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AS I STOOD on a trailhead in northern Ecuador, in the town of Baeza, the sky above me was implausibly blue. My backpack was weighed down by the 3-pound, 970-page “Birds of Ecuador Field Guide,” the beefiest such guide I’d ever seen. Just a few minutes after I entered the Sendero de Las Cascadas trail, its surface turned from a fine Andean dust to squishy and slippery mud, and the sky disappeared behind a canopy thick with gossamer webs and dangling moss. Another 10 minutes and I plunged deeper into the fog soup of a cloud forest—as cool, tropical mountain forests perpetually shrouded in mist are known. Given Ecuador’s…