It’s a desert, or at least a dry habitat, right? The plain in the foreground, anyhow–who knows what the climate is like in the mountains? But the tall, spiky yucca plants at front right tell you, just as surely as would a saguaro or a Joshua tree (itself a Yucca) that this is a dry place. Palm trees, especially coconut palms, serve the same function for moist tropical locales. So use #1 for Spanish Dagger, Yucca treculeana, is for framing establishing shots of deserts and near-deserts.

OK, on to use #2: imposing raptor perch.

Especially when they are in bloom, Spanish daggers provide irresistible lookouts for raptors like this White-tailed Hawk. Not only do they offer desirable panoramas over the surrounding country, they’re just cool-looking, the hard green spikes set off by soft cream flowers. They make a statement about the bird atop them. Even a mockingbird seems a little more fierce and regal perched on a yucca.

Which brings us to use #3: wild cash crop.

In mid-February, you’ll see scenes like this all over Northeast Mexico. People harvest Spanish Dagger blooms to sell to those who want to enjoy this traditional wild food, but don’t want to risk the spines and the climbing themselves. The flowers are added raw to salads, or cooked or pickled. They are said to vary in palatability, with some plants producing bitter blooms, others mild. I don’t know if the vendors at this stand warranted their produce against bitterness or not.

Eating yucca flowers is still popular enough that Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge had a sign posted in their visitor center warning that cutting the blooms is illegal and encouraging anyone witnessing such activity to report it to the staff. Those Aplomado Falcons need places to sit, you know!

If you’d like to know a little more about this plant, its uses, and the ecology of some of the critters that depend on it, check out this post by Ro Wauer on The Nature Writers of Texas blog.

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?

A large, rapidly rotating disc-shaped object floats in the sky over a remote mountainous area know for sightings of UFOs. I want to believe–how about you?

Well, the truth, as they say, is out there: below is the same scene, photographed with a flash and with the camera set to macro:

OK, it’s not proof of extraterrestrial life, but it’s an awfully cool bug, nonetheless. It’s a Guava Skipper. In the first photo, I disabled the flash and the camera focussed on the mountains outside the window on which the skipper was resting. In the second shot, I fixed the focus and used flash. You can see the reflection of the skipper in the window just below its wings.

Guava Skipper is a species that regularly visits South Texas, always getting oohs and ahhs from those lucky enough to see it. It may not be quite as exciting as a close encounter of the third kind, but it’ll do.

Around 11 AM, we boarded a small boat and began a cruise down the Rio Frio. Here are my feet, comfortably propped up on the bow, with the river and the mountains in the background.

We were ostensibly seeking waterbirds, but many of the highlights were landbirds that inhabit the riparian forest. The Lineated Woodpecker below was a case in point.

The red malar stripe on the lower face marks this as a male.

Also spectacular were Blue-crowned Motmots, large terrestrial relatives of kingfishers. Look at that maraschino eye, those racket tails. Damn, that’s a bird!

And we did actually see a few waterbirds, chief among them Boat-billed Herons, whose impossibly broad bills are specially adapted to seizing crabs and other crustaceans. They also have huge eyes, useful for seeing in the dark.

Speaking of eating crustaceans, this is what was awaiting us when we got back to the dock–a lunch of freshly caught langostinos, a huge crayfish that is probably better called a freshwater lobster. It’s nearly as delicious, too, as my friend and co-leader Roy Rodriguez, can attest.

So yeah, it was a tough day at the office. NOT!

We’ve been seeing a lot of each other recently and I have to say, I’m more than a little smitten.

I love the way you combine the transcendent with the ordinary.

I love the way you keep your secrets, revealing them so slowly.

I love the warmth and dignity of your people.

And of course, I love the marvelous array of life you hold in your big, strong, gentle hands.

Will you be mine?

Love,

Jeff

Pretty simple this time–just a ribbon of Roseate Spoonbills floating across a cloudless Mexican sky. Be sure to check out other Skywatch Friday posts from around the world.

OK, it’s no Painted Bunting, I admit, but it is a globally rare, interesting bird. But it’s not especially colorful. Neither is its habitat, at least in winter.

Downslope a little, things are bit more chromatic, but still dominated by dark greens, browns, and yellows.

The town itself is fairly somber, though some of the doors and walls are painted in rich hues. That turns out to be only the tiniest hint of what lies behind them–Teotitlán del Valle is famous for its color and is in fact fairly bursting with it.

Here’s the kitchen at Tlamanalli, a restaurant owned by the Mendoza family. Abigail Mendoza Ruiz and her sisters serve delicious Zapotecan food–the meal we has there was easily my favorite of the tour. The flavors were as bright as the tile work.

But it was after lunch that the real visual feast began. We walked uphill a couple of blocks to Mendoza home, entering the courtyard.

The Mendoza’s other business, as if being restauranteurs wasn’t enough, is rug-making. Here’s a small selection of their work:

Here, Abigail displays an especially fine rug:

It takes months of work to produce a piece like this. Even simpler rugs take weeks. Working with her sister, Marcelinea, Abigail acquainted us with a little of the process.

First the raw wool must be carded, a process that involves running it back and forth between what looks like two large dog brushes. Then the carded wool is spun. Abigail makes it look almost as natural as a spider spinning her web and it’s nearly as miraculous. Then the yarn is dyed to give it those fabulous colors. Dyes are made from a variety of natural materials, but certainly one of the most interesting is the carmine that comes from cochineal, scale insects that infest cacti.

Above, Abigail grinds the dried insect bodies using a stone matate. Below, the matate, along with cochineal both whole and ground:

The powder is added to a giant copper kettle, along with lemon, alum, and other ingredients that influence the shade of red produced and help fix the color.

Marcelinea (blue braid) stirs the dye while Abigail (red) interprets. Below, a look inside the cauldron–the ramen-looking stuff is the yarn.

Abigail hoists the now-red yarn for all to see.

Yes, this was a tourist exercise, without doubt. But as someone who has made a career of natural history interpretation and ecotourism, I can assure you that the Mendozas are amazingly good at at what they do. They make their customers feel truly welcome and share their work with an enthusiasm and conviction that I don’t believe can be faked. The proof, after all, is in the (corn) pudding, as well as in the weaving.

I didn’t manage to get any photos of the looms and the actual weaving process. Suffice it to say that it’s unimaginable to me how people can lay yarn on in such a way as to produce these intricate patterns. We couldn’t stop admiring–and buying–these gorgeous textiles.

Our afternoon with the Mendozas was a wonderful interlude. Rather than feeling like an interruption of our birding trip, it felt like a natural and welcome deepening of it. I wouldn’t trade the time we spent there. Or with that Oaxaca Sparrow.

PS: We weren’t the first to be impressed by Abigail Mendoza’s ability to demonstrate traditional lifeways. Here’s a Culinary Institute of America video podcast of Abigail preparing Mole Negro. Unfortunately, it overdubs her with an English-speaking narrator (subtitles–please!), but it’s still impressive to see just how much effort goes into preparing this dish.

I’ll bet you don’t even need a translation, but in case something wasn’t clear, here goes:

1. The Central Valley of Oaxaca is ringed with high mountains. It’s rather arid and very scenic.

2. The foothills are covered in dense weedy scrub.

3. In winter, the area is home to wintering neotropical migrants like Townsend’s Warbler, which are a wonderful component to the birding experience here. But it is the more restricted range bird species that really set a birder’s heart aflutter.

4. Some of these, like the Slaty Vireo, can be tricky to find outside the breeding season. So while our drivers patiently waited, we visited a number of likely sites, some of them multiple times.

I’m in the middle of leading a tour with Chris Benesh for Field Guides, Inc., to Oaxaca, in southwest Mexico. I don’t have much time to write, but here are a few pictures you might enjoy:

The main plaza at the ruins of Monte Alban, above. Below, the ball court there.

Overhead, a Zone-tailed Hawk searches for less than vigilant lizards.

A Boucard’s Wren peers out from the surrounding thornscrub.

Nightime in downtown Oaxaca, with street vendors plying glowing toys.

While diners crowd the patio at Asador Vasco.

More when I get the chance. Have fun tonight and be careful!

I’m ending on a chromatically appropriate note with Red-crowned Parrot Amazona viridigenalis. You can’t get much more red and green than this, can you? Sure, it’s not a cardinal in a snow-frosted holly tree, but it’s worth remembering that much of the world celebrates Christmas with warm weather and birds other than chickadees.

Actually, this picture was taken in April, outside San Benito, Texas, near Marci & Terry’s house, a/k/a Fuller’s Eco-Lodge. Though Red-crowned Parrots are native to a fairly small corner of Northeast Mexico (the Spanish Name in Howell & Webb is Loro Tamaulipeco: Tamaulipan Parrot), many U.S. birders have seen them in South Texas, South Florida, and/or Southern California. (Hmmm…why South Texas & Florida, but Southern California? Is it an issue of syllabic balance? Southern Texas and Southern Florida work OK, but South California sounds just plain wrong.)

Back to the birds. I’m not ruling out the possibility that some of the South Texas flock members reached the U.S. under their own power, but clearly most of them are pet trade birds, as are all the Florida and California birds.I haven’t heard population estimates, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that the U.S. population of Red-crowned Parrots is a significant percentage of the total population of the species.  U.S. “townie” parrots appear to be increasing, while the numbers in Mexico are obviously crashing, due to both habitat loss and capture for the pet trade. 

This is an unfortunate state of affairs, but in this case, I’m glad of having a couple of reservoir populations, even if they are sort of golf course geese. Though I’m no fan of exotic species of any sort, I think Red-crowned Parrots, whose native range is so small and so close to our own border, are a special case. In my opinion, we should be carefully looking after these birds, whatever we decide to do or not do about the menagerie of other parrot and parakeet species, not to mentiong the mynas and the bishops and so on, that increasingly populate our border cities.

One of the things I find so fascinating about borders, both political and ecological, is the many questions they raise and the fine opportunities they offer us to puzzle out the answers. Being places where different populations meet, they are places where things are thrown into high relief, where they come to a head. If you’ll allow me a Holiday/New Year’s wish for 2009, it’s that we approach the myriad of issues surrounding our border with Mexico with renewed wisdom, compassion, and vision. 

Whatever side of whichever borders you find yourself on as 2008 draws to a close and families of all types gather for holiday celebrations, I wish you a new year filled with plenty of birds, plenty of love, and an abundance of peace. 

NB: Posts may be sparse from now until mid-January. I’ll update this blog as time and the vagaries of internet access permit. Please check back from time to time…I really do appreciate my readers and I don’t want to lose any of you.