Guatemala: T for Townsend’s…

… T for Tennessee!

Rarely do the twain meet on their breeding grounds or on migration in the US and Canada; but in lovely wintertime Guatemala, the woods and the coffee plantations crawl, chip, and flutter with massive flocks of warblers, the most abundant of them Tennessee and Townsend’s Warblers. These delightful parulids from east and west, so different in their fashion sense and so confiding on their wintering grounds, were with us always the last ten days of February in Guatemala’s highlands, from the lush hillside forest of Finca El Pilar

to the somewhat drier (and vastly more challenging) slopes of San Pedro Volcano.

It was easy sometimes to look away from the hordes of Townsend’s and Tennessees, seduced by the many more exotic birds we encountered, but even with images of Horned Guan and Pink-headed Warbler seared onto my ornithocortex, all of the most memorable sights of a most memorable trip play out in my mind against a sound track of lisps and chips uttered by the familiar warblers from “back home.”

The lesson they teach is an obvious one to anyone who’s ever really looked at a map of the Americas. Here in the northern reaches of our continent, east is east and west is west, and conjunctions like Black-throated Green Warbler and, say, Hermit Warbler are rare and wondrous. But as the slender waist of Central America narrows, the oceans draw nearer to each other, and the full feathered glory of the vastnesses of Canada and the US mingle with the tropical creatures of birders’ dreams. There really is no east, no west, for “our” birds in the winter, and the unexpected constellations we encountered again and again reminded us just how different our mental atlantes are from the living landscapes they claim to retrace.

I’ll be writing about Guatemala these next few days, with a few pictures, too. Behind the words, behind the images, I’ll be hearing what I hope you can imagine: the incisive tseeps of elegant gray-clad Tennessees and the metallic chips of their colorful western cousins, familiar birds in unfamiliar conjunction, providing the background and the soundtrack to tropical adventure.