I'm quickly realizing that my aspirations of creating weekly, or even bi-weekly, posts is slipping through the cracks.  I think there are lots of reasons why it seems to be harder to keep up on the blog.  At the beginning, everything was so exciting, new, and different.  Now that I have been here for a while, things that would have shocked and amazed me five months ago have sort of fallen short of astounding me.  It is a good sign, I think, that I have adjusted and have started to think of Ecuador as a home rather than a strange and beautiful place that I have been visiting.  Regardless, I'm going to make a conscious effort to improve the frequency of my posts, even if they are shorter posts with less pictures.  Having said that, this past weekend I returned to Mindo.  I wanted to go back to take a guide out bird watching.  The bus ride up to Mindo took 12 hours (it should've taken 8 at the most).  The next morning I was up at 5 and ready to see some birds.  I saw some pretty amazing species.  Some of the highlights were:  andean cock of the rock, different species of toucans, toucanets, woodpeckers and tanagers.  Unfortunately, my camera was too big to take pictures through the guide's spotting scope.  However, I have pictures that the guide took of the same species of birds on different outings of his.  Here are a few pics: