Altinote ozomene - habitat, La Planada Nature Reserve, Colomia

Opening a new day and location. We left our overnight stay at Pasto for a 4 hour drive towards La Planada Nature Reserve. To reach this reserve, we needed to swap to a more powerful car, to be able to pull us up on a pretty steep and very bumpy 6km entry road. There, it took a long time before we were assigned a room, but that room turned out to be a little private wooden lodge, our favorite type of accomodation.

After several days of roadside birding, lots of transfers and a visit to La Cocha and the Páramo, I was eager to get back to the jungle, it feels like coming home, or our second home. Yet this is no ordinary jungle, it is a cool one. It's situated between 1,200 and 2,100m. That's the full altitude range but most of the accessible parts of the reserve are at about 1700m.

The average temperature is 19C, but the average does not mean that much as the swings downwards and upwards are huge. It would not be an exaggeration to call it a rainy place. Colombia by most lists is known at the country with the most rainfall per year (at about 3,200mm). Add 50% more rain to that to come to the 4,800mm of rain that falls in La Planada Nature Reserve.

Our stay here would not be very long: this late afternoon, the night, a full day, and then a morning. This first observation was in the garden of our private lodge. I love having some vegetation around the accomodation to do some macro in between tours.