Los Farallones

Los Farallones

Yesterday, Roselvy and I took our friend Dan Germer on a boat trip to a group of rocky islets in the Gulf of Fonseca called Los Farallones. Our objective was to find breeding Bridled Terns, and who knows what else pelagic. These rocks are about 10 km from the Cosiguïna Peninsula of Nicaragua, and about 10 km from Meanguera, an island that belongs to El Salvador. We left from Amapala, a Honduran island at about 25 km distance. Yes, the small Gulf of Fonseca is littered with volcanic islands and peninsulas from all three countries. Most authorities now accept that Los Farallones belong to Nicaragua, although the (Honduran) harbor master of Amapala was of the opinion that those rocks really belong to all three countries. It matters little to the birds that breed there, and ultimately — I'm not really a lister — not that much to me either. I was excited to see these birds no matter what nationality they possess.

Bridled Terns (and a Brown Booby)

The Bridled Tern colony on Los Farallones was first described by my friend Oliver Komar (Komar & Rodríguez 1996), who encountered an estimated 600 breeding pairs in 1993. Nineteen years later, this colony still exists, although my impression was of fewer individuals. 

Bridled Terns

As we circled the islands, it was difficult to get an accurate sense of how many Bridled Terns were there, but we estimated about 600 individuals, or 300 pairs. There may be a fairly wide margin of error in this estimate.

breeding Bridled Terns - note chick on right

We found at least one chick, and many apparently incubating birds. Komar and Rodríguez reported 8 chicks in early August of 1993, so the breeding season there appears to be July/August.

Blue-footed Boobies and a Brown Pelican

We saw five other species on the island: Blue-footed Booby (estimated 30, possibly more); Brown Booby (estimated 60, possibly also a low estimate); 300 Magnificent Frigatebirds; 80 Brown Pelicans; and 15 Gray-breasted Martins. A Least Storm-Petrel was seen darting away from the islands just as we approached.

Blue-footed Booby with a USFW band on its left leg

One of the Blue-footed Boobies was banded. Blue-footed Booby, a relatively recent addition to the Honduran list, now appears to be regular in the Gulf of Fonseca, as well as off the coast of El Salvador. Jenner et al. (2007) listed the species as unknown but expected from the Honduran part of the Gulf of Fonseca, and indeed eBird shows several recent records for the area.

Adult male Brown Booby

Unlike Atlantic Brown Boobies, adult male eastern Pacific Brown Boobies have a beautiful frosty-pale head around the face.

Note: a trip to Los Farallones needs to be planned beforehand; you can't just show up there and ask a fisherman to take you to 'those rocks out there'. If traveling from the Honduran side, a permit can be obtained from the harbor master in Amapala. Bring your passport and enough money to buy gasoline. From Amapala, the roundtrip is about 50 km. We spent about 80 USD in gasoline (which included the boatsman's fee) plus 12 USD for the permit.

Cited literature:

Jenner, T., O. Komar & A. Narish. 2007. Noteworthy bird records from the Gulf of Fonseca, Honduras. Cotinga 28: 13—20.

Komar, O. & W. Rodríguez. 1996. A Major Bridled Tern (Sterna anaethetus) Colony in the Gulf of Fonseca, Nicaragua. Colonial Waterbirds Vol. 19, Nr. 2: 264—267. 

Playa Las Hojas

I’m back in El Salvador for a couple of weeks. I’m here volunteering to assist principal investigator Oliver Komar with data processing of the Golden-cheeked Warbler data that I and others collected on the wintering grounds in Central America these past three winters.

In other words, office time. These days I don’t spend as much time in an office environment as I used to, but two weeks is totally fine for me. Plus, I get to do more birding in El Salvador in between.

Like yesterday, when Oliver, his wife Lorena and his daughter Yvonne and myself went to Playa Las Hojas, an estuary near the airport. Other SalvaNatura staff members Roselvy, Oscar and Lety joined us, to look for a rare gull photographed at this location two weeks earlier.

The gull was a dark-mantled, yellow-legged gull, most likely a Yellow-footed Gull. I saw photos of this bird a couple of weeks ago, and was keen on seeing it in the wild.

Well, we found a large concentration of shorebirds, herons, terns and gulls – Laughing Gulls – but no larger gull species among them.

Black-necked Stilts were quite numerous at this site. I think we saw more than a hundred. This bird came close enough for a photo.

Probably the most interesting sightings were of several single sulids, one of which appeared briefly – and barely – within the range of my camera. These photos are so heavily cropped that you can almost count the individual pixels, but all the same I think it should be possible to determine the species based on these photos. Shall we? (Please click on the photos for larger views.)

Let’s first determine the age of the bird, and review the possibilities. The bird in this photo appears to be an immature bird, although we should probably include adult Blue-footed Booby as a possibility. That’s a bird whose adult plumage isn’t as clean-cut as that of the other sulids. However, we can eliminate it on the basis of the dark head: an adult bluefoot would have a whitish head. Our bird has a mostly dark head, with mostly dark underwings but lighter underwing coverts. The tail on our bird is light, and there seems to be a bit of a light collar visible on the neck.

Brown Booby is a candidate, but it can be eliminated on the basis of the upperside: both adult and immature Brown Boobies have all-dark uppersides, including dark tails. Masked Booby can be eliminated on the tail pattern; it has a light rump but a dark tail. Our bird has a light tail. Red-footed Booby, another candidate, has all-dark underwing coverts, which our bird does not show.

Overall, the bird that fits much better is immature Blue-footed Booby. It is a large sulid, often seen from land. It has a mostly dark underwing, with light underwing coverts. It has a pale tail.

We saw three individuals in total, the other two even further away than this one. We were unable to identify them in the field, but the other two may have been the same species.

Coapilla

We’ve arrived at our last field site here in Chiapas for the current Golden-cheeked Warbler field season, this time a little further from ‘home base’ Moxviquil. We got here yesterday [see note below] by bus and taxi, altogether maybe three and half hours of traveling from San Cristóbal.

Coapilla is a small town, smaller even than Teopisca. It’s got one hotel that’s still partly under construction, and a few smaller outfits – posadas – that are essentially mom and pop operations. Not wanting to stay at a noisy construction site, we are now at “Rossy”, one of those smaller outfits, which appears to be run not so much by mom or pop but by the daughter, who cheerfully multitasks cooking duties with cleaning, laundry, dishes and various other tasks, while her relatives sit around watching TV or chatting. Pobrecita! I’m sure these relatives have nothing but the best of intentions for her. For example, almost right away, an enquiry was made into the marital status of the gringo. Technically not a gringo – although being European practically amounts to same thing – and certainly not independently wealthy, I am hardly worth their attention.

Bueno. The birding here certainly is good, as two life birds, a goldencheek and a surprise find all testify. Which lifers? Well, White-throated Swift, which was actually a bit overdue given the amount of time I have now spent birding the region. I don’t think this is a particularly rare species, it’s just that I had never seen one. Today we saw a group of four. The other lifer was Gray-collared Becard, a bird I didn’t expect to see here and in fact knew so little about, that when I saw it – and I saw it well – I didn’t even know what it was. Some kind of becard, was all I could come up with. The only becard I know well is Rose-throated, but this bird – a male – was much paler than that, a little smaller also, and had a lot of white on the wings, and a gray tail with a white edge and sides. This bird is nowhere common in its range, which comprises three geographically separated populations: in western Mexico, eastern Mexico, and Central America. There was a female Rose-throated Becard around as well. A little bigger and with a completely rufous tail, it wasn’t a female Gray-collared.

Regular readers of this blog have seen several posted Blue-throated Motmot photos by now, another bird that is supposed to be uncommon. We’ve encountered it now at three different sites and I wonder if it is really so uncommon here. It’s not a bird we actively search for, but occasionally stumble upon. I have never heard one vocalize, I usually just see it sitting quietly in a tree somewhere. They have a tranquil beauty and presence all of their own, and even without tail streamers they are still my favorite motmot (photo top).

Birds we see more often and hear practically all the time at most of our Chiapas field sites are Mountain Trogons.

The understory in the forest that we surveyed today had lots of flowers, and consequently lots of hummingbirds. This is a Ruby-throated Hummingbird.

Pelicans of course are common birds in pine-oak forests, often seen nimbly catching insects hidden away in needle clusters… No, wait a minute – that seems wrong.

This Brown Pelican was about the last bird I expected to see here, but there it was! I don’t think I’d ever seen one away from salt water. Maybe this bird – a young ‘un – got lost and found itself high in the mountains of Chiapas, looking for a place to fish. It circled for 10 minutes over La Laguna Verde, the local pond that serves as a centro ecoturístico, before it decided the pond was too small and moved on.

We saw birds there that fish on smaller prey, like these Least Grebes.

The goldencheek we found while scouting for future locations, after we had already described the first flock here. We’ll probably return there sometime in the days ahead, though not tomorrow. Tomorrow a local forestry official will take us to a part of the reserve that is a little too far to walk, but which apparently also has the Golden-cheeked Warbler among the members of its bird community.

Other warblers of note that we have seen here this first day are a Magnolia Warbler (generally more common at lower elevations), already three Black-throated Green Warblers (maybe more common here?) and a couple of Nashville Warblers, a rather uncommon species at the sites around San Cristóbal.

Note: we didn’t find any internet here in Coapilla the first few days, so it may take a while for these posts to appear on the blog.