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Adiós México

Added 7th August 2010

Shortly before our departure from Mexico, we had some firsthand insight into the parlous state of the US health care system. For our anti-malarials needed for Central America - initially about four months supply - we were quoted over $200 for generic tablets in the US. We decided to wait until Mexico to buy them. There was some minor confusion at the small pharmacy that we went to in Chiapas, as they did not know the word “chloroquino”, although they understood that we were asking for anti-malarials. Fortunately Anne had noted down the brand name, Aralen, which they immediately recognised. We walked out of there with more than our four months supply of name-brand, not generic, drugs, for a grand total of about $27. Anyone wonder why the US pharmaceutical behemoths report billion dollar profits?

Mexico was fantastic, and not just because of its super-cheap meds. Extremely friendly and hospitable folks (both locals and ex-pats), spectacular scenery, big forests (still), great contrasts between states and regions, fascinating socioeconomic and geopolitical developments, but of course most of all, superb birding. Ornithological highlights included finding apparently the first ever nest of Bar-winged Oriole in Mexico, and studies of the rare Sinaloa Martin that included getting the first known recordings of its calls and only the third record of the species in Michoacán. We had only about the fourth known field observation of White-fronted Swift. All of these records are the subject of articles that we have in various states of preparation with coauthors for the ornithological literature.

Birding highlights were too many to list, but nearly 600 species was very respectable (especially as we made no effort for waterbirds or seabirds, and almost all North American migrant species were absent at that time of year). Most importantly, we found all but one of our 80+ must-see-in-Mexico targets (yes Robert, that was Bearded Wood Partridge!), and loads of other goodies besides. We certainly don’t expect that kind of success (or luck) to continue, especially as we hit the rainy season in Central America, but on travels of this length and breadth, we can’t always be everywhere at the optimum time-of-year.

So goodbye to Mexico, or more accurately hasta luego, as we will definitely be back in the future. We have to see Bearded Wood Partridge, after all.....

Giant Wrens, Dwarf Jays, and very small security guards!

Added 30 July 2010

Since leaving Oaxaca City we have been through many places and climates, and so can only give only some of the highlights (and lowlights) of the past three weeks.

Just twenty or so kilometres above Oaxaca City, we had a couple of great nights in the cold and grey of the cloudforest of Cerro San Felipe, famed site for Dwarf Jay, a species that Jon had missed here on a brief visit in 2006. He got great looks at a pair on our second evening after considerable scrambling up and down forested mountain slopes, and then the final morning we had a super-cooperative family group with a mixed flock that finished up just next to the track a short stroll from our campsite. It is always particularly satisfying to track down something that had been previously missed, and this tiny dark blue jay with a sky blue throat was a real cracker.

A few days later we were on the Chiapas coast at Puerto Arista, where finally we encountered some genuinely hot and humid weather for the first time in Mexico (bear in mind that after years in interior California, Australia, Spain and elsewhere, our threshold for hot weather is very high, so all those other 35 centigrade days didn’t count!). We searched for several hours in the afternoon at some traditional sites (that seemed now to have been largely cleared of good vegetation) for the much-wanted Giant Wren but to no avail, and decided to retreat to a cold shower and even colder beverages at a camping area that we had seen just a block from the beachfront, leaving another go for the wrens until early morning. We’d only just finished setting up camp when a strange call near the vehicle was tracked down to.....a pair of Giant Wrens! Murphy’s Law being what it is, there was a pair nesting in the coconut palm about 20 metres from our camp site. Anne muttered some comment to the effect that we could have been sat in the shade with a gin-and-tonic in one hand and binoculars in the other watching them all afternoon, rather than slogging around in hot and sticky scrub. My response about birding karma, the more suffering you have, the more luck you have, didn’t go down too well.

Giant Wren living up to its name - yes, those are ripening coconuts it's perched near, giving a sense of scale! Their nest was a huge bundle of sticks in the top of this palm tree.

In the cool mountains of Chiapas at the famous El Sumidero Canyon reserve just outside Tuxtla Gutierrez, the staff seemed to feel guilty that camping wasn’t permitted, so they let us camp at the entrance gate for free. We gave the overnight security guard (about four-foot-ten tall, with a three-foot sawn-off shotgun) a beer to keep him sweet, which went down very well. He proceeded to show us the staff showers, which of course we made great use of, and first thing next morning he let us through the gate over an hour-and-a-half before official opening time. It always pays to keep an ice cold beer in the fridge while travelling, you never know when it may come in handy!

Along the Ocosingo Road near San Cristobal, we had just found the beautiful Pink-headed Warbler when we encountered the first birders we have seen in the field in over three months in Mexico, Joachim and Tessa, young Belgians travelling in the south for a month. After all enjoying the warbler, Jon showed them the Blue-throated Motmot that we had found at dawn right by our forest campsite, then we returned to our rig for a celebratory cuppa, exchanged information and stories, then parted ways.

Lagos de Montebello, near the Guatemalan border, turned out to be our one major disappointment of the trip thus far. We were very much looking forward to birding this mid-elevation region known to hold a number of species restricted to Chiapas and western Guatemala. Upon our arrival, however, we discovered all of the accessible forest had been cleared. We had read about ongoing deforestation in the area, but figured surely there would still be some good patches worth birding. Perhaps we could have sought some out, but the addition of massive crowds of Mexican tourists visiting the lakes made it very unappealing and we decided to move on.

We took the Guatemala border road around toward Bonampak, which held eight military checkpoints between the Lagos and Palenque. A few of these were manned by the elite Marines of the Mexican military, about which Jon had just been reading, as they had been recently formed under the Calderon administration specifically for drug interdiction. The Mexico-Guatemala border is (in)famously one of the most porous in the World, but the Marines had little interest in us, other than the usual fascination with our camper, and how the fridge and stove and electrics all fit so well into such a seemingly small space.

The Mayan ruins of Bonampak, set in superb mature rainforest. The first morning we walked most of the 9km into the site, birding along the way. On our second morning, we circumvented the shuttle bus system by paying a local a healthy tip (an extra 10 pesos, less than a dollar) to get us to the ruins before official opening time, hence the photo with no people in it!

After setting up camp at Bonampak, we were sitting having a cuppa and waiting for the sun to abate prior to an evening walk when we saw two familiar figures looking for somewhere to pitch a tent - Tessa and Joachim. We birded that evening and the whole of the next day with them, which was enjoyed by all. We ended up staying three nights there to enjoy the superb lowland rainforest birding and the picturesque Mayan ruins (that lack the crowds typical of the larger, more accessible ruins).

You know you're in the tropics when...the insects are bigger than some of the birds! Not a small beetle (above) with Joachim's hand for comparison, and an equally large butterfly, with the tip of Jon's index finger just visible below.

While briefly birding some lowland marshland in Campeche, the unexpected highlight was Black Howler Monkey. We had heard these in the forest, especially at Bonampak, but seeing them in the mature forest was tricky. Here we found a pair feeding on date palms by the side of a minor road at the edge of some (very rare) remnant sea level tropical forest.

Female Black Howler Monkey devouring the fruits of a date palm.

From the lowlands of Chiapas and Campeche, we headed north for a quick foray to Yucatan in search of the only two endemic species that we missed during our brief visit to the area last February. We needed to stop for a night on our way to the birding sites, so we opted to try a place just outside Campeche about which we had read some odd things. It turned out to basically be a very upscale country club that for reasons that are unclear (but greatly appreciated) happens to have an RV park built into its grounds. Needless to say, we jumped at the opportunity to enjoy the gorgeous seaside pool and cool breeze and were pleasantly surprised that it is essentially deserted except on weekends.

As you would expect, it all went downhill from there as we endured our first bad day of trip, and the bad part didn’t even start until late afternoon. The first mistake was the classic one of deciding to take a shortcut to the birding site. The road looked good on the map, and it would save us about 100 kilometers. But the final painful 30 kilometers were riddled with the worst potholes we’ve probably experienced anywhere (in the World, not just Mexico!) and took us almost two hours to get through. The general mood didn’t improve when we arrived in the town near the birding site just before dark to discover the place was plagued with swarms of vicious mosquitoes (not to mention the heat and humidity)! Fortunately, things improved greatly when we found many Yucatan Wrens just a little way out of town first thing the following morning, which Jon was able to record quite well. The key missing local endemic, Yucatan Nightjar, was tracked down that night when we camped at the Mayan ruins of Uxmal.

Now we’re back chilling at the Club Nautico before a few days more birding in southern Quintana Roo before crossing into Belize.

Jon with a wonderful mob of inquisitive (and constantly moving) kids at one of our many campsites. They asked about everything that was in our cab, including the tool box, which rapidly developed into a game of determining their heights using the tape measure.

Lilac-crowned Parrot in the Sierra Madre del Sur mountains of southern Oaxaca, one from a superb flock of well over 100 individuals.

Hummingbirds and rain: Guerrero to Oaxaca...via several other states.

Added 4th July 2010 (election day in Mexico!)

Our time since our last update in Zihuatenejo (Guerrero) has taken us through many habitats and from one coast to another, with lots of wandering in the middle. We started with a superb ten-day traverse of the remote Sierra de Atoyac in Guerrero, which does not appear to have been done before by western birders. It took three-plus solid days of searching, but we finally found a Short-crested Coquette (a tiny hummer, found only in a very small part of Guerrero state). The other key species in this area - White-tailed Hummer, White-throated Jay, and Slate-Blue Seedeater - were a piece of cake by comparison. We had loads of other good birds, an excellent 14 species of hummers, etc., plus we got through alive which is always a bonus. It’s the only part of Mexico we've been to (so far) that has armed guards on the Coke delivery lorries. But everyone we spoke to was super-friendly and we were invited in for coffee (even though we don't drink it) in a couple of places. You can't refuse when the coffee was literally picked off a bush outside the back door of the shack, and Anne was especially happy to take advantage of the excuse to enjoy a delicious cup of coffee!

Chestnut-capped Brushfinch, Sierra de Atoyac, Guerrero. 13 June 2010.

After the sierra, we did a bit of backing-and-forthing in the central volcanic belt, tracking down some good species at several somewhat widely dispersed sites. First, we stopped off at Volcán de Toluca in hopes of finding Strickland’s Woodpecker for Anne (Jon had seen it on a previous trip to central Mexico). Although we didn’t find the woodpecker, we camped at 3200m, and we met Mexico’s friendliest dog, Haisi, who slept all night under our truck and accompanied us on our morning walk.

We were hiking in the thin air at nearly 4000m on Volcan de Toluca when Jon sat down for a rest. Haisi had adopted us for the day and came and sat right next to him. If we had a bigger rig, we may have taken her with us!

Then it was off to Tacámbaro, in interior Michoacán, for the virtually unknown White-fronted Swift. Despite a lot of heavy rain over our three-day stay there, Jon had only the fourth ever reported field observation of this species. Although Anne enjoyed reading and staying dry in the camper, she did venture out enough to get excellent views of the many other swifts coming into the waterfall, including White-naped, Black, and Chesnut-collared.

Laguna Cuitzeo was our next stop for Black-polled Yellowthroat. Despite being a more developed area than many we have been to, the local Pemex petrol station staff were very kind and let us camp for free in their parking lot, and cleaned up the more-or-less abandoned bathroom especially for us to be able to take a shower.

We were fortunate to have good weather here and managed to find several displaying male yellowthroats fairly quickly on our morning visit. As a result, we decided to head to Teotihuacan (just north of Mexico City) for the night, and a token morning of duding (non-birding)! Anne spent several hours the next morning at the famous ruins, which was the largest pre-Columbian city in the Americas and include the largest pre-Columbian pyramids in Mexico.

Then on east to Xalapa, Veracruz. Jon had corresponded via the internet with a local transplant US birder Robert Straub who now runs Mexico’s only birding store (www.aveoptica.com). Long story short, we spent several days in the Xalapa area, and like our time at Rancho Primavera with Bonnie and Pat, this was a real highlight of our Latin American travels so far. Robert was wonderfully hospitable, gave us loads of good local bird info, we enjoyed a superb Italian meal with him in downtown Xalapa, and he even loaned us his sensational hot shower! (As you may have noticed, showering has become an exciting event in our lives - you value things so much more when they only come along every week or two.)

The spectacular Volcan Pico de Orizaba, the highest of Mexico's many volcanoes. We enjoyed this superb view during a celebratory breakfast from our campsite near Amatlan after a great hour or so watching and recording the fabulous Sumichrast's Wren.

After Xalapa we had a super time with the sensational Sumichrast's Wren (great recordings!) and other species at Amatlan, near Cordoba, and then moved down to Los Tuxtlas on the southern Veracruz coast. Due to spin off from the hurricane passing through the Gulf we got a bit washed out there. Fortunately, our first (dry) afternoon we had found the three endemic birds of the region. The birding there seemed great but no matter how many times we went up into the hills we got washed out (we were camping lower down where the weather was less solidly wet). We finally abandoned after a few days, and went south to Uxpanapa, a remote area of limestone karst country on the border between Veracruz and Oaxaca - what a great area. Loads of good birds, and better weather. More great recordings, this time of Nava's Wren, a very close relative of Sumichrasts’s. We found a great campsite by the fast-flowing rio Alegre, with nice forest patches and a troupe of Central American Spider Monkeys, complete with tiny baby hanging off mum.

Then down to Tehuantepec in far south-easternmost Oaxaca state, where after much more overnight rain the hurricane-related system finally broke, and that morning we had good thorn forest birding, where Sumichrast's Sparrow was new for Anne. Then we decided to head up to the Oaxaca valley where the weather has been remarkably good, dry, largely sunny, but surprisingly mild (cooler than in Sept 06 when Jon was last here). 

Getting up to Oaxaca city proved a little easier said than done. About 40km west of Tehuantepec at the village of Santa Maria Jalapa de Marquez all the traffic was blocked in both directions on the main road. The main road junction was blocked by vehicles, folks on the road, and a temporary shelter had been built over the whole thing. Chatting to a local it transpired that the local teachers had gone on strike complaining about pay, and their tactic was to seal off the main artery between the capital (Oaxaca City) and the main port near Tehuantepec. Apparently this happens nearly annually, usually at this time (near the end of the school year). Typically it lasts for a few hours or a day or two, and we were told things sometimes get pretty fractious (e.g., cars set on fire). Jon was last in Oaxaca in late 2006 when there were major problems in downtown related to discontent with the federal government by Oaxacan separatists, so it felt like business as usual in this turbulent state!

Anyway, for a couple of bucks we hired the informative local to jump in with us and guide us off the paved road and through the maze of dirt and overgrown tracks to get around the blockade and onto the highway on the other side. With the recent rains, this route proved passable only with a good 4WD through narrow thorn forest tracks, so all the cars and lorries were completely stuck until the demonstration was over. We thought we were done for when the “special” route was blocked by a taxi that had tried the same trick and got bogged in deep sand, but our chap found an alternative, and after a delay of less than half an hour we were free and on our way up to Oaxaca City. We never found out how long the demo lasted, but we certainly saved ourselves many frustrating hours. (A couple of days later there was a similar strike on a major city intersection in Oaxaca itself, but we were on foot running errands then so it didn’t affect us at all. Welcome to Oaxaca.)

We have found a great place to organise all of Jon’s recordings, get to the email backlog, clean our rig a little, watch World Cup matches, and plan the next couple of months, in a campground in San Felipe on the outskirts of Oaxaca City, which is very cheap and has superfast free wifi - the perfect combination for us! The owner (an ex-pat Yank) has his own mezcal business, making for some interesting tastings too. Hard to believe we've been on the road for well over two months already. The pace has slowed a little, having hit the rainy part of the rainy season, but finding the birds has still gone extremely well, and we've only missed one (of nearly one hundred) target species. Our Mexico trip list since late April stands at a respectable 439 species, with a remarkable 112 new. We’ll bird around Oaxaca and chill at San Felipe on/off for the next week or so.

Nayarit to Michoacán, western Mexico

Added 4th June 2010 

After leaving our private RV park on the southern Sinaloa coast, we had a nice stop at La Bajada, south of San Blas. It is an excellent, though small, patch of relatively low elevation hilly forest. We were woken pre-dawn by a man singing beautifully at the top of his lungs as he rode by our camper on his horse, presumably on his way up the mountain to work. The highlight may have been finding a Collared Forest Falcon nest and getting great views of both the male and female.

Final proof that there are indeed exceptions to every rule?!

We then continued our excellent luck meeting wonderful folks by dropping in on their property. It may be impossible to outdo the hospitality of our friends Nick and Jemima at Mount Henry near Sydney, Australia, but Pat and her daughter Bonnie of Ranchos Primavera and Santa Monica (near El Tuito, just south of Puerto Vallarta) were unbelievably welcoming and generous. Jon knew of the ranchos as the only site other than the Durango Highway colony where Sinaloa Martins have been regularly seen in recent years. After asking directions from several locals, we finally found our way to the rancho and dropped in completely unannounced, not sure what to expect. Before we knew it, we were treated to freshly squeezed lemonade (with ice!), handed limited edition “Rancho Primavera” t-shirts and had an offer to stay as long as we’d like! In the end, we spent four lovely nights there, with Jon spending most of his time staking out the main pond recording details of martin visits, with a few seen daily, up to eight one day. We also found time to do some general birding and among many other things were treated to two pairs of unusually conspicuous Rosy Thrush-Tanagers dueting in the forest subcanopy….so much for this being a skulking understory species.

It was extremely tough to leave the ranchos, but we tore ourselves away and pushed further inland. We were fortunate to finally track down some Mexican Parrotlets (see photos below) en route to the twin volcanoes of Nevado de Colima and Volcán de Colima where we had four superb days of birding. Our main camp on the east flank of the Nevado de Colima was in gorgeous near-primary mixed forest at 2450m, and although we had some long walks we ended up finding all our target birds within a few hundred metres of camp! We didn’t see another soul in four days, and yet again it was tough to move on.

Volcan de Colima from just below our main birding camp. The volcano has minor eruptions of fine ash material about every 15-20 minutes and there are daily (usually minor) earthquakes.

So back to the west coast to make our way along the surprisingly rugged, remote and beautiful Michoacán coast and then on to Zihuatenejo, where we are currently enjoying a few days restocking for our next inland mountain bash in the Sierra Madre del Sur of Guerrero.  

Mexican Parrotlets (above and below), Puerto Los Mazos #10, near Autlan, Jalisco, 25th May 2010. This adorable little parrot (note size compared to leaf!) is declining - and hence getting tougher to see - probably largely due to trapping for the bird trade. These members of a flock of at least 12 were wolfing down figs, as the one below ably demonstrates, which is their specialty.

Colima Pygmy Owl (above), Rancho Primavera, near El Tuito, Jalisco, 23rd May 2010. Some pygmy owls, especially at the height of  the breeding season, can be found out in the open singing away in broad daylight, and this species seems to do this especially frequently.

Purplish-backed Jay, Pantitlan Road, KM285.2 Durango Highway, Sinaloa, 14th May 2010.

On the road again - different continent!

Added 15th May 2010

We are in a large, and thankfully utterly deserted, RV park near Teacapan, on the Mexican Pacific coast of far southern Sinaloa between Mazatlan and Tepic. All the gringos left in March or April. It is rather surreal to have the entire place to ourselves, and hard to imagine it teeming with retirement age Yanks and Canadians wandering around in their speedos and sarongs just a couple of months ago.

We’ve been birding solidly for three weeks, and this provides a great first break with life’s essentials that have been sorely missed for the last week or so - showers, laundry, and free wifi! Quite why they keep the place open between April and October is beyond us, but we are very grateful that they do. Of course the birding doesn’t stop. Our first Mangrove Swallow was drinking out of the swimming pool, a covey of Elegant Quail wandered by our camp yesterday evening, and multiple species of tern and booby are drifting up and down the beach.

How did we get here? We spent early January catching up with the last of Australia’s endemic birds. Yes, we managed to see them all (except Night Parrot of course) including all the rumoured future splits, thanks to the information shared with the great network of friends and colleagues that we amassed in our two years based there.

We bounced back and forth between Australia and California a couple of times between then and April seeing friends and family on one side of the Pacific or other, while organising our next travels. Sadly we parted ways with our sensational Troopcarrier, which was completely problem-free for over a year, and which despite having 49,700km added in ten months, we were able to sell for only $500 less than we paid for her. At least she went to a good home, and now resides in the perhaps-not-coincidentally-named town of Penguin, Tasmania.

After organising a great new rig (see photos below) for getting into - and being able to sleep at - the remote birding sites of Latin America, we set off in mid April. After covering some familiar (to Jon) territory in NW Mexico, which allowed us to ease back into New World birding, we headed across to the north-east before the start of the local rainy season in June. Here we successfully caught up with all the key NE Mexico endemic birds before heading back west.

On our third day (near Chihuahua) we got our first offer of drugs, and on our fourth day got pulled over by crooked cops near Saltillo looking for a bribe - welcome to Mexico! Things have been almost uneventful since then by comparison. Yesterday afternoon outside the supermercado in Escuinalpa we did have to break up a no-holds-barred fist fight next to the truck between the young chap supposedly keeping an eye on it and the town drunk - we couldn’t get the fruit in the fridge until they moved!

We have already had significant birding time in half-a-dozen Mexican states, and despite having birded a fair bit in Mexico previously are accumulating lifers at a fierce pace (Jon has 49 already), hitting every single one of our target birds - clearly our superb good fortune from Oz continues. We’ve had especially good success with the tricky night birds (owls and nightjars) and with the often-difficult gamebirds (quails etc.), which bodes well.

singing male Worthen's Sparrow, 28 April 2010, near Tanque, Coahuila, Mexico

We spent nearly the whole of the last week on the Durango highway, starting very high up east of El Salto recording songs of Sierra Madre Sparrows (new for Anne), then a couple of days in Tufted Jay and Sinaloa Martin country, before descending through the thorn forest country, and wrapping up with Purplish-backed Jay just before reaching the coast yesterday.

Adult female Sierra Madre Sparrow, 9 May 2010, El Ojo de Agua Del Cazador, Durango

Male (above) and female (below) Sinaloa Martin, 12 May 2010, KM211 Durango Highway, Sinaloa

Top highlight among many already was an eye-level, perfectly sunlit view of a pair of huge, stunningly coloured Military Macaws at about 15 metres from a viewpoint on the La Pataca road off the Durango Highway. We had unexpected luck with this rapidly declining species, with 20-30 in various places up and down the highway. Unfortunately it is not hard to see why they are so popular for the cagebird trade when they look as spectacular as they do.

Our great new rig has been dubbed “Trocky” in deference to the local drug barons whose large gleaming 4WDs are colloquially known as trockotas del año (literally trucks of the year) as they always have the very latest model. It is always suspicious to pass through tiny villages of wooden shacks and see multiple Cadillac Escalades parked alongside the dirt road. We keep our heads down and drive on through. Anyway, Trocky has been well tested already on some very steep and rocky tracks, and is performing immaculately.

Next up the San Blas area, and we’ll bird our way south through Nayarit, Jalisco and Colima.

Our rig for Central and South America

Added 17th April 2010

Below are a few images of the truck + camper set-up we have put together for our travels through Latin America. We went with the pop-up camper for low-profile and light weight, and had to have the 4X4 truck to get to the remote birding sites we want to visit. It is surprisingly luxurious and spacious inside, at least for us, having spent ten months tent camping in Australia! We have a queen bed, hot and cold water, a sink and stove, even an outdoor shower - we must be getting soft.