My photographic adventures along the Pacific Coast of Mexico continue this week with a wide variety of strange and wonderful birds. As I mentioned in the first installment, I am in a small fishing village of San Blas, Mexico. Each day is sunny and warm and filled with another grand adventure and discovery. Some days are spent along the coast photographing pelicans and gulls as they skim across the oceans surface. Other days we drive up into the mountains and tropical forests for owls and songbirds.

One of the more spectacular coastal birds in this region is the Magnificent Frigatebird. If you have ever watched one of the TV specials about sea birds you probably have seen this bird. It is huge with nearly an 8 foot wing span. The males are black with a large red throat sac called a gular sack that it can inflate like a balloon to impress the girls during courtship. They are very distinctive looking with long narrow wings that angle backwards at the wrist. Their tail is forked and up to 2 feet long like the streamers on a ships mast. The females have white chests and black head. The young have white chests and heads.

The frigatebird has the longest wings relative to its body weight of any bird. It is truly a sea bird but it never lands or swims in the ocean. Instead it takes off from land and goes out to sea, soaring high over the waters surface looking for fish, jellyfish, crustaceans and more. When it spots something it swoops down uses it long thin bill to snatch it from the oceans surface.

Many consider this bird the pirate of the bird world, flying a black flag and wondering the oceans in search of food treasure. In fact these birds are known to go to sea and continue flying for many days to weeks at a time without landing. They are helpless if they land on the waters surface so they fly continually. The sleep and eat on the wing.

In the ports along the coast fisherman bring in the catch of the day and the frigatebirds gather by the hundreds looking for handouts. These huge birds circle overhead waiting to swoop down and snatch up a scrap of discarded fish. Photographing them as they swirl overhead is both fun and challenging. The local fisherman were accommodating and trying to talk to us as though we can understand. Once they saw that we were photographing the birds the fishermen sent two small children down to the waters edge to throw some fish scraps to bring in the birds. Then we really got some good images.

One day while driving along a tropical forest road high up in the mountains a large rusty colored bird flew right in front of the windshield. I stopped the truck in a small opening in the thick forest and looked across the valley. There at the base of one of the many trees was a very large rusty colored bird with a very long tail and a large curved bill. My buddy Rick recognizes it immediately as a Squirrel Cuckoo.

Before I could ask the question this bird starts to run directly up the trunk of the tree just like a squirrel. Once it reached the branches of the tree it hopped from branch to branch with great speed, skill and agility. With its long tail and rusty red color it appeared and acted just like a squirrel. Now I didn’t even have to ask the question as to how it got its name. The bird briefly landed on a branch out in the open, which is unusual in dense tropical forests, and I was able to get just one image. Since my camera shoots 10 pictures per second I would normally get dozens of images of a single species but this bird was only interested in moving across the valley and we never saw it again. It will be a bird that will stick in my memory for a long time to come.

I could go on and on about all the owls I photographed after dark, high up in the mountains or the boat trips that we took out into the ocean to photograph nesting Blue-footed Boobies. Or how I was laying face down in piles of bird poop to get a decent image of nesting Blue-foots. But I guess that will have to be another column. Until next time…