Our second stop in Ecuador was Mindo. Mindo is best known for having the most Birds counted for the Audubon Christmas Day Bird Count. It has counted the most birds in one day for more than six years. So we decided to go birding. We met at 6 o’clock in the morning to go birding. There were two other girls that came with us from England. We  got to a little house that wasn’t finished being built so it had a main room with no walls so you could see out across the cloud forest. Our guide gave us binoculars. Then he told us to look at the bird feeder for hummingbirds. He also went out on and a ladder and put bananas on a wooden platform in a tree and told us check it for birds. After we looked for the hummingbirds we had tea and crackers. Then he told us to follow him and we walked up a path through the cloud forest and looked for toucans, tanagers (blue gray and yellow breasted), and all different kinds of birds. The first bird we saw was one out of 4 types of toucans that lived in that cloud forest. My mom’s favorite bird was a white-tailed kite. We also saw a blue gray tanager, which was a very, very bright shade of blue and a dark shade of gray. The last bird we saw while hiking back to the house was a Guayaquil Woodpecker. This bird is black and it has a very large, fin of bright red feathers on its head.

The day after we went birding, we decided to go zip lining. I was a little scared because I had never been zip lining before. We did ten zip lines and during the last three, it was pouring rain, but it was still so much fun. They told us when it rains it is much faster and my mom went so fast on the last one that she flipped over backwards. It was so funny. Mindo was a really cool place. There was so much to do, but it was annoying that it was raining all the time. But the rain made it a little more beautiful.