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.

Discoveries at Cerro El Pital

I just returned from five days in the field at El Pital, El Salvador's highest peak (2,730 m) on the border with Honduras. I was there as part of a team of Salvadoran biologists. Our team was like a mini Noah's Ark, working in the torrential rains of tropical storm Alex, with two mammal specialists, two ornithologists, two botanists, two herpetologists, and two entomologists on board. I doubled as ornithologist and entomologist. One of the botanists doubled as 24/7 stand-up comedian. And despite the weather, we made a number of interesting discoveries. The bird at the top, for example, is a Sedge Wren, a species that until this week had been recorded only once before in El Salvador, without any kind of photo or audio documentation, at a site that doesn't have proper habitat to support the bird. That previous record may have been a misidentification, or at best a record of a vagrant.

This week, however, we found a small, local population of this species in El Pital's highland swampy areas, wet spots with lots of sedges and grasses. We photographed several individuals and recorded songs. We even saw a bird fly off with a fecal sac, and spent some time searching for its nest among the grasses and sedges.

This morning, while Carlos (the other ornithologist) was recording the songs of a couple of Sedge Wrens, a Ruddy Crake suddenly called! That's a bird normally found at much lower elevations (0 - 1500 m, according to Howell & Webb 1995) and as far as I know not previously reported from this site. We found it at 2,400 m! And this isn't even the only 'lowland' species we found here. Other examples include Grayish Saltator (0 - 1500 m, Howell & Webb 1995) and Spot-breasted Oriole (up to 1500 m in Central America, Howell & Webb 1995).

One of Central America's most charismatic birds is the Resplendent Quetzal, in El Salvador only known from two locations: Montecristo and El Pital. When Carlos and I got near the top of El Pital, well above 2,500 m, we found cloud forest that to me looked good for quetzal. So I started whistling one of their calls, and immediately four quetzals - two males and two females - came in! I got several shots of one male, apparently the first quetzal to be photographed at the site in 90 years!

Also at this same location, a bird that I had never seen before but had been reported once in the 90's at this site: Garnet-throated Hummingbird. We found an adult male. Note the quite obvious molt in the inner primaries on this bird.

King Vulture is another uncommon and spectacular Central American species. We saw one on an expedition to a smaller top, to collect orchids.

A surprise find was this immature Peregrine Falcon. The closest known breeding grounds are in northwest Mexico, although the species does winter in fairly decent numbers in Central America, usually near the coast. I suspect that June records for this species are quite rare anywhere in Central America.

This Rufous-collared Sparrow on the other hand is quite common in the highlands of El Pital, and its melancholy whistle could be heard from every yard or hedgerow. This bird ranges from southern Mexico all the way down to the tip of South America.

The iPod, by the way, was again fully operational last night, but we failed to turn up any of the target owl species. The only owl I heard calling faintly in the mist and rain was a Mottled Owl, a bird we didn't even play a tape for.

Our team has one day of rest / data entry / administrative work, before we head out to our next site, called Cerro El Tigre, on the slope of a volcano in eastern El Salvador. This area has been explored even less than El Pital, which means more possibilities for discoveries. You can read all about it here next week.

Cited literature
Howell, Steve N.G. & Webb, Sophie (1995) A Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America, Oxford University Press

White-collared Swift

A short update from Cerro El Pital, the highest peak in El Salvador, where I am this week with a team of biologists from SalvaNATURA documenting the biodiversity of the area.

As I'm writing this, I'm using someone's phone modem to download a critical update to my iPod, which I was hoping to use in the field this evening to play owl calls. The iPod, however, claimed it was empty, and would not play anything. While this download is going on - supposedly for another five hours, on this slow connection - I figured I could post this spectacular photo of a White-collared Swift.

This is not a rare bird in the region, but of course it is rarely seen up close. Someone in our group found it on the ground, apparently incapable of flight. It also appeared to have a leg injury. Since it didn't seem like it was going to survive in the wild, we decided to collect it.

Hopefully the iPod will be operational again tomorrow, and we can try again for owls tomorrow night.

Thursday I will be back in the city and will try to post more photos of this trip. We found some exciting birds here...

Another pulse in Monte Uyuca

As I write this, it's late Friday night, and I've just returned from another bird banding trip to Monte Uyuca in Honduras. Tomorrow morning at 6:15 AM I am expected at the SalvaNATURA office, to start on another assignment here in El Salvador.

Of course there are stories to tell and photos to show, but with such little time at my disposal (laundry to do, batteries to charge, sleep to catch up with), I'm afraid it's just going to be a brief selection of highlights.

The bird at the top is a juvenile Common Bush-tanager. With the rainy season well under way, many birds are either nesting of have just finished nesting. We caught a fair number of hatch year birds from a variety of species.

And, as always at this site, many hummingbirds, although this time practically all were Green-breasted Mountain-gems, like this bird. I think we caught only one or two Azure-crowned Hummingbirds, and zero White-eared Hummingbirds. These last two species were quite abundant as captures only a month ago.

This morning, while walking the net lanes, I found this Mottled Owl.

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.