Mike in the Wild

Encountering another dozen new bird species was exactly what I wanted to do on my single day off the Royal Princess cruise ship in Puerto Vallarta.  Of course I only dreamed that was what the day had in store for me when I booked Alejandro as a birdwatching guide almost two months earlier.  While planning the visit, I had let him know that I was hoping to see some tropical birds in Mexico's interior like trogons, parrots, motmots, and hummingbirds - with only one exception, that's exactly what I accomplished. On the same cruise a year earlier, I had visited the Vallarta Botanical Gardens where I encountered at least sixteen different bird species, eleven of them new-to-me tropical varieties like yellow-winged caciques and San Blas jays.  Only a half-hour drive southwest of the busy port city, the garden showcased a variety of cultivated plants in a mountainous forest preserve bisected by the  rainy season rapids of the Rio Los Horcones.  I was excited to explore...

Ever since my last visit to Mazatlán a year ago, my thoughts were on a tufted jay, an endemic bird found in the Sierra Madre Mountains in Sinaloa and two neighboring Mexican states.  During that trip, the tour guide taking my ship's group to the mountains even saw one from our bus as we took a busy highway out of the bustling port city.  I never witnessed the bird myself, even when we stopped at several towns in rural communities like Concordia and Copala.   On my return to Mazatlán this month, I sought out the assistance of a birding guide to take me around the area in pursuit of the tufted jay and other endemic birds.  Unfortunately no one was available to escort me on the single day that my ship was in port.  However the tour company Birdwatching Mazatlán did offer me advice on where to go birding in the city.  As a result, for only a ten-dollar taxi ride, I found myself in the city's Parque Central, an extensive expanse of landscaped parkland withi...