Up San Pedro Volcano

I’m an unabashed Guatemala fan. After three visits, the birding, splendid as it is, is almost incidental; when I think of Guatemala, the images that flood the mind are of people, architecture, landscapes, food–I’m quite simply fond of it all, and the birds are a wonderful bonus.

Hotel Los Pasos, Antigua.

As fond a birder as I am, I am still à fond a birder. And so on this latest visit, happy as I was to get to see Ana and Bitty and Irene and the whole generous gang, I still had a feathered target or two. Pink-headed Warbler fell on that happy morning at Rincon Suizo, and the Prevost’s Ground-Sparrow at Los Andes still brings a smile to my face. But there’s one bird that looms even larger for visitors to Guatemala: The Guan.

With the exception of a few tolerant chachalacas, nearly all the cracids–curassows, guans, and all that lot of strange primitive chickens–are in bad shape. The poster chick of them all, though, is the Horned Guan, a huge and bizarre cracid endemic to southern Mexico and Guatemala’s highlands. Unlike Highland Guan and Crested Guan, both of which we heard commonly (and in the case of Crested Guan, even saw a couple of times), Horned is rare even in Guatemala, and even at the most accessible sites, finding it requires some considerable effort. The vertical red line on this map of San Pedro Volcano pretty much tells the story: you are here, the guans are up there, way, way up there.

We started our morning early, with the drive to San Lucas Toliman, a beautiful and peaceful town on the shores of volcano-ringed Lake Atitlan.

For birders, the half-hour boat ride across the lake inevitably combines sad memories with the experience of the sublime. While there were plenty of American Coots, Laughing Gulls, Lesser Scaup, Ruddy Ducks, and hirundinids to enjoy against the picture-perfect landscape of volcanos and forests, it’s hard not to recall that had we made the trip a long generation earlier, we might have run across the endemic grebe, extinct now for some three decades.

Lugubrious thoughts were put aside as soon as we arrived in San Pedro, a bustling tourist town that serves as the jumping-off point for visits to the volcano above. I was amused to find the local House Sparrows building “natural” nests on the telephone poles in town.

A quick and adventurous twelve minutes later, and our pickup truck dropped us a the San Pedro Volcano visitor center, where we would begin our, ahem, stroll.

The hillside forest was the more beautiful the closer we got to it, and the weather was pleasantly cool. And the reminder at the bottom of the trail to say a prayer seemed just another bit of the local religion’s touching syncretism.

Like a fool, I told myself in my heart as we started up that this notorious trail was nothin’: I do more challenging walks every time I venture into one of southeast Arizona’s Sky Islands. Indeed, the San Pedro trail actually goes downhill from the visitor center, bottoming out beneath a dry cliff filled with White-throated Swifts. It was here, too, that a fantastically big and beautiful Stripe-headed Sparrow popped up in the vegetation–an Aimophila, a lifebird, and a good omen for the rest of our day on San Pedro!