A male Ecuadorian Hillstar perches atop a chuquiragua bush, his favorite high altitude habitat. I have chased these birds in the thin, cold air from 11,000-13,500 feet, where they nest and thrive (and we gasp for breath).
In 2016, I fell from a slippery embankment when a fence broke, landing hard on cobblestones and breaking my heel. (At least it was in the last two hours of the workshop. My group got great shots while I tried to walk off what I thought was a bad sprain, until we retired to the hospital in Quito -- and a wheelchair for me! We suffer for our art.)