Sunday morning was chilly and dark when Robert picked Tamie and me up at our hotel, but the reward for early rising was the sight of sunrise over Xalapa, with forested Macuiltepetl rising up out of the heart of the city.

By the time we reached the oak and pine forests of La Joya, it had started to mist and my teva-clad toes had started to tingle, but our walk through the woods produced a few birds in spite of the weather, among them Slate-throated Whitestart, Cassin’s Vireo, Hermit Warbler, Spot-crowned Woodcreeper, and Brown Creeper, for a truly odd mixture. A couple of male Red Crossbills paused briefly for scope views; their deep voices and long, slender bills should make them identifiable to “type” once I find time to consult the AMNH crossbills page.

Not far away is the dramatic canyon landscape of Las Minas–or so I’m told. The fog was so dense and the mist so heavy by the time we got up there that we could barely see the side of the road; but that turned out to be enough. An undistinguished looking overgrown field gave us a score of Striped Sparrows and a small flock of Audubon’s Warblers and Chipping Sparrows; it was here, too, that we saw our only Vermilion Flycatchers and a lone Cassin’s Kingbird, huddled against the cold.

The landscape was dazzling in the dim light and rain, romantic and mysterious like the paramo or the prairie in winter. We continued into an area of scattered pines with dense undergrowth, and as we sorted through a flock of Hermit and Townsend’s Warblers and tried to gather resolve enough to get out of the car, Robert gave a shout: Red Warbler! It was in sight for only a moment, but there’s no mistaking that handsome creature with its silver cheeks. The experience was enough to get us out into the rain, but we didn’t run across the flock again, and so continued, down to the low point of the road and up, up, up the other side past slopes flowing with water and draped with lush greenery.

We were far past the point where any bus would have had to surrender to the acuteness of the turns, and stopped at a patch of flowers to look for hummingbirds. A male White-eared Hummingbird was a nice sight, and I had my best looks ever at Gray-breasted Wood-Wren while others sang from the impenetrable foliage. And then, again, a flash of bright color, and another Red Warbler moved in to work the shrubs, occasionally turning to face us head on, those glinting cheek patches ever so slightly puffed out, like fallen stars. Two in a day, of a bird I’d never expected to see in my life.

We looked at our watches and discovered that if we hastened back down the mountain, we’d have time to look quickly at Xalapa’s Parque Natura, a large preserve literally across the street from the conference hotel and one of the best sites around for the endemic Hooded Yellowthroat. We didn’t find any yellowthroats on our quick visit, but it was a delightful place to end a too-short visit to Xalapa.

It was warm (especially compared to Las Minas, some 2,500 feet higher) and fairly busy on a Sunday afternoon, but even without many birds, this large park offered some beautiful sights. Orchids grow out of the trees:

And some downright baroque insects creep around, waiting to be admired, if not necessarily identified:

I’m generally happy just to have seen most invertebrates, but occasionally there are those that I feel driven to attach a name too, like this incredibly frilly caterpillar:

What on earth is it? It was most decidedly and frantically alive, by the way, in spite of its grotesque squashed-on-the-sidewalk appearance.

Another look at our watches and it was time: we stopped by Robert’s store, then tried and failed to return the rental car (Kangarou rentals in Xalapa was quite trusting), and then it was off to the bus station for our ride to Veracruz for the night–again, downright luxurious, cheap, and with more legroom than any number of first-class airplane seats.  A short night, a short taxi ride, and on to Houston, thence to Tucson, and now a year to look forward to returning to Veracruz in autumn.

Saturday 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!

Continental 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!