Jeffrey A. Gordon

It occurred to me one day during my recent trip to Mexico that I was taking a lot of pictures of red things, often with green and white as background or accents. Hmmm, I thought, I should get a good shot of Mexico’s flag–it would make a nice introduction to a blog post featuring those colors. Well, that kind of went by the boards, so here is a shot someone else took of Mexico’s flag, or in this case, flags.

Banderas by Fabián Everardo Alvarez Navarro (fabalv on flickr.com) Used under a Creative Commons license.

There is one creature that so closely approximates the national colors that Mexicans call it pajaro bandera, literally, “flag bird.”

We happened upon this male Mountain Trogon on our way up to Alta Cima, a tiny village tucked in a shallow lip between the mountains of El Cielo. Mountain Trogons are endemic to Mexico and northern Central America, so their color scheme is especially appropriate. It’s only a little different, really, than that of the Elegant Trogon, which ranges farther north and farther south, but even though Elegants are, um, elegant, I always find Mountains to be just a little more crisp. Maybe it’s the neat white blocks on the tips of the undertail–they’re as stylish as a linen handkerchief in a suit pocket.

When we reached Alta Cima, lunch was waiting at La Fé, the small but attractive restaurant and craft gallery in town. The appetizer–grilled cactus pads with onions and tomatoes–repeated the national colors.

After lunch, a short walk through town took us to past a number of striking Erythrina trees, commonly called coral bean. Again, I was seeing a scene featuring the red and green, with the silvery-gray bark standing in for the white.

Here’s a close up of an inflorescence. 

Coral beans do produce seeds that are glossy, bright red, and hard–they even get made into jewelry, some of which was on offer at La Fé.

Lastly, I’m going to stretch my theme a little here to include redbud, which really ought to be called pinkbud. In any event, it was blooming like crazy on the hillsides above town, a good two months before we’ll see it in the mountains of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Redbud is an example of a glacial relic–plants of more northerly origin that advanced south into the  tropics as the glaciers advanced, but were able to retain a foothold at higher elevations once the ice sheets retreated. So at El Cielo, us gringoes are constantly seeing old friends from home growing leaf to stem with plants of a decidedly tropical nature.

I don’t pretend to know any significance to this motif of red, white, and green that seemed to surface again and again during our visit to Alta Cima, other than that I noticed and enjoyed it. Has anyone heard of a study attempting to correlate environmental colors with flag colors?

Tags: cactus, coralbean, erythrina, flags, mexico, nopales, redbud, trogons

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