Hooded Oriole

This was the last day of our guided excursions and we spent it at cultural sites in and around the busy and texturally rich city of Oaxaca. It is the land of the Zapotec people who, like so many meso-American cultures, including the neighbouring Mayans and Aztecs, had developed a society of humbling cultural sophistication and wealth; that is until Hernandez Cortez and his armies spread catastrophe across the land, some at the end of a sword and some unwittingly through disease. We spent the morning exploring Monte Alban, the site of an ancient Zapotec ceremonial centre, then later the workshop of a traditional potter. The afternoon took us to San Augustine, a village with such an abundant supply of spring water as to make it unusually lush and green and which at one time supported a (now bankrupt) cotton weaving industry.
Water also attracts bird life and it was in San Augustine that I was suddenly distracted from the guide’s itinerary by a tree full of warblers: Yellow-rumped, Tennessee, Nashville, Townsend’s and Orange-crowned among them. Then the Hooded Oriole came along for an obliging and breathtaking photo-op, behind it was an unidentified hummingbird and a little later a White-throated Thrush and a probable Slate-coloured Solitaire foraged in the dense foliage of an Indian Linden tree.
As we returned to Oaxaca at the end of the day (with me vowing to go back) our guide asked what we’d liked best and notwithstanding some astonishing historical artifacts and exquisite ceramics, my immediate and almost-without-thinking response was “Hooded Oriole”; my undoubted Bird of the Day.