Southeastern Arizona spoils me in many ways. A good July day here can produce 13 or 14 species of hummingbird, not quite up to Ecuadorean standards but not that much worse, either.

The most active feeders in Guatemala seem to produce only 8 or 10 species at a time. But what species! Uncommon Arizona “specialties” like Magnificent, White-eared, and Berylline Hummingbirds occur in swarms at highland sites such as El Pilar, Los Andes, and Cabanas Suizas; and they’re joined by truly exotic wonders such as Azure-crowned and Blue-tailed Hummingbirds and the two big ones, Violet and Rufous Sabrewing.

Among the commonest highland species, Azure-crowned Hummingbird is also one of the snazziest. Just when you decide that it’s a drab little creature, one manages to catch the light just right–putting to shame the garish spangles of this White-eared!

I have to admit that I tended to ignore the Magnificent Hummingbirds, looking past them for the less familiar; but who can look away from a male in good light? (The female Magnificent at left is no slacker, either, even with White-eared and Berylline to compete with.)

Here in Arizona, Magnificent is the second-largest trochilid, coming only after Blue-throated. But in Guatemala, it’s the sabrewings that dwarf everything else. Violet Sabrewing is relatively uncommon, and incredibly flighty, rarely lingering long at the feeders, which it probes with its scimitar-like bill before darting off, big white tail tips aflash. Rufous Sabrewing, however, is very common, very conspicuous, and relatively confiding.

They aren’t so trusting, though, as to turn their back on the observer; but all that means is that there are plenty of opportunities to admire the beautiful pattern of the outer tail feathers.

North of the Mexican border, most hummingbirds have fairly undistinguished tails, at best marked with white spots. Rufous Sabrewing, however, has a complex pattern of bright buffy tips with a dusky subterminal band–much more attractive than the picture reveals.

Of all the hummingbirds we saw, I learned most from the Beryllines and the Blue-taileds. Berylline is an abundant hummingbird in the highlands, but I was having a hard time reconciling my impressions of the bird from west Mexico and Arizona with what I was seeing in Guatemala: the southern birds seemed so much more glittery, with much more colorful bellies and, often, less obvious brown in the wing; they were also more conspicuously booted, more than once making me think I must be on a Blue-tail. If I’d just reviewed Howell and Webb a little more thoroughly, I might have remembered that the Beryllines south of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec differ in just those ways from northern birds, and can reasonably be considered a distinct species, Deville’s Hummingbird.

That realization prepared me for the outstandingly good views we enjoyed of Blue-tailed Hummingbirds at Los Andes. I’d seen the species before, but never as well or as easily as there; this is a stunning (and apparently unphotographable) bird, even flashier than Berylline, with a deep steel-blue tail setting off its purplish rump. I could have spent all day watching them, but there was more to be seen….

The stereotype is that birders live for novelty: if it’s not new, it’s not worth looking at. But then why was I so excited to learn that we’d be paying several visits to Finca El Pilar? I’d been there a number of times on earlier visits to Guatemala, and the hours spent birding there this year simply confirmed its status for me as one of the most pleasant birding places in the country.

We left lovely Antigua early, and our nimble bus took us up to where the forest opened up and blue skies greeted our first birding morning. The volcanoes welcomed us, too, with the occasional puff of an eruption.

Sights like that, and the constant memento mori of Antigua’s many earthquake-shattered ruins, should have worried us, I suppose, but vaguely alarming seismic activity just seems like part of the Guatemala experience, and I sort of enjoyed the thrill of it all as we watched Eastern Bluebirds, Rufous-collared Thrushes, and natty little Black-headed Siskins before entering the forest.

The woods were alive with birds, familiar and tropical alike, from the omnipresent Townsend’s and Tennessee Warblers to Red-faced Warblers and Slate-throated Redstarts.

This is a lousy photo, even worse than I thought it would turn out to be, but it does show how strikingly yellow this individual was on the underparts; all the others I saw this visit were the usual red-orange, but this bird was a lovely reminder that we were nearing the range of the yellowstarts.

Possibly the most significant sighting up top at El Pilar was of a “Solitary” Vireo with a poorly defined head pattern; here in Arizona, I’d have called it Cassin’s Vireo with no hesitation, but none of us had long enough or close enough views to rule out the possibility that the bird was merely an ill-marked Blue-headed Vireo, of which several others were in evidence.

Reluctantly we headed into the forest and downhill, taking advantage of the beautifully constructed boardwalks and cleated steps that made even these steep slopes easily manageable.

Along the way we enjoyed the “usual” birds: vocal but invisible Singing Quail (like five-pound wrens that had just drunk triple espressos), Pacific Parakeet, Golden-olive Woodpecker, wonderful little Tufted Flycatchers, Black-capped Swallow, Bushy-crested Jay, Brown-backed Solitaire, and on and on. Butterflies were good, too, drawn to the water that channels down the canyon to fill the ponds and swimming pool at the finca headquarters.

Awaiting us at the bottom of the trail were the famous hummingbird feeders, with Violet and Rufous Sabrewings and White-eared, Azure-crowned, and Berylline Hummingbirds; we’d seen a few Green-throated Mountain-gems on our walk, too. But perhaps just as important to hungry hikers was what else we encountered.

Breakfast, elegantly served ‘neath the new pavilion. And a few hours later we returned for an equally elegant evening meal, this time accompanied by a series of tableaux vivants, frames and all.

How I longed to get them to break character; never did.

… 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.