A Bird-Finding Guide to Mexico

Steve N. G. Howell

1 Viva Howell!
Do not go birding in Mexico without first procuring a copy of this invaluable book! Last summer a friend and I undertook a succesful three week birding road trip throughout western Mexico, and most of our route was planned directly from this book! There is a relative scarcity of information on finding birds in Mexico. Visit southern Texas or Arizona, and you can easily obtain a dozen helpful volumes. Cross the border, and you are hard pressed to track down any useful information - but this book is certainly the best of what is currently available. Written by the same man who authored the superb and definitive field guide to the birds of Mexico, it covers most of the important regions of Mexico(a "mega" bio-diversity country), and points you in the right direction to search for every single one of Mexico's 115 endemic and 25 near-endemic species. On our trip we visited nearly every site described in chapters 5, 6, and 7. We enjoyed the luxury, thanks to this book, of showing up at remote places in a foreign country and immediately getting down to business of birding the best spots, without wasting time exploring or scouting - as if we were at a local wildlife refuge back home!
I eagerly anticipate future editions. There is room for improvement here, as well as expansion. I can envision this book doubling in scope, without andy redundancy. More and more birders are venturing into Mexico, and this book is helping pave the way. The number one improvement I hope to see is a dramatic enlargement of appendix B, which deals with sites for finding species of particular interest. I would like to see that expand to offer a few paragraphs of information per species, rather that a vauge line or two. Also, a few of the directions will need revision and updating (although most were right on!). Finally, I hope to see a lot more sites described within a day's drive of the border.
In short, unless you are accompanying an organized tour group, your birdwatching experience in Mexico will be far, far richer for having this book - and if you are anything like me, you will read and re-read it prior to your birding trip until you have almost memorized parts of it.

2 Please correct typo in previous customer review
Should be "Birder's Delight: Potent Conservation Tool." As it is the "n" was left out of the word Conservation. Many thanks.

3 Birders' Delight: Potent Covservation Tool
Steve N.G. Howell is to be commended, perhaps more appropriately thanked, for the tremendous job he has done in writing this revolutionary book. Howell, who together with illustrator Sophie Webb several years ago authored the definitive guide to Mexican birds, has now given the world something far more important than a field guide. In "A Bird Finding Guide To Mexico," Mr. Howell provides a complete and up-to-date guide for where to find the diverse species of Mexican birds. The guide is unprecedented in its coverage.

Howell divides the country into 14 regions, and lists the top several birding locations for each region, called "sites." Not only are there specific directions to the sites he covers ("turn right onto cobblestone road at Kilometer 14, past Pemex station," for example), he supplies a list of species found at each site. The result is two-fold: (1) anyone can now easily find the "hot spots" for Mexico's fabulous avifauna; and (2) field identification is facilitated, because a species list for the site has been provided by the man who authored the authoritative field guide. You will know where to stay; where to go; and what you are seeing once you get there. Quite simply, birding in Mexico has been forever changed, and just in the nick of time.

This reviewer recently took the book on a "family vacation" to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Assuming I was to be confined to seeing a few species at the resort where I was staying with my 3 year-old, my 6-year old, my in-laws, and my wife, I nevertheless eagerly anticipated the trip -- hoping to make forays into the wild -- but not knowing where on earth to go. Receiving a tip 10 days in advance that Howell's book had just a few weeks earlier been published, but assured that undoubtedly I would not be able to procure a copy in time, I nevertheless got one quickly from Amazon.com in three days. Whew!

After consultation of the book, I learned there was a splendid lagoon 5 miles from my luxury hotel (which I visited twice) and that a world famous bird area was only two hours to the north -- San Blas, Nayarit -- Spain's headquarters for its Pacific empire of the 1700s. I quickly reaaranged my itinerary; rented a car; made reservations in a lovely hotel recommended by Howell; and took in a three day adventure that netted me 135 species of birds. This would have been impossible without the book, as Howell's guide directed me to 7 specific locations that were simply gushing with birds, birds, and more birds.

On the first morning of birding at Site 6.2 in the state of Nayarit (the Mexican state north of Jalisco), I hiked up a verdant canyon above the village of "La Bajada." The mouth of the canyon opened directly into a gentle bay of the Pacific, which I could see far below. The cliffs of the canyon rose 800 feet above me, and I gradually worked my way higher and higher as morning mists evaporated and sunlight hit the leaves. A canopy of trees surrounded a coffee plantation, and I was proud to be setting out before the coffee bean collectors merrily starting their early morning work, with sharpened machetes and little fires to keep warm and burn the forest.

In a few hours in the mysterious canyon above La Bajada, I spied both the Elegant Trogon and the Citreoline Trogon (a Mexican endemic); the Lineated Woodpecker and the Pale-billed Woodpecker; three species of parrots (two screamed as they rocketed away from a Grey Hawk, which seemed to swoop out of nowhere); the Squirrel Cuckoo; the Ivory-billed Woodcreeper; the Masked Tityra; the Rose-throated Becard; and the Black-throated Mapie-jay, the San Blas Jay and the Sinaloa Crow (all Mexican endemics).

But the sounds were marvelous as well. A Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl tooted from a grove of trees, unseen but easy to identify from the combination of the bird list in the "Finding Guide" and Howell and Webb's authoritative field guide. The Happy Wren, another Mexican endemic, blasted its pulsating song from the brush. The White-tipped Dove cooed ghostlike, unseen from the forest floor.

As I had hoped, above La Bajada I also heared the song of the bird many consider to be the finest singer in the New World -- the Brown-backed Solitaire -- a thrush in the genus Myadestes. George M. Sutton, in his ground breaking "Mexican Birds: First Impressions," described the fantastic song as an "electric sparkler," as "musical fireworks," and confessed that in his decades of professional ornithology, when he first heard the solitaire in 1938, he felt as if "his ears had never fully functioned" until that "high moment that filled him with wild, half-furious exultation."

At La Bajada you hear such things, and the trees were indeed literally dripping with birds.

In San Blas proper about 20 minutes away, there were thousands of shorebirds, Roseate Spoonbills, Wood Storks, and Black-necked stilts. On the beach was the majestic American Oystercatcher. A pair was observed catching tiny crabs, and performing an odd sort of bonding dance where the two stood parrallel to each other, but head to toe to bounce and sway in unison. There were warblers galore, parrots, anis, Crane Hawks, Black Hawks, Harris Hawks, and a Peregrine Falcon was easily approached on top of a hill where an old fort, church and canon commanded a view of the town at sunset. The raucous call of the Collared Forest-Falcon was heard from a cliff, bouncing through the forest. The bird list for the marvelous San Blas area tops 305 birds!

The directions in Howell's book are so good that the name and telephone number of a boatman specializing in mangrove swamp tours was given: Oscar Partida. I took the bait, and as a result approached a Northern Potoo, a Paraque, Boat billed Herons, Bare-throated tiger herons, and Rufous-bellied Chachalacas at close range. Obviously, this book has revolutionized birding in Mexico. Many of the magical areas seem to be within easy driving distance of resorts, and comfortable hotels. It is profusely illustrated with diagrams on how to get where you want to be.

In the larger scheme of conservation biology, the book should also serve as a landmark of sorts. On each jaunt I saw wetlands being drained for new resort hotels, forests being hacked down and burned, and the delicate web of life irreversibly disorganized by the growing human and economic activity. This is, of course, nothing different from what is also happening here in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Many tropical countries, most notably Costa Rica, have recognized that conservation of biological diversity, at least in the form of eco-tourism, has great economic value. Mexico is, at this moment, now coming to this realization, and towns such as San Blas are experiencing a revival precisely because of such eco-tourism.

Accordingly, Howell's book is also important because it will make much more widely accessible the viewing of the marvellous Mexican birds. Let us hope it sells in droves, and that its readers flock to Mexico to see the birds. The concomitant increase in awareness of birds there, both as economic factors and also as indicators of intact ecosystems, will do much to aid Mexico to preserve its invaluable biodiversity, which otherwise may disappear within the next generation.

Bravo, Steve N.G. Howell! Your book has tremendous potential at the turn of the Millennium, both for enjoyment, and for preserving our planet.