Range extension for Arizona Sister

This is Adelpha eulalia, or Arizona Sister, which I found yesterday in Aldea Sicatacare, a small community about 2 km SE of Santa Ana in Dpt. Francisco Morazán, Honduras. Adelpha is a large neotropical genus of brushfoots in which many species have a white band across the wings and an orange subapical patch on the forewing. About a third of all genus members have been reported from Honduras (Miller et al. 2012). This observation, however, represents a first country record and an extension of the known range of Adelpha eulalia, recently split from Adelpha bredowii.

Arizona Sister, an oak-specialist, is found from southwestern USA through Mexico to Guatemala — and apparently also Honduras. It is similar to the allopatric California Sister (Adelpha californica) and the partly sympatric Mexican Sister (Adelpha bredowii), but differs morphologically from those species in a number of ways, including the shape of the orange subapical patch, alignment of the spots in the white postdiscal band, and other minor characters (Prudric et al. 2008).

This year I've already found eleven or twelve new butterfly species for Honduras, and I expect more will follow. For more information on the butterflies of Honduras, please visit my other blog Butterflies of Honduras.

More first records of butterflies for Honduras

Strymon cestri - Tailless Scrub-Hairstreak

A month ago, I wrote on this blog about a first country record for Honduras of Megisto rubricata (Red Satyr), and a few days later about another first Honduran record, of Autochton cincta (Chisos Banded-Skipper).

Since then, I have found five more butterfly species previously unrecorded from Honduras. Some of them appear to be quite common in the area where we live, just a little south of the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa. Miller et al. (2012) note that the lepidopteran fauna of Honduras remains relatively unknown compared to that of neighboring countries; their own Annotated List of the Lepidoptera of Honduras is a major step forward in closing that gap. 

Their list is a compound of results from their own recent collecting expeditions to Pico Bonito in northern Honduras, and historical data gleaned from Godman & Salvin (1879-1901), Monroe et al. (1967a, 1967b) and other sources. 

The hairstreak illustrated above is Strymon cestri, or Tailless Scrub-Hairstreak, found from southeastern Arizona and southern Texas to southern Brazil, and thus expected for Honduras. It appears to be quite common here. This individual was photographed on May 8, 2012 on Cerro de Hula, but I have also seen it in our own backyard.

Leptotes marina - Marine Blue

Another apparently fairly common but previously unreported hairstreak is Leptotes marina, or Marine Blue. It is similar to Leptotes cassius, already known from Honduras and certainly more common here than marina. However, Leptotes marina is by no means rare in our area. My records indicate an extension of the known range, which is from southern California, the Southwest and Mexico to Guatemala. This individual was photographed on May 5, 2012, near the shore of the reservoir La Concepción, just outside Tegucigalpa.

Echinargus isola - Reakirt's Blue

Another blue, Echinargus isola or Reakirt's Blue, was new for Honduras when I photographed it on February 12, 2012, near San Buenaventura, a small village south of Tegucigalpa. It ranges from southern California, the Southwest, and Texas through Mexico and Central America to Costa Rica, and thus was expected for Honduras.

I also documented a couple more new skippers for Honduras. 

Cynea megalops - Lesser Cynea / Megalops Skipper

Cynea megalops, or Lesser Cynea / Megalops Skipper, is found from eastern Mexico to Colombia and western Ecuador, and thus an expected addition to the Honduran list. This individual was found basking in Reserva Biológica Cerro Uyuca on April 22, 2012.

Urbanus evona - Turquoise Longtail

A specimen of Urbanus evona (Turquoise Longtail) was photographed on April 18, 2012, in pine-oak forest near the village of Las Anonas, between Cerro de Hula and Montaña de Isopo. Its known range is from Mexico to Colombia, so again expected to occur in Honduras.

I submitted all these first Honduran records to Butterflies and Moths of North America, where they can be consulted by anyone wishing to investigate range extensions of these species. It seems likely that (many?) more first records for Honduras will follow.

Cited literature

Godman, F.D. & O. Salvin. 1879-1901. Insecta, Lepidoptera-Rhopalocera. Biologia Centrali-Americana.

Miller, J.Y., D.L. Matthews, A.D. Warren, M.A. Solis, D.J. Harvey, P. Gentili-Poole, R. Lehman, T.C. Emmel, C.V. Covell Jr. 2012. An annotated list of the Lepidoptera of Honduras. Insecta Mundi, Center for Systematic Entomology, Gainesville, Florida.

Monroe, R. S., and L. D. Miller. 1967. A report on a collection of Hesperiidae from Honduras.

Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society 21: 243-247.

Monroe, R. S., G. N. Ross, and R. N. Williams. 1967. A report on two recent collections of butterflies

from Honduras. Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society 21: 185-197.

Another new butterfly for Honduras

Hot on the heels of last week's first country record for Honduras of Megisto rubricata (Red Satyr) comes another first for Honduras: Autochton cincta, or Chisos Banded-Skipper. I photographed this individual today on Montaña de Isopo, at an elevation of 1630 m in oak forest with scattered open areas, about 15 km south of Tegucigalpa. The Annotated list of the Lepidoptera of Honduras (Miller et al. 2012) lists five Autochton skippers, but not this one (1). An email to its first author resulted in her confirmation of the identification.

This expands the known range for this species from West Texas (USA) south through Mexico and Guatemala to Honduras (previously thought to occur south to Guatemala and El Salvador only) (2).

Naturally, I submitted my photo to the Butterflies and Moths of North America site, for which I am now the reviewer for Honduras and El Salvador. It appears that the lepidopteran fauna of these countries is still not fully known, and that with a bit of luck, new country records can be found.

As the rainy season progresses here in Honduras, more and more species will be flying. I'll regularly report back on noteworthy butterflies here on the blog. There are of course older butterfly entries on this blog (to find them, simply click on the label "Butterflies" in the list of labels on the right), and I maintain a Butterflies of Central America Facebook page, which you can find - and hopefully like - if you type "Mariposas de Centroamérica" in the Facebook search bar.

References

1. http://centerforsystematicentomology.org/insectamundi/0205Milleretal.pdf

2. http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/species/Autochton-cincta

New butterfly species for Honduras

Last Wednesday I photographed what appears to be a first country record for Honduras of Megisto rubricata, or Red Satyr. This species is known from southwestern USA (central Arizona, central New Mexico, east Texas, and south-central Kansas), Mexico and Guatemala (1). It does not appear on the recently published Annotated List of the Lepidoptera of Honduras (2). Thus my photos indicate an extension of the known range for Red Satyr.

I found this individual on Cerro de Hula, a mountain about 12 km south of the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital. The elevation there is 1630 masl, and I found it on a grassy slope, in farmland with scattered oaks and harvested corn fields.

Its NatureServe Global Status is Secure - Common: widespread and abundant (1). Here in Honduras, at the edge of its range, it is likely uncommon.

In the field, I did not realize the rarity of this observation, and thus did not collect the specimen. The photos, however, appear to be sufficient for identification to species level. 

Photo documentation, while long accepted for verifying rare bird sightings, is just starting to gain acceptance in the entomology community. An ambitious 'new' project, of which I am proud to be a contributor, is Butterflies and Moths of North America (BAMONA). It is somewhat similar to eBird, in that it collects distributional records submitted by professionals and amateurs alike, though a major difference is that each record requires photo documentation, which is then reviewed by a regional expert. 

I know many birders also enjoy butterflying, and I would encourage anyone with an interest in butterfly conservation to photograph the butterfies and moths they see in the field, and to submit their documentation to BAMONA. Your sightings will help expand knowledge of Lepidoptera, and may serve to document range extensions, as in this particular case for Red Satyr.

References

1. http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/species/Megisto-rubricata

2. http://centerforsystematicentomology.org/insectamundi/0205Milleretal.pdf

Cinquera's butterflies

 

Today a couple of butterfly shots from Cinquera, El Salvador, where Roselvy and I went to take a little break from the accident and its tedious aftermath. I did manage to catch the flu the night before we left, so here we are, taking it a little easier still. It's very hot here and the flu has knocked the energy out of me. We've been on a couple of walks in the nearby forest but have not birded or butterflied it quite as thoroughly as we would have liked. We lucked into great and prolonged looks at a Thicket Tinamou walking on the forest floor. This is not a rare bird, but far more often heard than seen.

The butterflies at the top are Guatemalan Kite-swallowtails, common during the rainy season in edge habitat of Central American dry deciduous forests.

Another attractive lep we found yesterday is this Shining-blue Lasaia. Find these and other butterfly photos taken in El Salvador on the Mariposas de El Salvador Facebook page.

An emperor and a fritillary

Doxocopa pavon - Pavon Emperor (male)

Pavon Emperor and Gulf Fritillary, that is. These are not uncommon butterflies in Central America.

In Doxocopa emperors the proboscis (or 'tongue'), here only partially visible, is green.  Pavon Emperors, in the genus Doxocopa, are nymphalid butterflies, a family popularly known as brushfoots. Like all insects, the brushfoots have six legs, but the first pair of legs are greatly reduced in size - and in Doxocopa emperors, green.

Female Pavon Emperors have a wider white band on the undersides of the forewing and hindwing, and an upperwing pattern similar to Adelpha sisters. Only the males have a beautiful purple gloss on the upperwings, some of which is visible in the photo below.

Doxocopa pavon - Pavon Emperor (male)

Gulf Fritillaries are found from the southern United States south through Central and northern South America. They sometimes stray further north.

Agraulis vanillae - Gulf Fritillary

Brushfoots also, their front feet are quite reduced.

Agraulis vanillae - Gulf Fritillary

I photographed both individuals in Suchitoto, El Salvador, last Saturday.

Skippers

My camera may be dead, but I still have a ton of photos from the field trips I went on these past 5 weeks. I found these butterflies, for example, feeding on mud near a small river in the Rio Sapo area, in northeastern El Salvador last week. Click on the photos for close-up views.

It was cloudy and there wasn't much light, but these critters were so busy feeding on the nutrients they find in mud, that they were oblivious to my very close presence. At times the lens was only two or three inches above their heads.

The white skipper is a Common Enops (Polyctor polyctor) which, despite its name, certainly is not common in Mexico, although it may be more common in Central America. I've seen it at other sites in the region.

The pretty blue one is Aztec Bentwing (Cycloglypha thrasibulus), fairly common throughout the region.

The gray skippers are male Dusted Spurwings (Antigonus erosus), and in these photos the brown ones are also males, only older and more worn. The females are all brown, with two small transparent windows in the wings. Rare in southern Texas, it is often abundant in Mexico and Central America. Their flight is fast and erratic, and usually just inches above the ground. It's rare to find this species perched or flying more than one meter or three feet above the ground. It's been my experience that aggregations such as this one often consist largely or even solely of males. I don't know why that is.

Cinquera

Cinquera is a small village near the Cerrón Grande in central El Salvador, not too far from Suchitoto. I was there for a few days to participate in field work documenting biodiversity in a protected area, on the same project I have been writing about in the last few blog entries. After this trip, two more trips remain in this project.

This area is rich in butterflies, especially now in the rainy season. The butterfly above is a male Sinuous Mottlemark.

Here's a Red-spotted Scrub-Hairstreak.

Probably the most exciting find in the avian department was this Ochre-bellied Flycatcher, a species not previously registered in the area.

Fan-tailed Warbler was another cool bird to document in this area. Other notable observations included Nutting's Flycatcher, Bright-rumped Attila, Northern Beardless Tyrannulet, Pacific Screech-Owl, and - numerous - Long-tailed Manakin.

Parque Los Pericos

Yesterday I went on an excursion, organized by Partners In Flight / El Salvador, to an old coffee plantation on the outskirts of San Salvador, called Parque Los Pericos. At this point, it is still no more than that: a former coffee plantation. SalvaNATURA recently signed a contract with the municipality to develop this area into a park where Salvadorans can escape the exhaust fumes and noise of the city, and relax.

I didn't really expect we were going to find any rarities here, within the San Salvador city limits, but we did stumble across one: a female Magnificent Hummingbird, pictured at the top. Regular blog readers will have seen photos of this bird before in these pages, but those photos were all from areas where this bird can be expected: Central American highlands. The normal elevational range for this species is between 1500 - 3000 m. Yesterday we found it below 900 m. What was it doing there? Did it come down from the nearby volcano? Is there some altitudinal migration in this species? Who knows?

Other cool birds seen or heard there included Thicket Tinamou, Masked Tityra, Yellow-olive Flycatcher, Violaceous Trogon, and quite a few Berylline Hummingbirds.

We saw a good number of butterflies too.

This one, for example, is Tegosa guatemalena, or Guatemalan Tegosa.

And this is Mechanitis polymnia, or Confused Tigerwing. This species is often found in coffee plantations.

This skipper is called Urbanus proteus, aka Long-tailed Skipper. Apparently this individual lost one of its long tails. Urbanus skippers are often easy to photograph, because they keep returning to favorite perches. All you need to do is move close to its perch. It'll probably fly away, but if you keep still and don't make any sudden movements, it will come back to the same spot.

All these species are common butterflies here. The most abundant species we saw was Anartia fatima, Banded Peacock. This may well be the most common butterfly in Central America.

The excursion, by the way, was organized by Roselvy, coordinator of PIF/El Salvador, and had as guests two biology students from the local university, Jennifer and Melvin, and me. This park has many park rangers, and a small army of them greeted us as we arrived a little after 7 in the morning. Three went with us in the field. The guy in the middle told us he had seen Masked Tityra in the park, and when we got to the spot where he had seen it, we also saw one there.

Cerrón Grande revisited

Last Saturday, Roselvy and I went to Suchitoto, to bird the Embalse Cerrón Grande. About a month ago, I birded that spot also, and wrote about Snail Kites I saw there.

This time, we saw only a couple of Snail Kites cruising over the water. Of course we saw many of the same species that I had seen there a month ago. Migrants and winter birds are all up north now, so what remains are residents such as Neotropic Cormorant, Northern Jacana, Great, Cattle and Snowy Egret, Black-crowned and Yellow-crowned Night-heron, Black-bellied Whistling-duck, Wood Stork, Crested Caracara, Gray-breasted Martin, Mangrove Swallow, and Ruddy-breasted Seedeater, to name a few.

The bird at the top is a Cattle Egret.

A notable difference between now and a month ago was the number of butterflies around. In May, the rainy season had just started, and it was still a little early for decent numbers of butterflies. Now, we saw many individuals of several species, including these four fresh Guatemalan Kite-Swallowtails. I have seen these also in Mexico and Nicaragua.

A month ago I found a group of Roseate Spoonbills sitting in the trees on one of the 'bird islands'. In the middle of the reservoir is a group of islands, one of which is known locally as the 'isla de los pajaros' (bird island), although several islands here have rookeries that support large numbers of egrets and herons. Even though I didn't find any spoonbill nests back then, I assumed the birds in the trees were part of the rookery and were either breeding there or - I thought more likely - had just finished breeding there. Many spoonbills I saw were in immature plumage. And after all, spoonbills don't feed in trees.

But, as I since learned from local experts, these birds almost certainly did not breed there. The bird populations of those islands are monitored by Salvadoran biologists, and a breeding population of large, pink birds would not have gone unnoticed. Perhaps the birds were scouting the area for future breeding, and will return next year? Or they may simply have been in transit, using the reservoir as a stopover site, and one of the rookeries as a great place for an afternoon nap.

However, since we were there, we thought it prudent to revisit the island and to see if the birds were still in the area.

We paid a local woman to take us (and her daughter, left) out to the islands by boat. From the water, these islands look deceptively similar, and I kept saying "I'm almost sure this is the island where I saw the spoonbills". Eventually we did briefly land on one of the islands to check it out. In what seemed the correct trees on the correct island, we found many Wood Storks, as well as Great Egrets and Black-crowned Night-herons.

But not a trace of Roseate Spoonbills...

Banding in Monte Uyuca

This little ball of feathers is one of many, many hummingbirds we caught this week in Monte Uyuca, Honduras. It's an Azure-crowned Hummingbird, a common pine-oak resident that here in Monte Uyuca, a forest with an exceptionally well-developed middle layer, reaches high densities. This may be one of the plainer species, but the azure crown for which it is named is spectacularly beautiful. Brilliant colors on hummingbirds, however, are a product of refracted light, and are only visible from certain angles. From this angle, it does look rather plain.

The bird has just been processed, and is ready for release. They sometimes wait a little before takeoff. One moment it sits quietly in your hand, the next moment it blasts off full throttle.

This is a female Magnificent Hummingbird, a larger species. In SalvaNATURA's bird monitoring program, we don't band hummingbirds; a special permit is required for that. Thus, processing a hummingbird means determining its age/sex class; measuring its weight and its wing cord; assessing its breeding condition, its molt condition, and fat score; and determining flight feather wear by looking at the four outermost primaries. The tip of the right outermost rectrix (tail feather) is cut, and the bird is released.

We left San Salvador Monday morning and met with Honduran forestry staff at the ICF in Tegucigalpa in the afternoon; Monday late afternoon we arrived at the site. Although not fully recovered from the flu that kept him at home last week, Carlos Zaldaña joined Roselvy and me on this trip. In Montecristo, we had occasional assistance from park rangers. Here in Uyuca, it was just the three of us. We caught so many birds - nearly 200 in 25 hours - that it would have been difficult to do this with a crew of just two (one of whom - me - being less experienced). Especially hummingbirds need to feed constantly and have to be processed quickly. The first day of banding, Tuesday, we caught 103 birds, 70 of which were hummingbirds. Azure-crowned and White-eared Hummingbirds were particularly numerous, as were Green-breasted Mountain-gems, a hummer as beautiful as the name suggests. I did not take many photos on this trip, partly because we were just too busy processing birds and partly because it was overcast and dark most of the time. The top two photos show a few rays of sunlight but we had mostly light rain.

This Anna's Eighty-eight (Diaethria anna), a typical cloud forest denizen, found the collar of my rain coat to be infused with delectable salts and minerals from sweat, and fed on it for quite some time.

It's interesting how this site shows a mix of pine-oak and cloud forest residents. Birds that are primarily associated with cloud forest, like Slate-colored Solitaire and Resplendent Quetzal, mix here with pine-oak birds like White-eared Hummingbird, Olive Warbler, and Crescent-chested Warbler. Birds like Yellowish Flycatcher and Mountain Trogon, typical of transitional zones between pine-oak and cloud forest, are found here also.

Two heliconians and a cattleheart

This magnificent creature is a Heart-spotted Heliconian, or Heliconius hecale. It is found from Mexico to Colombia. I photographed it yesterday afternoon, in the botanical garden of San Salvador.

Heliconians, sometimes called longwings, are part of a subfamily of mainly tropical butterflies, formerly considered a distinct family, but now united with the fritillaries in the subfamily Heliconiinae. Together with fritillaries, crescents, checkerspots, milkweed butterflies, satyrs and many other subfamilies, heliconians belong to the family of so-called brushfoots (Nymphalidae). Like all members in that family, the front pair of legs are greatly reduced and covered with short hairs. In the field, it looks like they only have four instead of six legs, like all other insects.

Here's another shot of the same individual.

Also nectaring there was this heliconian, Acting Heliconian, or Eueides vibilia.

The larvae of most heliconians feed on passion vines, which contain toxic chemicals. This causes the adult butterflies to be unpalatable to predators, such as birds. Note that this particular individual shows some damage in the left forewing. Did a bird peck at it, or did it damage its wing in some other way?

The plant it's feeding on is common in Central America and a favorite among nectaring butterflies.

Cattlehearts are not brushfoots, and are more closely related to swallowtails. This is a Pink-checked Cattleheart, Parides eurimedes, a fairly common Central American species found from Mexico through northern Colombia.

As far as my computer problems are concerned I'm not out of the woods yet, but I am somewhat operational now with a largely empty new hard drive.

Monte Uyuca

Our first outing at our last field site, Monte Uyuca near Tegucigalpa, proved successful today: we found no fewer than four Golden-cheeked Warblers. Three of them were in today's large flock, all three males. It pays to observe plumage details, for today's first goldencheek had no streaks at all on the undertail coverts, while bird number two was distinctive because the black on the breast was considerably less than on the first bird. The third bird finally was seen in close proximity of the other two. All three birds had black throats, black chins and black upperparts - and thus were adult males - but differed subtly from each other in the amount of streaking in various places.

Also exciting was an observation of three Ocellated Quails that Kashmir flushed almost from under his feet. The birds flew a short distance and landed, but could not be found again. As I mentioned in the previous post, this is a species that I had never seen or heard before. This year we're registering it in two different places.

The hummingbird at the top is a common bird in pine-oak forest, and we see it all the time. Today we had an opportunity to photograph it up close and personal. This is a male White-eared Hummingbird.

This spectacular butterfly was another exciting find. It's called Red-lead Fiestamark; this is a male. It's very small, and very beautiful. I had never seen one before.

Today's large flock had no fewer than 66 individuals representing 25 species. Besides Golden-cheeked Warbler, those included Greater Pewee, Blue-headed Vireo, Wilson's Warbler, Crescent-chested Warbler, Townsend's Warbler, Yellow-backed Oriole, Spot-crowned Woodcreeper, Dusky-capped Flycatcher, Hepatic Tanager, Slate-throated Redstart, Olive Warbler, Golden-olive Woodpecker, Hairy Woodpecker, Rufous-browed Peppershrike, Flame-colored Tanager, Black-throated Green Warbler, Hermit Warbler, Yellowish Flycatcher, Northern Flicker, Warbling Vireo, Black-and-white Warbler, Bushy-crested Jay, Steller's Jay, and Brown Creeper.

At one point, the flock broke in two, with orioles, jays and most woodpeckers going one way, while the smaller species went another way. Later, both parts seemed to merge again, forming this rather large mixed flock.

After we were done with the field work this morning, we continued on the same road to look for tomorrow's location. For hundreds of meters, there wasn't a bird to be seen or heard - all had converged into this mega-flock. Then we found a small pocket with some birds about a kilometer away, including an immature male goldencheek. This was around a construction site. Tomorrow we will go to a slightly different area along the same road.

In La Botija

Today a couple of pictures from our third field site, La Botija in southeastern Honduras, near the Nicaraguan border. In fact, the butterflies you see here mating are Nicaraguan Satyrs. They're perched on fallen oak leaves. Broad-leaved oaks are fairly common here, but thin-leaved oaks, beloved by wintering Golden-cheeked Warblers, are quite scarce. In previous years, goldencheeks themselves were fairly scarce around here, although they were found every year.

We didn't find any this morning, when we did our first mixed species flock here. If we're lucky, we'll find one or two at this site.

American Kestrels on the other hand are quite common here.

Recovering from dengue fever

Mexicans are wonderful people. As I was walking by myself in Cardel this morning reflecting on this (and not for the first time either), I was interrupted by someone calling from across the street: “hey John! How are you?” It was Adrian, one of the Hotel Bienvenidos staff. Last Monday, when I left the Hotel count site early, I told him I was feeling sick. Instantly he offered some medication, which I declined. He said he hoped I would at least take a rest and would feel better soon. Well, I did – but not before I felt a whole lot worse first. When I left Cardel heading home for Chichi, all I knew was that I had a fever. Once home, I laid down and from that point forward, my whole existence started to appear tenuous to me. I felt intense misery – but only a dull, unspecific pain just about anywhere in my body – and the strangest thing to me was how time had almost come to a standstill. I kept looking at my watch and checking with my alarm clock to see how this could be: that what to me felt like 10, 15 minutes passing was really only one or two. The afternoon, needless to say, lasted forever. Eventually, my roommates showed up, and they suggested I see a doctor. I said I didn’t know about that, figured that if this wouldn’t go away overnight, we could maybe go and see a doctor the next day. When I collapsed on the tiled floor after a bathroom visit, and I heard them say that I had a really high fever, they decided to call the project’s coordinator, who lives an hour and a half’s drive away, to take me to a hospital. So at 2 AM, Eduardo, Irving and Kasmir accompanied me to the local hospital, where I didn’t have to wait very long and where they gave me an injection to bring down the fever. The diagnosis was probable dengue fever, but it was recommended that I come back the next day for a test. This I didn’t do (for lack of funds), but I have since developed the entire pathology of dengue, including a rash on the third day after the fever finally went down, so their diagnosis appears to have been correct. High fever, headache, diarrea, muscle ache, general fatigue – this screwy time thing probably an artifact of the fever – followed by a rash. This morning waking up I was pleasantly surprised, twice; first when I looked at my alarm clock and noted “wow! 8 whole hours just went by!” and then when I raised my body from my bed and felt how easy that was – “yay! my strength is back!”

Today was a scheduled day off, and feeling so chipper about having left the fever tunnel (back on normal time, able to see depth again), I went to Cardel to pick up my laundry, drop off more laundry, do some internet, and do some grocery shopping.

So I’m standing in line at the grocery checkout, before me is a very large woman blabbering endlessly with her even bigger son, then she engages in a lengthy item-by-item discussion with the coincidentally also large cashier, and I think to myself how back in the 9-to-5 world I would have craned my neck and gauged the length of other lines. Now, however, I mentally coach my precursor to prattle on, for I am listening in on her conversation, trying to learn the language. Mas que nada, this in-depth discussion of various family members’ brand preferences for certain household goods provided a great listening proficiency experience for me.

What about the birds then? Well, the dengue fever had me indoors for a few days, I’ve since then worked two days and then of course the third day is a day off. (I wrote the above a few days ago.) In terms of raptor migration, diversity is probably at its highest right now, with all species we get in a season currently visible. I think the only regular but rare migrant still missing is Red-shouldered Hawk. We’re still getting a few Swallow-tailed Kites, but that will taper off soon, and Mississippi Kites don’t have much longer to go either. Zone-tailed Hawk is probably the only species currently peaking, with daily counts between 5-30 individuals.

This month I’m not traveling as much on my days off for lack of funds, next month on a whole month of salary I’ll have more opportunity. I’m sticking to Chichicaxtle and its environs mostly, where the birding is often quite decent. This morning on my walk I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but noted that numbers of Yellow-breasted Chat have definitely increased. I saw many familiar birds, like the Squirrel Cuckoo pictured above, Ferruginous Pygmy Owls, Altamira Orioles, Blue-gray Gnatcatchers etc.

An interesting butterfly I found was this Pale-spotted Leafwing.

Birding around Chichicaxtle

The bird pictured here is a Roadside Hawk, a common resident species in this part of Mexico. I photographed it this morning on a walk around the block in Chichicaxtle, where me and the other counters on the VRR project are housed. Last year I often went birding on a dirt road just behind the observation tower, but this year I'm finding that there is other, sometimes more interesting birding to be had elsewhere in the vicinity. Today I saw a few birds that I hadn't previously seen in Chichicaxtle, including two species I don't remember ever having seen in Veracruz (although I have seen them elsewhere in Mexico). White-bellied Wren came in calling on a Ferruginous Pygmy Owl imitation, and stayed well-hid in dense vegetation, before I finally got an unsatisfying look of the bird flying away. Plain Chachalaca is a bird that I don't think I saw here last year, but this morning I found a small group. The other bird that was a first for me in Veracruz was Northern Beardless Tyrannulet. Yellow Warblers, Blue-gray Gnatcatchers, Orchard Orioles, and Great Crested Flycatchers were abundant neotropical migrants. Altamira Oriole, Blue-black Grassquit, Common Ground-Dove, Inca Dove, Ferruginous Pygmy Owl, Short-tailed Hawk, Squirrel Cuckoo, Boat-billed Flycatcher and Great Kiskadee are some of the resident birds easily seen here.

The other cool find was another Magic Shrub! Again, I'm no botanist and can't tell you which shrub this is, although I do remember finding another individual here last year that had a Fox-face Lemmark on it. This had Guava Skipper (above) and Beautiful Beamer (below), and about 20 other species, mostly skippers, on it.

Folks at Pronatura had the excellent idea to create a butterfly garden next to the entrance of the Chichicaxtle observation tower. But good ideas aren't always well executed, and the plants they bought and planted are pretty but don't seem to attract any butterflies. In fact, the yellow 'weeds' across the dirt road are probably far more popular with butterflies. For a really good butterfly garden, I suggest they plant the above species - success guaranteed!