cousins and sisters in Ecuador

I'm going to try to return to blogging a little more regularly and return the blog to the Ecuador trip this spring.  That trip focused mainly on the upper mid elevations of the west slope of the Andes, centered at Tandayapa.  We'd left off with a morning walk at Rio Silanche, the lowest elevation we reached on this trip.  The lower elevations tend to have more generalist birds rather than the specialty endemics of the highlands, and this was true at a little pond we stopped at.

Blue-and-white Swallow looks pretty analogous to a Tree Swallow and are pretty widely distributed.

It's pretty easy to figure out who Gray-breasted Martin is related to, another bird I've seen on most neotropic trips.

White-thighed Swallow was new.  These birds were even darker than the Southern Rough-wings that were also present, and a size smaller too.

But these were lowlands in South America so that meant there had to be more new birds.  Water-tyrants are pretty much limited to South America (with the exception of Pied which just crosses into Panama's Darien).  These are Masked Water-tyrants

I'm not great with butterflies but I'm pretty confident these are some species of Sister.

We heard Brown-capped Tyrannulet here.  Its beeeee, bee-be-be-bi can be a prominent part of a lot of neotropic soundscapes.

I was surprised to see Plain-brown Woodcreeper, in Central America they've always been forest birds, this was much more edge type habitat.

Scarlet-backed Woodpecker is a somewhat odd and quite unique looking bird.

Finally our good friend Summer Tanager, they call more on their wintering grounds than they do in Warren Dunes (or else they're just a lot more concentrated in winter)