“What is Christmas like in Mexico?” I was recently asked by a friend who had just moved here from the United States.

While the media is filled with chatter about futbol and béisbol, there is another sport dear to the heart of many Tapatios, which rarely ever makes news: pigeon racing.

Would you like to escape from urban noise, fumes and blight for an hour or so and commune with nature in the middle of nowhere?

Last Thursday it was my pleasure to tag along with Jim Cook and Jim Boles on the latest adventure of the Fearless Hacienda Hunters of Ajijic.

Last month it was birds and now it’s bees. Guadalajara’s Museum of Paleontology continues its fine tradition of hosting fascinating exhibits which may not have much to do with dinosaur bones, but excel at making natural science interesting and understandable to the average person.

Three of Great Britain’s top experts on tarantulas – Andrew Smith, Stuart Longhorn and Guy Tansley – recently paid a visit to the Ecological Center of Pinar de la Venta, where naturalist Rodrigo Orozco is raising 6,000 tarantulas in captivity with an aim to ending poaching of these spiders in Mexico.