Rise and shine, it’s clay lick time!

We’ll get up bright and early for a trip to the clay lick, a landslide where parrots, parakeets, and macaws go to lick the exposes clay. By doing this, they intake important minerals for their health. The clay they ingest also absorbs toxins that reside in their stomach from the seeds that they eat. The birds you’ll see have been returning to this exact clay lick for generations.

You’ll spend the entire clay lick excursion in the canoe. There’s a rare hilly area in the area that we always go to. Clay licks in flat areas are rarer and harder to get to, often taking the form of a shallow pond. The clay lick we’ll bring you too is the most accessible in Ecuador.

From the canoe, you can see the birds gather around the exposed landslide, licking up the clay. They fly in and gather in dozens, sometimes darting back out into the surrounding trees.

We try to go early in the morning to give us the best chance to see a multitude of birds gather. All of our excursions are in the wild, so we can’t always predict what we will or won’t see. Sometimes, when we’re lucky, we’ll see hundreds of birds gather at the clay lick.

Be sure to bring your binoculars to get a better view or a camera with a good zoom lens!