Birding Near the Port of Mazatlán

Mazatlán is known for its near perfect winter weather and its wide, golden-sand beaches, making it a popular destination for Americans during the cold months. Within sight of its tourist zones, its large commercial port reminds you Mazatlán is also a center of fishing and agriculture for the Mexican state of Sinaloa. In addition, a large brewery and two power plants signal that industry of all varieties fuel the local economy. However I disembarked my cruise ship with a much less lucrative activity in mind: birding.

The ports on Mexico's tropical west coast attract many species of seabirds. Magnificent frigatebirds, brown pelicans, cormorants, brown boobies, and sea gulls are just some of the birds that greet arriving ships in these harbors. From Mazatlán's own port, I boarded a small boat with twenty-five of my Majestic Princess passengers shortly after the cruise ship's arrival. We were setting off to explore the bird life that inhabit the estuary that separates the salt water harbor from freshwater sources inland.

Our guide Polo from King David Tour Company was so so confident we'd see a plethora of birds that he gave each sightseer a checklist with more than fifty birds' names and a pencil to keep a tally. On our late February outing, songbirds wouldn't be as prevalent as shorebirds, Hugo told us, as it wasn't yet the season when they come down from the mountains for breeding.

As our boat chugged across the harbor, passing hundreds of shrimping vessels that were mostly idle at the tail end of their fishing season, mangrove swallows, several types of terns, ospreys, and vultures joined frigatebirds and pelicans flying overhead. A variety of herons and egrets hunted patiently along mud and stone beaches peppered with plastic. Curlews, willets, and other sandpiper species were a challenge to identify compared to several American white ibises which shone brightly in the morning sun.

After passing one of Mazatlán's steaming power plants, the waterway narrowed and the mangrove-filled coastline closed in on us. Before venturing into the encroaching jungle, Polo paused our boat to distribute waters, sodas, or beers to any parched passengers. The break seemed to be a queue for a brown pelican to immediately land on our bow. One, two, three fish, the pelican greedily fed on handouts from Polo's supply in exchange for patiently posing for pictures.

The tight mangrove forest enveloped us as we squeezed by a couple of fisherman in rowboats. A common black hawk calmly observed us motor by while a kingfisher noisily fled from its perch. Three kinds of herons (great blue, little blue, and tri-color) and snowy egrets were easy to spot in their shaded hunting grounds. The dense foliage certainly housed more birds but they'd remain hidden until another visit.

Crested caracaras flew overhead as our boat docked on Stone Island, the land portion of our full-day excursion. A tractor was waiting to pull us on a covered bench-lined trailer through the farm fields that dominate an island that is in reality a peninsula. It borders the south side of Mazatlán Harbor with the estuary on its east and a wide tourist-beckoning Pacific Ocean beach on its west.

The long, dusty ride northwest, to our lunchtime destination Molokay Restaurant on the beach, passed fields that seemed to be part of a plantation growing mangoes. Tropical kingbirds made hunting forays from power lines and trees. However an exciting surprise was the bird life flocking around the fresh water ponds that lined the east side of the route.

Black-necked stilts and American coots were the easiest to pick out by eyesight. However with my telephoto lens I was able to identify a large variety of water fowl wintering in the ponds: gadwalls; green-winged, blue-winged, and cinnamon teals; ruddy ducks; northern shovelers. I also spotted my first ever whistling ducks and jacanas.

At the restaurant, cages held tropical birds as pets, including a lilac-crowned amazon, a parrot endemic to the area's slightly higher elevations. A sugar water feeder attracted another local species, the cinnamon hummingbird. A fellow tour passenger saw at least two oriole varieties in nearby trees. An after-lunch walk along the beautiful Stone Island beach afforded me some good shots of American oystercatchers and ring-billed gulls amid the sun-loving vacationers.

I counted seeing close to forty individual species on our tour, an exciting enough reward for a day's outing. But Polo and King David weren't finished with the adventure. On the short boat ride from Stone Island back to the marina near our cruise ship, Polo retrieved more fish from his cooler for the second act of his pelican show. However instead of one or two hungry birds, more than a dozen magnificent frigatebirds flocked at our bow for their rewards.

One by one, passenger's took turns holding out a dead fish to these large and indeed magnificent sea birds. Never fully sated, they kept coming back for more, like hungry birdwatchers on the lookout to check one last species off their bucket list.