Paul Blanchard, a retired UW-Eau Claire mathematics professor, has a keen interest in observing and photographing birds of all kinds, but hummingbirds have a special place in his heart.
What’s not to like about them, he said.They are pretty — many with iridescent colors that rival the flowers that provide them with food.They are remarkable flyers, with wing beats of 50 to 70 beats per second. “They are able to fly forward, backward, up, down and around.
They have fantastic courtship flights. They can do things that no other birds can do.”Blanchard, 77, said he’s not the only one with a soft spot for humming birds — consider all the hummingbird feeders filled with sweetened water that people hang out.”The only one we have here is the ruby-throated, but everybody puts their feeders out,” he said.The ruby-throated hummingbird is an exception — a versatile bird that wanders far to the North.
Most hummingbirds are homebodies. “There are hummers that are reliant on one plant species.
They don’t wander far from their habitat. They can be endangered for that reason, because of the loss of habitat.”Biologists just discovered a new hummingbird four years ago in the cloud forest of Columbia — the gorgeted puffball, named for its bright blue and green throat and white, fluffy legs. Unfortunately, Blanchard notes, the limited forest area where it lives is in danger of being cleared by drug traffickers to plant cocoa for cocaine.Columbia would be an excellent place for bird-watchers because of its diverse bird life — they have 1,721 known bird species — the most of any country in the New World. It may have more species that have never been described. But with drug wars and crime it’s not a tourism-friendly place.
Last spring, Blanchard visited nearby Ecuador, which is more friendly and also has lots of birds. Ecuador, the size of Colorado, has 1,559 bird species — the greatest number, per square mile, of any country. For comparison, the U.S. has 768 species and Canada has 578.
Of the 1,559 birds in Ecuador, 135 are hummingbirds. After a three-week stay at lodges at three different altitudes, Blanchard had photographed 30 of them, along with a host of colorful tanangers and other birds.
Blanchard’s interest in cameras predates his interest in birds. In 1955, as a student at UW-Eau Claire, he took a photography class from Gil Tanner which got him interested. He later settled on birds as favorite subjects.
Bird watching by altitudeOn his trip to Ecuador he flew into Quito, the capital city which sits 10,000 feet above sea level. He stayed at three private lodges at different altitudes, starting with some high-altitude bird-watching at a lodge near Quito.
Blanchard next dropped down to 5,000 feet to a lodge in the “cloud forest,” where, as the name implies, it is often misty or cloudy. A major portion of the precipitation comes from mist condensing on vegetation, then dripping to the ground.
It took a half mile hike up mountain switchbacks to reach that place, but it had the greatest array of hummingbirds he has ever encountered.
The organizers of the bird-watching circuit, which they call the “Magic Bird Circuit,” were worried about whether Blanchard could make the climb when they saw his age, but he told them he hikes every day.
His last week was at 2,000 feet a in rain forest, where, as you might expect, it rained a lot. It made bird-watching a challenge. “The amount of rain at 2,000 feet was pretty much unbelievable,” he said.The rain forest was a better place to hear birds than to see them. The trails through the dense vegetation were pretty much “green tunnels,” where all you could see was a wall of green, Blanchard said.
He did see and photograph one of his favorite birds of the trip at 2,000 feet —the white-whiskered hermit. It was a hummingbird, of course.