Archive for October, 2008
Veracruz 2008: Chavarillo and the Coast
Posted by: | CommentsSaturday morning we set off early, downslope to the transitional tropical forest of Chavarillo, a charming little town full of kind and birder-friendly people. The main square (well, the only square, really) was full of equally charming little Social Flycatchers:
Birding Chavarillo turned out to be easy: park at the square, admire the Yellow-winged Tanagers and Tropical Parulas, then walk a couple of yards uphill and turn into the forest. “Forest” is a bit overstated, or at least a bit under-specified: the trail, which is a nice, level dirt road, runs alongside some little-used railroad tracks, with tall and dense forest on one side and an interesting patchwork of pasture, milpa, and scrubby woodlot on the other, perfect for a good variety of birds. Melodious Blackbirds, undistinguished of plumage but sporting moderate vocal gifts, serenaded us as we walked through the open areas.
Fancier birds awaited us farther down the trail: Red-billed Pigeons and an Altamira Oriole perched up, while the endemic nominate race of Rufous-naped Wren and White-bellied Wren played harder to get from the thickets. I got my best views ever of Masked Tityra as they bounced around giving their little porcine grunts, and among the omnipresent migrant warblers was the only Hooded Warbler I saw all weekend.
It’s going to be hard to tear ourselves away next year during the Conference, and the butterflies aren’t going to make it any easier.
And neither will the people of Chavarillo, who painted their little church purple
and built their own hawkwatch tower, where Aldo tallies hundreds of thousands of raptors on their return flight north each spring!
We, though, had to remember that this was scouting, and so, too soon, it was on to the next sites, stopping quickly along the way out of Chavarillo for two Fork-tailed Flycatchers on the wires and some awesome views of snow-capped Orizaba, the highest mountain between Canada and Colombia:
By the time we made it to Cardel, the skies had darkened and the wind was coming up. We enjoyed a fine lunch at the Hotel Bienvenido, then rode the new elevator up to the roof for a chat with the hawkwatchers. Numbers of Scissor-tailed Flycatchers were shooting past overhead, and we saw a few hundred Turkey Vultures head south, but all in all there were few birds to tempt us into lingering. And so it was on to Chalchihuecan, where the habitat looked plenty promising but was, not unexpectedly, fairly devoid of birds in the mid-afternoon.
It pained me to cross it off the list of field trip destinations, but there are only so many days in a conference week–and our first views of the La Mancha Lagoon convinced me that that would be far the better choice.
We stood watching the lagoon and the Gulf of Mexico behind it for a few minutes, enjoying Royal Terns, Brown Pelicans, and numbers of Magnificent Frigatebirds, then walked out the paved road to see what was lurking in the trees. And this is what we found:
Look hard, look hard, and you’ll discover that the broken-off branch at the center of the image is not all branch.
This Northern Potoo has been roosting in the same line of trees for something like three years, carefully monitored by Enrique, who is going to keep an eye on it for next October, too. Whodathunk that such a bizarre creature could be found just two hours’ flight from Houston?
That bird sealed the deal, and La Mancha is definitely on the itinerary for the conference! The skies were lifting and the wind moving to the north, so we headed south and inland to Chichicaxtle, the site of another ProNatura hawkwatch.
Here at last we saw something approaching a flight: many hundreds of Barn Swallows moving south among vast kettles of Turkey Vultures, with a couple of Sharp-shinned and a single Cooper’s Hawk mixed in. Sadly, we didn’t have time to walk the brushy borders of the fields to look for Mexican Sheartail–a fact that leaves me with a target bird for next October!
Veracruz 2008: Xalapa
Posted by: | CommentsContinental stood me up for a full 24 hours, and I was well and truly cross when we finally landed in Veracruz shortly before 11:00 pm Thursday. But to my surprise, I made the bus to Xalapa, and to my delight, it proved clean, even fancy, and as comfortable as I could have wished for the hour-and-a-half ride through the dark.
The kind staff and the noisy Great-tailed Grackles were waiting for me when I arrived shortly before 1:00 am (!), and I slept the sleep of the innocent until the phone rang with my wake-up call the next morning. I ran downstairs to breakfast, past more Great-tailed Grackles on the lawn, and Tamie and I planned our scouting for next October’s ABA Conference in Xalapa and Veracruz.
The first order of business was to deal with the bus company, a meeting made much easier by Robert’s skills as interpreter; that out of the way, the three of us set out in Robert’s van for the Macuiltepetl Reserve, on the slopes of an extinct (or maybe just long-dormant) volcano that rises right from the center of town.
Wide, paved paths spiral up the flank of the mountain, providing great views over the city and–even in the afternoon–good birding. Boat-billed Flycatchers greeted us at the entrance to the reserve:
And our walk up the gentle paths was enlivened by such lovely and such disparate specialties as Slate-throated Whitestart and Blue-crowned Motmot.
The motmot was deep in the shady crater of Macuiltepetl (the “fifth hill”), and no sooner had we turned from our admiration of that tropical beauty than a loud rollicking whistle announced that we were in the presence of Bearded Wood-Partridge; we didn’t see him, unfortunately, but it is one of the small triumphs of Mexican conservation that this declining species has been successfully re-introduced to this small but beautiful reserve surrounded by city. It was here, too, that Robert and I glimpsed a Blue Mockingbird, a species I have seen a mere handful of times in Mexico and Texas.
The afternoon up in the cloud forest was spectacularly wonderful, skin-warm and bright, and the butterflies were taking full advantage of it. The flower patches near the clean, modern restrooms were alive with heliconians:
and a very pretty eighty-eight fed on the sidewalk:
The complex patterns of the undersides are fascinating, of course, but this species was every bit as attractive from above:
I have a feeling that as many conference-goers will be busy with Glassberg as with Howell and Webb at Macuiltepetl!
Big Sit 2008
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That’s Fahrenheit! It’s always cooler at Catalina State Park than at home, but I hadn’t expected the temperature to be approaching freezing at the start of a mid-October Big Sit. It’s Arizona, after all!
But I unpacked anyway, to the sweet hooting of a pair of Great Horned Owls that became the first of the day’s 38 species.
I’d brought a coat and gloves, but soon went back to the car for a blanket, too, and huddled up to await the dawn.
In spite of the cold and the dark, we tallied a good list by the time the sun rose shortly after 7:00. Rufous-winged Sparrows and Abert’s Towhees were singing within minutes of my laying out our circle, and by local sunrise–noticeably late there in the shadows of the high Catalinas–we already had 20 birds checked off.
First light brought a little warmth and the first clear glimpses of our home for the next 12 hours.
The picnic site I’d chosen was the same one we used for our 2005 count, surrounded by amaranth tangles and open mesquite woodland. We also had a clear view through the bosque to a saguaro-covered slope.
What we didn’t have, of course, was water, and that had been precisely the reason we’d settled on this spot in 2005. Placing the circle in Sutherland Wash, where tiny pools and puddles often persist into early fall, would vastly increase our list potential (as would simply abandoning Catalina State Park for any of Tucson’s amazingly birdy artificial wetlands), but I wanted to see then, and am still fascinated by the idea now, just how many birds could be ticked from an area where we were guaranteed to see no waterfowl, no shorebirds, no Great-tailed Grackles or Inca Doves.
That doesn’t mean we wanted to do completely without water. There is a dripping hydrant within sight of our circle, though this year the mud (generous word!) seemed more attractive to butterflies than to birds.
Most of the birding during a Big Sit is centrifugal, of course, straining to pick birds out at the limits of vision, all the while with a single foot inside the circle; in fact, the optimal circle is always chosen to maximize sight lines, meaning that like ours, it is surrounded by but itself devoid of any real habitat. Nevertheless, we had a few birds share our 175 square feet. A Gray Flycatcher or two dropped in to munch on small insects taken from the low mesquite branches or from the ground. And a small flock of Audubon’s Warblers, with them half a dozen Black-throated Gray Warblers, also spent most of the day cycling through, busily gleaning the twigs and leaves.
The best bird of our day was one that braved the edge of the circle. We’d been watching Lazuli Buntings drink from our water drip, and when I heard a Passerina on the edge of the bosque, I assumed it would be another. In fact it was a Varied Bunting, a female-plumaged bird but readily identified by its curved culmen and dark plumage. With a couple of Blue Grosbeaks dropping in during the day, we scored high in that genus, higher, I suspect, than any other Big Sit this year. It’s always good to be best at something.
Visible migration was otherwise nearly non-existent. A few Violet-green Swallows passed overhead during the warmer parts of the day, and two Western Kingbirds were slightly tardy on their way south. By mid-afternoon, it was pretty clear that while the day was beautiful and the company outstanding, it would take the mother of all mixed flocks to get us anywhere near our 2005 total of 50. But who can complain about a day that brings Crissal Thrasher and Green-tailed Towhee, Pyrrhuloxia and White-crowned Sparrow?
Our final bird came at 4:48 pm. Catalina State Park is notoriously good for raptors, and after Saturday’s stormy winds and dim skies, I’d expected Sunday’s blue heaven to fill with resident and migrant hawks. Not so. More than eleven hours in to the day, we had not had a single falconiform bird–and I was starting to get a little weary of the reports each new Big Sitter brought: a Prairie Falcon on the road in, a pair of Red-tailed Hawks at the park entrance, a family of Harris’s Hawks in the yard when they left home…. Finally, finally, a juvenile Cooper’s Hawk made a clumsy pass at the Mourning Doves gathered in the amaranth, the entire day’s only diurnal raptor and species number 38 for the Big Sit.
We stayed to watch the moon rise and the sun set, and by the time I was packing the car back up for the quick drive home, I was once again bundled up against the desert cold. We’d seen a couple of hundred individual birds of 38 species (39 if the invisible flicker calling in the morning was not, like the one that flew through at noon, a Red-shafted Flicker), enjoyed good company all day long, and most importantly, made a donation to Nature and Culture International equivalent to an acre of tropical deciduous forest in southern Sonora, Mexico.
Just might do this again next year!
Still Space on My Spring Tours
Posted by: | CommentsThere are still a couple of spaces open on both of my spring 2009 WINGS tours. Both are relaxed experiences, staying at a single location, expressly designed not just for birders but for anyone interested in getting to know the natural and cultural landscapes of two of the most fascinating regions I know.
A Winter Week in Arizona is based at a beautiful ranch in the high grasslands of Sonoita, with sparrows and raptors right out the door and easy access to every single one of southeast Arizona’s famous hotspots. Or rather coolspots: the February weather is breathtakingly beautiful, with fine warm days and cripsp pull-up-the-covers nights.
France: Birds and Art in Provence is centered at a fine modern hotel in Arles, the cultural and artistic capital of southern Provence–just minutes away from one of the continent’s most productive birding destinations, the Camargue. We’ll split our time between the marvelous birds and the even more marvelous cultural treasures of a 2,000-year-old landscape, from Roman ruins to nineteenth-century barns and more.
Join us!
Black Redstarts and White Wagtails sing from the roof of ancient Roman temples in Provence.
Barnacle Goose: Vindicated!
Posted by: | CommentsThe latest issue of New Jersey Birds (we old-timers remember it as Records) has a fine review by Jennifer Hanson of the status of Barnacle Goose in that state. It took me back to the Barnacle that spent much of the winter of 2002 in Hamilton’s Veterans Park, a mere hop and a skip from our then-backdoor–and so I was doubly happy to see that record among those accepted. Guess I can really count it now!
