I Love a Spectacled Owl in the Morning!

Just across the road from Selva Verde Lodge is their botanical garden. Many, many treasures abound, botanical and bird. 

Cane orchid, world's tallest. Looks like a Dendrobium, but it grows right in the soil. Way over my head!

Lobster claw heliconia. The diversity of forms and colors in this family is delightful. The true flower is that yellow bit peeking out of the third claw down from the left. A succession of these flowers pokes out of the colorful, long-lasting bract, attracting hermit hummingbirds, with their decurved bills. 

Here's a green hermit, so you can see how its bill would fit right in that flower. Hermits are big and very cool, fast and flitty and severe-looking, with unearthly viridian green plumage.

Parrots are morning people. They fly over shrieking their species-specific shrieks just after sunrise. It behooves a birder to learn these shrieks, and once you get a handle on it, you can use the shriek and the size, shape and flight style to reliably identify speeding bird bombs high overhead. Getting a good photo of parrots is another story. I take probably 50 parrot photos for each one that's worth a darn. This one's worth a darn. Allopreening white crowned parrots (Pionis senilis) --get it? White hair? Old man?

A pair of pale-billed woodpeckers was double-rapping on a large hollow tree. What a thrill to hear the trademark knock of Campephilus woodpeckers. We all stood in awe, wishing imagining ourselves in a bayou somewhere in the States.

Pale-billeds are very short-tailed, and not nearly as massive as the ivory-bill, but still. 

Nearby, a pair of masked tityras croaked in a bare treetop. These cotingas sound like frogs and travel in pairs.

I walk with my head down, listening, looking at the ground. It's good to pair me with a guide who walks looking up, as Mario Cordoba does. We make quite a team. I miss flyovers. He picks them up. He misses mystery stomachs. I...well, I don't pick them up, but I see them.

A bunny met an untimely end. I saw its stomach (bottom center) and when I showed it to Mario, he showed me the rest of it (top right). I remarked that owls do that: surgically remove the stomach, which they won't eat, and then start eating from the head back. 

As we were looking at the crime scene, rufous motmots were growling and a variety of birds was scolding in the forested hillside just above us. Mario (who was looking up) spotted a large owl flying through the trees. Lightning fast, he set up the scope, and said, "Julie, you're gonna like this."

I did. I really, really liked it. A spectacled owl!!

Which was quite perturbed about being mobbed by motmots.

And which looked, as one of my Facebook friends said, like a stuffed version of itself. Some kind of avian Muppet. An amazement. And a gift on this misty clear morning as we were leaving Selva Verde.

We would go on to see many other things, but that owl stuck with me. In Brasil, they called it Carpintiero for its rapid, hollow, knocking hoot. They said it was building coffins. Love it.

This woman was cooking palm fruit (pejibaye) which is hanging in clusters over her head.

At our next stop this beautiful Brahma let me fondle her spotty brisket. I needed an animal fix of some kind, and she was kind enough to oblige. A good day in the making.

Back to Los Tarrales

A native heliconia flower. When these are put in bouquets, they're usually inverted so they point up, but they look best hanging, I think. An enormous hummingbird called the violet sabrewing feeds at heliconias. I saw it for a shining moment, perfectly purple in the sun, its big wings beating so slowly I could discern individual beats.

I really don't know whether these Guatemala posts are up your collective alley or not. But I took something like 900 photos in four days, so you're going to get Guatemala on your plate, and by God, you're going to at least try it. Or maybe you'll sit back and wait for a Chet Baker post. Ah well...After minor diversions, we're back at Los Tarrales, the uber-cool horticultural farm/shade coffee/banana/flower plantation with fabulous habitat for ecotourism (and ecotourists!)

Tarrales is owned by Andy and Monica Burge. Andy's grandparents bought it about 80 years ago, and it's been in continuous family ownership ever since. A little village of about 300 people has grown within its bounds, many of them employed at the finca. Andy is kind of like the town's mayor/boss/landlord--a position that's probably as hard to describe as it is to fill. You couldn't find nicer people than the Burges, and Tarrales in many ways seems like a charmed place.A Maya woman wraps and packs bananas for the market. These baskets will be carried in the traditional way, balanced on her head.

Other fruits abound. These are breadfruit leaves--enormous against the brilliant sky.A gumbolimbo tree, outrageously shiny, muscular, otherworldly. I wanted to run my hands up and down it.

The juxtaposition of human habitation and wild second-growth habitat makes for some interesting images. I peek through a bamboo stockade to see a fine, fluffy chicken butt.You'd better have a signed release from Henrietta, Missy. She's not going to like that photo one bit.A few dozen yards away, a cinnamon hummingbird guards one of Tarrales' many feeders. Though they're kept clean and filled, they don't get much action, because there's a nasty lil' cinnamon hummingbird guarding each one. This gave me to wonder if rufous-colored plumage is warpaint to hummingbirds (in North America, rufous hummers are the feeder-guarding bullies!) We saw some fabulous nectivorous bats, species unknown, sneaking nectar from the feeders at night. We advised Andy to try grouping a bunch of feeders all together to foil the cinnamon bullies.Just up a trail, a collared trogon called, jetting its tail up with each salvo of soft whoops.Check out the wing position. I love the Christmas colors of this outlandish bird. Trogons are among my favorite birds to draw, but I didn't get time to sketch on this trip. We were always going, moving on down the trail.
More Guatemala anon.