Author: Peter T

We’re staying at the home of a rug weaver and natural dyer in Teotitlan de Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico. As we settled in to our accomodation I was more than a little surprised to see that our host had a copy of the Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America. No field guide this one, it’s 850 pages of all you need to know about the 1070 species you just might run in to. He has a great story to tell how he came to be the proud owner of this marvellous book, the upshot of which is that he was given it as a gesture of thanks for services rendered to a group of itinerant birders. Discovering this resource got us off to a good start. He readily understood where my interests lay and volunteered to take me to a nearby watercourse and reservoir at cockcrow this morning; I quickly accepted.

So this morning he dropped off a small group of us at a pond edge, explained the lay of the land and then left us to explore on our own and walk the kilometer or so back in time for breakfast. It was a perfect arrangement, his only caution to us was to watch out for rattlesnakes.

I ended up going there twice today, morning and late-afternoon, it was so good. The Bird of the Day was easily the Vermillion Flycatcher; there were dozens of them. If they weren’t so splendid, both males and females, I could almost have become quite dismissive and shrugged them off, but they are really cool birds. The male is an eye-popping scarlet and black number while the female is, if anything, even more beautiful in a subtly delicious way. The photos will explain better than I possibly can.

There were many more memorable sightings. In the morning the small bushes along the creek held many Wilson’s Warblers, Aztec Doves and a Black Phoebe. A Northern Mockingbird caught my attention atop a cactus and moments later a strikingly handsome House Finch perched nearby.

A group of White-throated Towhees was scratching for seeds along the dusty farm track on my evening walk. Later a couple of Loggerhead Shrikes, a small group of Greater Kiskadees and a hovering Laughing Falcon made for a great spontaneous birding trip. I even managed to find a quiet place to sit and watch to see what might pop up but the light started to fail, so I headed back. And, by the way, no rattlesnakes.

January 17 2013. Magnificent Frigatebirds must have impressed early sea-goers of all ranks, they’re so masterful soaring in circles along the boundary between land and ocean. Watching them through binoculars I wondered how many lessons in aeronautical design are held in those long-winged proportions, some of mankind’s most frail-looking competitive gliders either did or should owe a lot to the frigatebird.
On our travels today we stopped for lunch at a Pacific beach, Playa Cangrejo. It is perhaps five kilometres long, an arcing bay punctuated at either end by towering rock outcrops. The wind blows so furiously along the shoreline that uncounted years of drifting sand has piled over these terminal-rocks creating massive sandscapes, The sea was furious with white-horses tearing off the wave-tops. In the vernacular of my childhood, white-horses were more rampant dynamic and dangerous than mere whitecaps.
At the shoreline a small group of fishermen was working the close-inshore waters netting fish, usually no more than fingerlings but enough good sized fish to eke out a living. Brown Pelicans and Magnificent Frigatebirds knew a living when they saw it too. They gathered around the fishermen as they hauled the nets in and waited anxiously for whatever was thrown their way. The pelicans stood beside the men while the frigatebirds soared and swooped overhead.
I never tired of trying to capture the classic frigatebird photograph but this one is among the best, showing the mutually workable, if sometimes strained, coexistence of fisherman and birds.

January 18 2013. Today I engaged Eric Antonio Martinez to guide me, to show me the birds of ‘the Isthmus’ this culturally, ecologically and climatically distinct part of Mexico.
It was a blockbuster day with more firsts than I can possibly recount and two Birds of the Day; Rosita’s Bunting and Lesser Ground Cuckoo.
First the setting. It’s mid January and there is a wickedly cold slab of air sitting over the northern part of Mexico, for reasons that I don’t fully understand it is giving rise to an unforgiving and unrelenting gale force blast of wind here in the south. We had to seek canyons and crevices tucked out of the wind to hope to see any birds at all. Where you might normally have expected to see birds of all sizes and shapes picking away in open fields or perched on fence posts, there were none. So we worked the lower edges of a short range of mountains that lie just north of the town of La Ventosa.
The highlights without getting too tedious were: an early Feruginous Pygmy Owl that responded to Eric’s calling, several Doubleday’s Hummingbirds a dark green mite with a long red bill, Ash-throated Flycatchers much like ‘our’ more familiar Great-crested Flycatcher, a Laughing Falcon a stocky accipter-like falcon that specializes in meals of snakes, and several Scissor-tailed Flycatchers. The day’s list actually ran to a bit over 50, some of which were quite familiar like Nashville Warbler, Warbling Vireo and Blue-winged Teal. And then there were the Birds of the Day.
Bird of the Day number one. In a dry scrubby woodland edge we happened upon several Rosita’s Buntings, aka Rose-breasted Bunting. This species is only found here on the slopes of this little mountain range. I have never encountered a bird quite as eye-popping as this, the male’s head, back and wings are a vivid electric blue, bluer than an Eastern Bluebird but maybe matched by the best a Blue Jay has to offer. Its breast and belly though are in evolving shades of tangerine through crimson, the full range of a spectacular sunset. Here’s a couple of pictures, one is pretty blurry but it hardly matters because its the colours that make the bird.

Bird of the Day number two. We set out to find a Lesser Ground Cuckoo, a relative of the Roadrunner; which makes it a potentially curious bird to begin with. They are elusive, secretive, ground hugging birds of dry scrubby woods.  To make up for their evasiveness they have a call like an infuriated screaming and whistle-blowing referee, They’re happy to be heard but just don’t want to be seen. We tried calling for them for a long time and eventually one responded; it was impossible to find it though. Then as we finally turned to walk away I looked across the shallow canyon beside the path and put my binoculars on something a little different; what at first I took to be an American Robin turned out to be bird we sought, the Lesser Ground Cuckoo. It was facing me and had an expression of anxiety emphasized to theatric effect by the most remarkable Cleopatra eyes, the dark round eye itself surrounded by a large teardrop field of blue skin. In the pictures below the bird is partly obscured by foreground clutter, click on them to enlarge the photo and look closely and you’ll get the idea.

January 16 2013. There’s something really unnatural about being propelled from a cold climate to a tropical one all in the space of a handful of hours. Our Ontario day dawned with snow flurries but by lunchtime we were shedding overweight clothes. My winter-dry skin was saying thank you and suddenly there were birds, lots of birds.
We are in Huatalco, a smallish resort on the Pacific coast of Mexico. We are about to set off to explore the ancient and traditional practices and techniques of weaving and dyeing; 8 or 9 days off the beaten tracks with no promises made about comfort or escape from Travellers’ Diarrhoea!
These last 24 hours have produced many new-to-me birds including a few that I had absolutely no expectation of seeing. This afternoon we were on a boat about a kilometer offshore, we’d been to observe the ancient Mixtec practice of extracting a royal-purple dye from the foot of an inter-tidal zone mollusk, and as we made our way home I watched a Peregrine Falcon storm across the wave-tops and seize a Red-necked phalarope  which had hitherto been innocently bobbing the waves with its pals. Magnificent Frigate Birds, an Osprey or two, Black Vultures and even a Common Black Hawk hung around the shore. There were Brown Pelicans sitting patiently on the rocks and occaisionally taking a plunge in pursuit of a meal.

Somehow though the Bird of the Day came just after we’d settled in to our hotel room. I looked out of our window and saw a large flycatcher-like bird atop a dead tree. My first shoot-from-the-hip impression was that it was Great Kiskadee, but I was wrong (it would come later.) A careful examination through my field guides told me I was looking at a Tropical Kingbird which has all the presence and air of ownership that that we commonly see in our more familiar Eastern Kingbird, but its beautiful sulphur yellow breast sets it apart. It turns out that about five Tropical Kingbirds spend quite a bit of time on this perch together with a small group of Rufous–backed Thrushes (very much like an American Robin) and a family of Golden–fronted Woodpeckers.
There are many birds too that I see and fail to identify, or at best can only place it in a family: an oriole, a tanager and so on. It hardly matters though, it’s an embarrassment of avian riches as it is.

January 9 2013.  Hamilton ON. While quite a bit of Canada is perfectly capable of living up to it’s reputation as the place of snow, ice and deep dark cold, here in Southern Ontario winter can be a hit and miss affair.  It’s true that some January days can be numbingly cold, but others, like today, are well, actually quite mild.  Today’s trade off was a buffeting south-west wind which really shouldn’t have made much difference, but it was tough being a duck, they had to seek out a sheltered spot away from the white-caps and spindrift and just sit out the blast.

Knowing that waterfowl should be easy to find I spent an hour or so prowling some quieter corners of the harbour.  The birding was much as expected.  Apart from a curious Muscovy Duck, a South American species often kept around farm yards, there were tons of Mallards, Canada Geese, and Lesser Scaup; a scattering of Red-breasted Mergansers, rafts of loafing Ring-billed Gulls and best of all, my Bird of the Day, half a dozen Redheads.

Redheads and their close cousins, Canvasbacks, positively shine in the winter sun.  They can be told apart at a distance by the shape of their chestnut heads. Redhead’s heads are round and classic duck shape like a Mallard’s, whereas Canvasbacks’ heads are distinctly patrician, they have long sloping foreheads.

While they may look more aristocratic, it hasn’t always been fun being a Canvasback (or Canvas-back as they were once known). The last couple of centuries have been particularly tough. As P.A. Taverner in the 1934 Canada Department on Mines publication,  “Birds of Canada”, put it: “To many sportsmen the Canvas-back ranks first among the ducks and its praises have been sung for generations.” My fragile copy of the 1906 Bird Guide. Water Birds, Game Birds and Birds of Prey, by Chester A. Reed, has this to say about Canvas-back: “…(they) are one of the most persistently hunted birds, for their flesh is much esteemed, and they have a high market value.” 

Volumes have no doubt been written about the rewards, techniques and regulation of sport hunting , but that’s not my field.  I prefer photographs.

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