Jardin Botanico de Bogota

Bogota, Colombia is a sprawling city of over 7 million people.  In the midst of it is a beautiful botanical garden.  On our first day in Colombia, we squeezed into 2 tiny taxis with our friends - 5 adults and 3 children, and went off to see the gardens.

If you ask most people what comes to mind when they think of Colombia, they would probably say illegal drugs or kidnappings (and it's true those have been problems); but I think of birds.  

Colombia has 1,871 recorded species of birds!  (click here for a list) And, 162 of those are hummingbirds!  That's the greatest diversity of hummingbirds of any country on earth.  So, of course, as we headed to the botanical gardens, I was thinking... where there are flowers, there might be hummingbirds.  I was not disappointed!

Isn't this one beautiful?  I believe it is a Sparkling Violet-ear.   ( I identified it from a photo I found online  here).  If you want to be amazed at photos of hummers, check out this gallery.  There are 8 pages of hummingbird photos!  Actually, I think just the names of them are fascinating!

The Sparkling Violet-ear, so called because of the long feathers by its ears that it can raise, was sipping nectar from these flowers.

It was the only hummingbird we saw in the garden, though we did see more later at other places.

We enjoyed walking around the gardens in short-sleeve shirts.  Perfect weather.  Bogota is a subtropical highland climate about 8,600 feet above sea level.  It's actually on a high plateau in the Andes Mountains.

Most of the plants in the gardens were unfamiliar to me, with a few exceptions...

such as this large bed of day lilies and the next one, a rose garden.

The greenhouses featured different rooms with the flora of that climate.  This one contained bromeliads and orchids.

Here's the cacti house:

This plant (I'm not sure what it is), was particularly beautiful.

 

Though most of the plants and birds were basically unknown to me, there were some that seemed familiar. Does the next bird remind you of any common American bird?

It acted and sang quite a bit like our American Robin.  There are 27 kinds of Thrushes (the family our Robins are in) listed for Colombia.  I believe this one is a Great Thrush.

Here's a youngster, perhaps waiting to be feed a juicy worm.

These flowers looked familiar, I think they are ones I've grown in my garden (but have to dig up in the winter) called Peacock Orchids.

The birds on the ground in front of them looked familiar, too.  They are similar, but not the same as our Mourning Doves.

The identity I came up with is Ruddy Ground Dove.  I need to explain that on the trip, I didn't have a 'bird guide' or even a field guide to Colombian birds (though I'm waiting for one from an inter-library loan), so I've been working on looking up birds from the internet.  The Colombian bird list has 29 kinds of doves or quail/doves.... so there's a very good chance I could be wrong!

Our first morning at our friends' apartment (in the middle of many houses), I heard a bird singing.  It turned out to be a Rufous-collared Sparrow.  I was able to get a nice photo of this one at the gardens.

Its song became quite familiar while we were in Colombia.  If you know the song of an Eastern Towhee ("Drink your tea!"), this sparrow's song sounds like that, only with the trill on the "your" instead of the "tea".

We saw this pretty snail... I was sort of sorry it was alive because I would have collected the shell otherwise.  But it got to stay in the garden.

It was the only shell I saw while I was in Colombia.  And, this was the only snake:

It was supposed to be a replica of some sort of prehistoric monster snake. 

I did keep my eye out for snakes as I was walking around Colombia-- and wouldn't have minded seeing some... as long as they were MUCH smaller!

The Botanical Garden was a great way to kick off our Colombian adventure.  I have a lot more photos to share, so stay tuned!