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Its hard to believe that I arrived in Ecuador only yesterday afternoon. At 4 in the morning of that day I dozed numbly in the back of a taxi rolling through the deserted streets of Buenos Aires, and at dusk on the same day I sat in an open air restaurant in Salinas - on Ecuador´s southern coast – staring at the Pacific Ocean and eating seafood with the country´s premier seabird expert. I discovered Ben Haase´s name in a book I pulled off a shelf in a hostel, and I emailed him about my project even though it only mentioned him off-handedly as someone to contact about whale or birdwatching trips in the area. Only after talking for some time with him did I discovered that despite having lived in Ecuador for 20 years as an avid birdwatcher, Ben - who was born in Holland and can speak at least 5 languages - has never been to the jungle or the Amazon region to pursue his hobby. His only love is seabirds and he is so devoted to this particular passion that he has never felt the desire to do what ever local or foreign birdwatcher seeks to do in this country – namely trek to a province like Napo, hire a dugout canoe and a guide, and search out tanagers and hummingbirds (to name a few) that exist nowhere else on the planet. If I hadn´t stumbled across Ben´s name in the book, I would probably have only found him after traveling from one end of the country to the other, receiving clues at every step of the way from guides and professors and birdwatchers about a wise seabird guru lurking somewhere on the south coast. We mostly talked shop over dinner – terns, gulls, and shorebirds – and the following morning (today of all days) we caught a rickety bus at dawn that carried us through the rainy muddy streets to a few ramshackle houses and hunching garbage piles at the edge of town. Just beyond these last bastions of civilization lie a series of man-made pans owned and controlled by a salt processing company in the area. These small lakes also happen to be crawling with birds – flamingos, pelicans, terns (of course) – and Ben and I spent the morning gleefully traipsing through the mud and admiring our winged friends. By noon, with the sun growing maliciously hot, we returned to civilization and caught the bus back to the town center. I don´t think I´ll stay long in this town, but will instead travel fairly quickly up the coast, searching for terns and other seabirds of course at every stop along the way. Plans change fast, though, and if past experience is any indicator, its almost just as likely that at this time tomorrow I´ll find myself reclining in a comfortable chair at a large estancia in Bolivia, smoking cigars and drinking champagne with the president of the country.
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