The joy of birds

The driver of the minibus was reeling off a list of names. “El Trampolín de la Muerte”, “El Diablo”, “Adiós Mi Vida”, he said, smiling.

My Spanish isn’t great. But I knew what these words meant. They were what the locals called the 70km ribbon of rubble we were on, which snakes east from Pasto, high in the Andes some 500km south of Bogotá, through the páramo and cloud forest, over a couple of 2,800m passes, and down to steamy Mocoa in the Amazon basin.

It’s got everything you could want from a road with death in the name: just too narrow for the big trucks that use it to easily squeeze past each other, vertical drops into deep ravines guarded only by plastic tape strung between wooden stakes, raging rivers tumbling across it, landslides. And, naturally, shrines on every hairpin, candles burning brightly.

Three days before, I had ventured away from my small Welsh valley for more or less the first time in two years; the physical retreat from the pandemic having, over time, begotten a psychical uncoupling from the wider world. Horizons had shrunk; courage had crumbled. I had avoided Covid-19. But at what cost?

During the pandemic, I had developed a love of birds, clinging on to their constancy and conviviality in a suddenly unreliable and frightening world. So when, a couple of months back, I read about Colombia, about how it was the world’s number-one country in terms of bird diversity, with nearly 2,000 species (compared with just over 600 in the UK), many endemic and most of them ridiculously beautiful, a plan was formed. About 70 per cent of Colombia’s bird species are found in the south, the former heartland of paramilitaries and cocaine cartels, but an area in the process of emerging from fear and isolation.

Thus I found myself on the Trampoline of Death, with birders from Finland, Germany, the UK and the US, wistfully thinking about my safe little Welsh valley.

“Golden-eyed flowerpiercer,” someone shouted from the back.

“Glowing puffleg,” somebody else yelled. “Stop the bus!”

We pulled over. On one side of the road, a sheer drop. On the other, endless páramo, the ecosystem typical of Colombia’s Andes, carpeted with frailejones, with their giant yellow daisy-like flowers, succulent hairy leaves and thick spongy trunks. The plants absorb moisture from clouds, then pass it through their roots into the soil, thus creating subterranean water deposits and lakes, making the land so fertile and biodiverse that scientists consider it an evolutionary hotspot.

“The flowerpiercer is one of the tanager family,” one of the birders was telling me, pointing to a nearby bush. It was hard to follow her finger, but eventually I found the bird, a tiny puffball of cobalt with eyes so startlingly yellow that it looked permanently irritated.

Her finger swung a few degrees to the right.

“Can you see the puffleg? One of the hummingbirds. Colombia has over 130 species of them, one of the highest concentrations in the world.”

After another few minutes’ searching (unlike me, experienced birders seemed to have an amazing capacity to find their quarry), I could, watching the puffleg’s perpetual mania as it flitted between the flowers of the bomarea multiflora, or trailing lily, dipping its matchstick-like bill into the tubular crimson bells, its glittering golden-green belly topped with an iridescent purple bib, there as if to catch the drips.

We jumped back on the bus, back on the Trampoline of Death. One of the group paired their phone with the bus stereo. “I Like Birds” by Eels started blaring out, a song about loss and a mad world and the solace to be found in birds.

We crossed the border between the departments of Nariño and Putumayo, the road plunging and climbing, in and out of the milky froth of the clouds. These remote southern mountains had been off-limits for nearly 60 years, former strongholds of the anti-government Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) in the civil war and a place where the coca leaf grows prolifically, which saw the cartels and the paramilitaries working closely together.

“It was a complete no-go area, very dangerous. Nobody would come here, foreigners or Colombians,” Luis Urueña, 39, birding expert and owner of Manakin Nature Tours, who had organised our trip, told me as the bus bounced along.

But the conflict — which cost more than 200,000 lives, the majority of them civilians, saw five million people internally displaced and made Colombia an international byword for violence, cocaine-trafficking and lawlessness — also, Luis explained, had an unexpected impact.

“The conflict helped preserve this pristine environment, the most biodiverse on earth. Because the forests were where the militias hid and the coca crops were grown, they allowed no deforestation, no development.”

Luis was frustrated that southern Colombia remained equated with danger in the global consciousness. Despite the 2016 ceasefire, which has largely held, and an astonishing turnround in safety, the US and UK foreign offices still advise against all but essential travel to many of the southern areas. My Lonely Planet guidebook — edition printed November 2021 — had on its country map a vast swath of land in the south totally blank, like one of those areas of terra incognita beloved of ancient cartographers.

“It will take time, I know,” said Luis. “But it’s painful for Colombian people that the world still sees us that way. We want to show off our fabulous birds, but we want to show everything: the food, the people, the landscape, culture. With birds as an excuse.”

“Yellow-backed oriole!” came a shout from the back.

“Crimson-mantled woodpecker! Stop the bus!”

We piled out, dodging the trucks. Scopes were screwed on to tripods and trained upwards, binoculars raised to foreheads, mouths agape in wonder, the rest of the world forgotten as the group, flocked together in a tight bunch, focused intensely on a tree dripping with epiphytic orchids. Colombia, Luis told me, has more than 4,000 species of orchids, the greatest concentration in the world.

“Long-tailed sylph!”; “Bronze-green euphonia!”; “Flame-faced tanager!”; “Green-backed hillstar!”; “Streaked tuftedcheek!”

The names were called out, one after the other, like an announcer at a society ball; a ball with florid, outrageous costumes by Vivienne Westwood or Jean Paul Gaultier, with the chamber orchestra playing not a waltz but the sharp, discordant notes of a laser tag game, or the deep, haunting echo of a submarine’s sonar, or, in the case of a duetting pair of rose finches, the sweetest mellifluousness I had ever heard.

“This is a mixed flock,” Luis said to me. “Very common here, where food is so abundant and birds feed together in vast numbers as protection from predators.”

High in the sky, a black hawk eagle was being harassed by a sharp-shinned hawk.

A male Andean cock-of-the-rock flashed through the trees, leaving a neon red tracer in the green, before alighting on a branch, hopping up and down and emitting a pig-like squeal for the indifferent-looking female below him.

“In other countries, you might see one bird every 20 minutes or so, and have to trek through forests to find them,” Luis said. “Here we can see 40, 50, even 60 species together, and just by the roadside. Everyone calls out the names and you are looking everywhere. So much fun.”

After about five minutes, my eyeballs felt untethered.

The Trampoline dropped down and down, into the warm, oxygen-rich embrace of the Amazon basin and our hotel for the night, just outside the town of Mocoa, a dusty, chaotic place seemingly being devoured by the jungle. We drove through a main square full of palm trees, framed by Spanish colonial buildings, teenage boys on scooters with girlfriend passengers scrolling through their phones, weaving around donkeys and carts driven by campesinos in their sombreros vueltiaos and ruana ponchos.

“White-eyed parrot!” came a shout from the back.

Birders are never off.

“Black-tailed vulture.”

The birders were delirious with happiness at the accommodation, too, the funky Dantyaco, with its outdoor dining area beside the rainforest, where dusky-headed parakeets and scarlet-crowned barbets did their thing as we ate burritos, binoculars up and down between mouthfuls. Saddle-back tamarins leapt from branch to branch and a column of leafcutter ants carried high their precious cargo on their backs, like the sails of a thousand little ships, along the wooden balustrades.

The birders’ joy only increased when we saw our rooms — high above the raging Río Mocoa, open-sided, the outside inside, thick forest adjacent, so that it was possible to birdwatch on the loo or from the hot tubs on the balconies. I had a shower, surrounded by half a dozen green and yellow frogs looking up at me, their little throat sacs pulsing, before the evening’s entertainment of Tierra Andina, a brilliant, raucous local group fusing the old and the new, like Status Quo with ponchos and panpipes.

I had set my alarm for 4am — birders start very early — but I was awake at 3.30am after a thunderclap had rattled the flat metal roof of my room and thrown me out of bed. We drove away from Mocoa in the dark of night, heading south, cresting a hill as rosy light fingered the dawn. Before us lay the 400,000 sq km of Colombia’s Amazon rainforest. It was the first time I’d seen it, but it felt familiar, emotional, like a homecoming.

We passed fields where dazzling scarlet ibis and turkey-sized horned screamers, each with a strange unicorn-like spike growing from its forehead, grazed.

We arrived at Puerto Asís, on the wide, languid Río Putumayo, a tributary of the Amazon, just 20km from the Ecuador border. We climbed into a voadeira boat and puttered off downstream, weaving between huge, whole trees floating past, red-bellied macaws flying overhead, ringed kingfishers calling raucously from riverside perches.

We went ashore at Playa Rica, an ecological reserve owned and run by indigenous people, and trekked through the rainforest, coming to a clearing where Luis played the call of a ferruginous pygmy owl through a little Bluetooth speaker, the 21st-century equivalent of what birders call “pishing”, where imitation calls attract birds. The call of a predator, Luis explained, made the other birds nervous and break cover to investigate.

“We use them sparingly or the birds get stressed,” he told me.

Soon we were seeing Amazonian umbrellabirds, white-eared jacamars, long-billed woodcreepers and violaceous jays. Yellow-rumped caciques cackled as they swung off the strips of vines they were adding to their pendulous nests, like Cirque du Soleil acrobats.

A ferruginous pygmy owl sat in a nearby tree, looking confused.

We had seen more than 200 species in five days, 87 in Playa Rica alone. Luis told me that someone doing Manakin’s whole southern Colombian trip could feasibly see more than 800 species in three weeks (there are 1,120 species in the whole of North America).

We stopped at the little café run by the women of the Playa Rica community for a lunch of catfish — pulled out of the Putumayo that morning — green plantains and rice, and a glass of ice-cold fresh guava juice.

I walked away from the group, back through the rainforest. A vast kaleidoscope of golden butterflies flittered around me, a familiar motif in the magic realism of Colombia’s Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, where they symbolise hope and peace.

I thought back to the spring of 2020 and all that had followed. The shrinking horizons, the abandoned dreams, the creeping, insistent fear, the retreat from the world.

“It’s not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old,” Márquez wrote in his 2004 novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores. “They grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”

In the humid fug of the Amazon basin, I perched on an old rotting log on the riverbank, removed my shoes and socks and put my feet into the cool Putumayo. Brilliant, opalescent dragonflies skimmed the water. Above my head, a lineated woodpecker, with a vivid carmine crest, was destroying a branch like a jackhammer. I was joined by a fisherman, a thin stogie hanging from his lips, who cast his line into the river.

The man struck and reeled in a large fish.

“Qué es eso?” I asked.

He held it to my face, its mouth pulsing, its razor teeth glinting in the bright sun.

“Piranha,” he said, grinning.

I quickly pulled my feet out of the river and laughed out loud.

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