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.

About to go

When Kashmir and I traveled down to El Salvador almost a month ago, we anticipated spending little time in El Salvador before heading out to Honduras and Costa Rica, in search of Golden-cheeked Warblers. This study, now in its fourth year, is carried out in five Central American countries: Mexico (Chiapas), Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. A sixth country - Costa Rica - lies outside the species' known wintering range, although recent records suggest that it may winter there in small numbers. We were going to investigate that.

But we're still in El Salvador, and though we've seen many cool birds, we have yet to see our first Golden-cheeked Warbler this winter.

The main reason for our delay has been lack of funds. The study is funded, but on a reimbursement principle. To put several crews into the field requires a sizable working capital, which our client in today's global financial crisis does not have. At one point, there was even talk of postponing all field work on this project to next winter.

However, we are now almost ready to go to Honduras and do a 5 or 6 week field season there. We're hoping to resolve several smaller bottlenecks today so we can leave for Honduras either today or tomorrow. Field work in Costa Rica has been postponed to next winter.

Meanwhile, we've been guests on SalvaNATURA's bird monitoring project, and assisted with vegetation sampling on a Scarlet Macaw reintroduction program. Here are some snapshots from these activities.

Here's Karla, project coordinator on SalvaNATURA's Scarlet Macaw reintroduction program, interviewing an elder about various animals, including Scarlet Macaw, that he may have seen in his youth. He remembered seeing Scarlet Macaws in the 1940's in southwestern El Salvador, where Karla is conducting the interviews. In the foreground a video camera, which I operated that morning. Other work Kashmir and I helped out with on this ambitious project was collecting vegetation data on potential food supply trees in El Imposible.

We also spent a bunch of time banding birds, in a small forest near a coffee plantation in the Santa Ana area, and also at a higher elevation in Los Andes, a part of Parque Nacional Los Volcanes.

Here's a close-up of a Rufous-and-white Wren.

I banded this Slate-throated Redstart. This species, incidentally, is also found in pine-oak forest and is a regular flock member of mixed flocks that also include Golden-cheeked Warblers.

In Los Andes, a good portion of the birds we caught were hummingbirds. This is a male Green-throated Mountain-gem.

This magnificent hummingbird is a Magnificent Hummingbird.

The last bird I removed from a net yesterday was this Rufous Sabrewing, a lifer for me.

I wish to express heartfelt thanks to various SalvaNATURA staff (especially Lety, Carlos, Roselvy, Vicky, Ricardo, Karla and Robin) for providing us with the opportunity to assist them on their projects. We learned a lot from all of them, and the time spent waiting for our own project to start was not wasted.