Ecuador: Hummingbirds and Butterflies

 

Golden-tailed Sapphire (Chrysuronia oenone).
WildSumaco Lodge, Ecuador. 

I am finishing this series of blogs about Ecuador with a return to hummingbirds and a brief detour into butterflies.  Going from North Carolina with its one summer resident hummingbird to Ecuador with over 100 hummingbirds is brain boggling.  Butterflies that amaze with their size or brilliance is the norm.

Hummingbirds with their range of iridescent colors, their speed and fearlessness make them quite appealing.  It takes a while to get all the hummingbirds in an area in your head.  They move so fast that you often have only a few seconds to take in their field marks.  Conversations about hummingbird ID often went, “Did that one have a blue head and green throat or was it a green head and blue throat?”  The fantastic hummingbird names add to the appeal.  Some had hummingbird in the name but others were called mangos or sabrewings, thorntails or brilliants, violetears or sapphires, or even woodnymphs.  Hummingbird feeders allowed us to have extended and repeated looks at the hummers that would have been impossible to identify in thick forests.

Among the insects the visual counterpart to hummingbirds are the butterflies.  Like the hummingbirds, butterflies were bright, brilliant and fast.  The butterfly counterpart to the hummingbird feeder is a wet gravel road.  Butterflies land on the road and sip water laced with minerals in a behavior call puddling.  Puddling allows for longer looks at these brilliant insects.  

Here are some of the hummingbirds and butterflies of the Ecuadorian cloud forest and rainforest.  

Gould’s Jewelfront (Heliodoxa aurescens).
WildSumaco Lodge, Ecuador. 

Green Hermit (Phaethornis guy).
WildSumaco Lodge, Ecuador. 

Male Black-throated Mango (Anthracothorax nigricollis).
WildSumaco Lodge, Ecuador. 

Female Black-throated Mango.
WildSumaco Lodge, Ecuador. 

Golden-tailed Sapphire.
WildSumaco Lodge, Ecuador. 

Sparkling Violetear (Colibri coruscans).
WildSumaco Lodge, Ecuador. 

Brown Violetear (Colibri delphinae).
WildSumaco Lodge, Ecuador. 

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Wire-crested Thorntail (Discosura popelairii) on the left and
Golden-tailed Sapphire on the right. 
WildSumaco Lodge, Ecuador. 

Black-throated Brilliant (Heliodoxa schreibersii).
WildSumaco Lodge, Ecuador.

Napo Sabrewing (Campylopterus villaviscensio),
WildSumaco Lodge, Ecuador. 

Fork-tailed Woodnymph (Thalurania furcata).
WildSumaco Lodge, Ecuador. 

Many-spotted Hummingbird (Taphrospilus hypostictus).
WildSumaco Lodge, Ecuador.

While the butterflies were bright and memorable many do not have common names.   Several butterflies shown here will have only the binomial scientific name in the caption. Many of them were puddling on gravel roads. 

Siosta bifasciata. 
This small butterfly has brilliant blue and orange
spots on the black wings. 
WildSumaco Lodge, Ecuador. 

Adelpha sp. This brown butterfly with yellow bands belongs 
to a group of butterflies called Sisters.  They got this name
because their brown color resembled the habits on nuns.
WildSumaco Lodge, Ecuador. 

Caligo idomeneus, the Idomeneus Giant Owl butterfly is 
native to the Amazon basin.
Sacha Lodge, Ecuador. 

Idomeneus Giant Owl butterfly eggs
Sacha Lodge, Ecuador. 

Red postman (Heliconius erato) advertises its
toxicity with bright warning colors.
WildSumaco Lodge, Ecuador. 

Archonias sp. is related to the whites and sulfurs (Pieridae)
in the Southeastern United States. 
Cabañas San Isidro, Ecuador. 

Our trip to Ecuador was a birding excursion and we did see a prodigious number of birds, including hummingbirds.  But the real takeaway from our travels to the páramo, cloud forest and rainforest was the exuberant diversity of life.  From tiny plants at high altitude to giant trees emerging from the Amazon canopy, from butterflies to soaring condors, life was abounding.  It was a privilege to see this spectacle.