Notable sightings in San Salvador

Fan-tailed Warbler, January 15, 2011, San Salvador

Roselvy and I went birding this afternoon in the botanical garden La Laguna, in the San Salvador neighborhood of Antiguo Cuscatlán. Easily accessible by bus, we sometimes go there to still get a little birding in when we don't really have time for trips further afield.

We did great! We found a couple of birds normally encountered in more extensive woodland, one bird that winters on the Atlantic Slope and is rare anywhere in El Salvador, and one bird that is normally found at higher elevations.

Fan-tailed Warbler belongs to the first category. A habitat specialist normally found near ravines, where it hops around on the ground looking for ants, its principal food source.

Orange-billed Nightingale-Thrush January 15, 2011, San Salvador

Orange-billed Nightingale-thrush also falls into that first category. We had no idea this bird can be seen in the city of San Salvador.

Hooded Warbler, January 15, 2011, San Salvador

Hooded Warbler is an Atlantic Slope winter visitor to the region that is rare in El Salvador, situated on the Pacific Slope.

Another surprise was Black-throated Green Warbler, a common winter visitor here at higher elevations in pine-oak, but probably irregular in the city.

Cerro El Tigre

Another installment in the tales of the traveling circus documenting the biodiversity in certain protected areas of El Salvador. Basically the same group of biologists went to Cerro El Tigre, on the slope of Volcán Usulután in eastern El Salvador, for another 5-day expedition executing field work for MARN, the Salvadoran Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, or Ministry of Environmental Affairs.

The bird at the top is a Rufous-and-white Wren, a common species in humid montane forest. I took this photo in the Laguna de Alegría, a small crater, with a lovely little lake in the middle, where we did a day of field work.

There we found some Yellow-faced Grassquits, small finches of open, grassy areas. I saw a female emerge from a clump of grass, and figured there had to be a nest in there. These hatchlings are probably just one or two days old.

This bird, a Striped Cuckoo, was also pretty common in Cerro El Tigre. Usually this species stays well hidden and is far more often heard than seen.

A bird I had never seen before, but again common in this area, is Prevost's Ground-Sparrow. Roselvy joined us on this trip as bird bander, and she and I caught a few of these charismatic birds with big Elvis 70s style sideburns.

Orange-billed Nightingale-Thrush too was common. We heard their pretty little songs constantly, and we caught several individuals.

Unusual sightings included White-breasted Hawk, a bird of pine-oak forests in the north of the country, and previously unreported for the area, and Yellow-backed Oriole, also more commonly found in pine-oak. Worth mentioning too are Greenish Elaenia, Lesser Greenlet, White-throated Thrush, and Bar-winged Oriole.