my favorite pic of the trip?

Variable Hawk is the common buteo of the high elevations and paramo.

This is one of my favorite pics of the trip, I like that the habitat shows well.  The small version doesn't show the details of the face as well as the big version that's the background on my desktop does.

The bird banked showing off the rufous back.

Variable hawks are ... variable.  Here's a light morph bird.

Here's a different dark morph

We watched a couple of young variables interact and swirl about