite of new birds; Black-backed Grosbeak, Scarlet-bellied Mountain-Tanager (wow, what a stunner!), Spectacled Whitestart, Mountain Velvetbreast, Pale-naped Brush-Finch and Rainbow-bearded Thornbill (just a female, didn’t get the dazzling male till the following day). James</blockquote>

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