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...

Pacific Parakeets

Today a picture of two Pacific Parakeets, a species that roosts in large numbers near to where I'm currently staying, in Antiguo Cuscatlán, a neighborhood of San Salvador. Every evening, these birds gather here in the hundreds to roost in eucalyptus trees surrounding a baseball field.

With careful scanning, it is possible to find a few Red-throated Parakeets among them, like the bird center left.

Fleeper

This week I'm in San Salvador, and every morning I do what millions across the globe do: I commute to an office. Not having done this for close to five years, it feels a little strange. Each morning, I hop on a bus and ride it to work. What kind of work? This week I've been writing up 6 years of bird banding data collected on a hummingbird. All will be neatly compiled into a peer-reviewed science paper that will likely be a major source of information on that particular species of hummingbird for some time to come. The hummingbird is called Green-throated Mountain-gem.

On my commute, I get off the bus at the national stadium, which has a little swimming pool attached to it. The swimming pool is patronized by a couple of swimming clubs.

One of them is called "Fleeper"!

As a kid in the seventies, I grew up watching reruns of Flipper, the intrepid, hyper-intelligent dolphin that solved crimes humans could never solve. Flipper was my hero, and probably fostered in me an interest in nature, as I'm sure Flipper did in millions of other kids. Evidently, the members of this Salvadoran swimming club have similar fond memories of the bravery and charm of the beloved mammal. They remember his name, but they just don't remember exactly how it is spelled. Hence, an orthographic rendition that literally spells out the Spanish inflection: Fleeper. Gotta love it!

Also amusing to me: I'm standing in front of the cheese section at my local supermarket, and a sales girl comes up to me to offer me a sample of Gouda cheese. Instantly, my mind's eye registers a flashback to the Dutch city of Gouda and its market square. I passed through Gouda almost daily back in... ooh, let me see now, a long time ago. Probably sometime in the mid-nineties. I was doing field work on four species of shorebirds (waders, as they are called in Europe) in an area roughly between Gouda and Rotterdam. So I'm munching on the cheese, surprised at how good it is, and I ask her, smiling: "Do you know where Gouda is?" Without so much as batting an eyelash, she says: "Costa Rica."

And - lo and behold! - close inspection of the packaging at home reveals that this rather delectable piece of 'Gouda' cheese was indeed hecho en Costa Rica! Food purists will protest that this cannot be anything like the real thing, and that 'he has been away too long' to remember what real Gouda cheese tastes like. Meanwhile, I am enjoying this inexpensive Costa Rican product as a more than satisfactory alternative...

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.

Banding in Montecristo

I just returned from a great 5-day bird banding trip to Parque Nacional Montecristo, in the northwestern mountains of El Salvador. I assisted one of SalvaNatura's bird monitoring staff, Roselvy Juárez, filling in for another SalvaNatura bird bander, Carlos Zaldaña, who was sick this week. The site consists of cloud forest at higher levels, and pine-oak forest at lower levels. SalvaNatura has been monitoring bird populations here for a number of years with two field stations, one in the cloud forest and one in pine-oak.

The first couple of days we worked in the cloud forest, where birds like the above Spotted Nightingale-Thrush are common. We caught a bunch of these beautiful but otherwise rather elusive birds.

Other very cool birds we caught in the cloud forest included Scaled Antpitta, Black Thrush, Tawny-throated Leaftosser, White-faced Quail-Dove, Blue-throated Motmot, Grey-breasted Wood-Wren, Slate-colored Solitaire (quite a few), Common Bush-tanager, and Golden-browed Warbler (several), among others.

Wednesday morning I briefly tried for Cocoa Woodcreeper, a species that was recently found at the site as a first record for El Salvador. Oliver Komar, who found the bird with Álvaro Moisés a few months ago, told me where they heard it. This was about a 20-minute walk from the banding station. I went out there knowing I'd have to be incredibly lucky to find it in very little available time and without playing a tape for it. I didn't see or hear that bird.

A bird that I am very familiar with but had never seen up close was this Rufous-browed Peppershrike. It's a bit of a generalist. We caught this individual in the pine-oak forest, but I've also heard it in scrubby edge-habitat in Cuscatlancingo for example, a suburb of San Salvador. Peppershrikes are very large vireos that feed on insects as well as fruit. They sometimes associate with mixed warbler flocks, and briefly become flock members, before continuing on their own. It's not uncommon in Montecristo, though it's only been captured a handful of times there. Last week we caught two individuals.

Here another familiar Central American pine-oak resident, Bushy-crested Jay. This bird too is common at the site but usually stays higher in the canopy, and is not frequently caught in the mistnets. Having seen groups of Bushy-crested Jays at practically every field site for the Golden-cheeked Warbler winter monitoring project I've worked on, I was really excited to find one in one of our nets. As I extracted it, I learned what incredible strength it has in its feet and bill. "This," as I said to Roselvy, "is a bird with personality."

Here I am holding it after I banded it. Note the raised crest of this excited bird. It pecked a little at my hand and also tried to remove the band I had just put on its right leg.

Obviously the neotropical migrants that winter here are all gone, so we only caught residents. This is a young Ochre-bellied Flycatcher, a bird that ranges from SE Mexico all the way to Ecuador and Brazil.

Magnificent Hummingbird. This is an adult male. Click on the photo for more detail. Aren't those colors fantastic?

One of the last and most exciting captures this week was this Olivaceous Woodcreeper, a very small woodcreeper that is not known from any other site in El Salvador and is not at all common in Montecristo. This was only the second time for this species to be caught in the bird monitoring program here.

After we released it, it landed in a tree nearby.

Tomorrow morning, I'm off to Honduras, for another banding trip, this time at Monte Uyuca. This site also happens to be one of the Golden-cheeked Warbler sites, and in late January and early February I was there also, first to collect GCWA data, and then to assist with bird monitoring. This time of year there won't be any goldencheeks there, obviously, but there will be a bunch of really cool birds and butterflies for sure. More about that next time...