Bird-watching enthusiasts have come out with a handy guide to local birds which I think will be of enormous value to those of us who don’t know a Caracara from a Cowbird.
The new “Quick Guide to the Birds of the Metropolitan Zone of Guadalajara and Chapala” is a six-panel, accordion-folded sheet of sturdy, plasticized cardboard. It shows beautiful, sharp images of 140 birds, with all the waterbirds lumped together on one side. Since I spotted that blue bird in a dry place, I have only to look on the other side, where my eye quickly scans 89 birds, looking for one mostly blue. In an instant, I see only two with a blue body and blue wings. One is a glue grosbeak, which has, as its name suggests, a fat beak, allowing me to determine in only a second that the bird in the tree above me – with a slender beak – must be a blue mockingbird.
This guide is in English, Spanish and Latin, so I immediately know this is what Mexicans call a mulato azul, a beautiful and curious bird unfortunately stuck with the ponderous scientific name of melanotis caerulescens. Later, knowing its name, I can Google this mockingbird and find out about its habit of imitating other birds’ songs.
The Quick Guide was produced by Defenders of Wildlife and Teyeliz, in cooperation with local
birdwatching groups Pájaros en el Alambre, Ecokaban, Birding Guadalajara and Tortilla Con Chile. The latter, by the way, is not a Mexican snack, but the popular name for a bird (sturnella magna) whose call, Tapatios insist, sounds just like the words “tortilla con chile,” and which we less imaginative English speakers call the eastern meadowlark.
“In the past, bird guides were created for the Primavera Forest and Los Colomos Park,” Lizzy Martínez, the founder of Pájaros en el Alambre and one of the authors of the guide, told me during a visit to the excellent exhibit she has set up at Guadalajara’s Paleontology Museum and which runs through the end of October. “I wrote one for Colonia Seattle where I live, but now it seemed like the time had come to have one specifically for Guadalajara. A lot of people cooperated in this effort and out of it came this guide to 140 species, which will be useful whether you are high and dry or in a wetland.”
As a little girl, Martínez said she used to vex her elders by freeing birds from their cages.
“I have always had a special fondness for birds, which led me to study biology at the University of Guadalajara,” she continued. “This is where I learned the first scientific names of the birds that had caught my notice. I started observing birds in Colonia Seattle and then I went to study in Puerto Vallarta where I learned about waterbirds. Later, Molly Hacker and I produced the book of birds in Colonia Seattle.
“Now, I was totally in love with birds and when I started doing bird counts, people said, ‘Why don’t we go out birding more often? Counting birds once a year in the winter isn’t enough – we want more!’ So I helped start Tortilla Con Chile, the group of birdwatchers in the city, and it grew and grew, and now it is huge.”
The Quick Bird Guide costs 150 pesos and will be available at the visitors’ desk of the Museum of Paleontology until the end of October. It is also available from Verónica Rosas in the Department of Ecology at the University of Guadalajara’s CUCBA campus on Highway 15, 7.5 kilometers west of the Periférico. In Ajijic you can purchase it from John Keeling (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).