On birds and cows in Mindo, Ecuador

Who says cows and birds do not get along? Not us say the egrets.

One early morning before sunrise, we took a walk along a road that begins just south of the town of Mindo and dead ends at the Reserva de Las Tangeras. We heard a lot birds- but did not see any up close. It was a beautiful walk through the valleys of the rivers Cinco and Saloya on the low-traffic dirt roads, with alternating sections of  bright-orange and burnt-umber coloured soil. Barbed-wire on either side demarcated the territory and kept us from trespassing unintentionally.

Hiking the Cinto Saloya River Valley at dawn.

The surroundings changed in colour from pitch black to a verdant green in unison with the sky that changed from a deep prussian blue to a soft silver glow with the sunrise. We did not have the eyes of the "La Guia" to help us. We saw the silhouette of a hummingbird in a tree, a flock of parrots flying high above us, a school of egrets by the bridge on the River Saloya, one prize find of an unknown indigo and black bird 20 feet away, two fluorescent toucans and a few other previously seen birds like the lemon drop tanager and the tropical kingbird. Less than a dozen species in all. Nothing to endanger record of the fifty plus species we had seen with the guide.

Looking east from the bridge: The sun rises over the Saloya river valley

At several places during the walk , we had seen cows resting in lush grass; grassland that consisted of grass because the trees had been cleared to allow the grass to grow for the cows. Some of the cows had egrets perched on them- a sight common with buffaloes and cows in India. We had also seen a house with inquisitive goats that stared at us as we climbed the road after crossing the bridge. I even saw a patch of forest cleared for what looked like palm-oil trees.

This egret contends that fishing in a stream beats hanging out with cows!

Palm-oil trees in Mindo?

On our earlier walk with Julia, the bird-watching guide from Mindo, we had seen cows in grassland and trees, and had even seen one sheep/cow farm in the distance. On another day, we had climbed into the hills on the bird-trails leading out of the "Yellow House": we had paid to hike on private property that day; our path was a double-barreled path carved in the ground by pickups, and on either side lay fenced cow pastures. I had been surprised to see cows grazing like goats on a steep hillside. Some flatter places had maize- but most of the landscape was cow-pasture.

Bucolic view near the Rio Mindo. Sheep or Cows?

Cow: Steep hillsides are not just for Donkeys and Goats!

I had seen the same in the USA. A prominent memory is from the Tillamook county on the Oregon coast. There near the highway, instead of trees as wide as houses and as tall as skyscrapers as seen in logging photographs from the 19th century, today one sees pastureland for cows. In Mindo too, it was the same story. The land was unsuitable for agriculture- and we had the cows and sheep and goat to make the most of it. The official "Guia Turistica" of Mindo mentions that in the region "6" in the tourist map (the Cinto Saloya valleys), "... you will find vast farmlands as the local people work by raising livestock and producing dairy."

Fenced in cattle in lush grassland- the egrets are evidently enjoying this too.

I was wondering if the bored fenced-in cows were luckier than the free to roam cows seen in Indian cities, who supplement their diet at the garbage dump. Coming from India, where cows have been part of the culture for millennia, it struck a discordant note in me to see cows grazing by themselves sans a cowherd in sight, and that too in a place where land that had been cleared expressly for the cows. 

On the way back, it was drizzling lightly, and I was pondering about the people who milked the cows. We saw a pickup parked by the road with a solitary milk can in the back. As we neared closer, we saw  the outline of a sleeping driver through the misted window, his baseball capped head resting on the glass; asleep. We passed the truck, trudging back to town. We heard another pickup approaching us from behind, and when we looked back, we saw that the pickups had parked next to one another. The 40-liter aluminium can was loaded onto the other truck, and when this truck passed us by, we saw that it had 15-20 similar cans- all headed towards Mindo. We saw the awakened driver snake the empty truck down a winding road to a shed like structure. Adjacent to it were patches of grass and trees with a few cows sprinkled in. Further away from the house the patchwork was replaced by the forest. The driver had probably milked the cows before dawn, and was headed back to a well-deserved sleep.

A road snakes its way to the milking shed on the left of the picture: on the right, we have cow-pastures giving way to forest proper on the right edges of the picture.

A few kilometers closer to town, we saw a solitary milk 40-liter can by the side of the road. Investigation revealed that it was half-empty and sitting at the bottom of a narrow path that led to group of houses up the hillside. As I was staring up the path, I saw a man in the common attire of the place, baseball-cap, t-shirt, jeans and gum-boots. He was half dragging half carrying a pale yellow plastic container down the muddy path. When he reached the can, he emptied milk into the can, and trudged back up the path. I learnt that one must employ more arduous methods to deposit a full milk-can by the road in the absence of a pickup and a road.

A solitary milk-can on the road: filled by muscle power and to be carted away by fossil fuels.

In my mind, Mindo was supposed to be an unrivaled birding paradise, so it was a surprise for me to see that trees had been chopped down for cows- just like in Tillamook county in the past hundred years  or over thousands of years in India- for the Indo-Gangetic plains were once old growth forests at some point in time.

So even in the place which routinely crops up as the top "most birds seen in a day" place in the world, we have trees being chopped for pastureland. I could not help thinking about all the cities I had been in India, and why I had never been able to see birds in plenty there.

The struggle in Mindo is between having grazing-land for cows or having it preserved for eco-tourism. Some of the land-owners are aware of this- some have planted fruit trees for birds, some promote eco-tourism on their property with hiking, horse-back riding and bird-watching, others try to promote its use as shade-grown coffee plantations, while many chop the trees for the wood and more cows. Only time will tell if Mindo will continue to have more than 400 species of birds in the future.

Mindo: the view from the bird-walking trails from the "Yellow House" looking south