A 1996 BIRDING TRIP THROUGH MEXICO by Jim Conrad COPYRIGHT MATTERS: © Jim Conrad 2008 This publication is made freely available to anyone who wants it. You can download it, print it on paper, and give it away if you want. You can even print it out, bound it and sell the finished product if you want. I got my payment making the trip. Just don't change around my words and thoughts. That's why I'm copyrighting it, to keep you from changing it. If you feel like sending me a little money, then please feel free to do so. If you don't want to, don't feel bad. I'm just happy you were interested in what I had to say. Still, even a single dollar would be appreciated. If you do want to send some money, please find a mailing address at www.backyardnature.net/j/writejim.htm ***** THE DUNES OF SAMAYALUCA October 4, 1996 In northern Mexico's Chihuahuan Desert, about half an hour south of the US/Mexican border between El Paso and Juárez, a Fronteras bus pulls away leaving me standing alone beside the highway. The bus's curtains have been pulled while a gringo movie with car chasing and gun shooting showed on eight video screens over head. The heavy darkness inside smelled of industrial-strength disinfectant, nachos and aftershave. As the bus pulls away a cloud of black diesel fumes fogs around me, but very quickly the sound of the engine grows softer and the fumes drift away. As my eyes adjust to the light and the new dimensions of things at last there's nothing but the quietness of the desert. What a change this is from the last couple of days! When the sun went down last night I was on a Greyhound bus entering Dallas on I-30, coming in from the Northeast. All afternoon I'd been looking at low rolling hills and scrubby forests of oak and hickory. Last night as I slept there were stops in Abilene and Odessa, and we got into El Paso sometime around 4 AM. I walked across the International Bridge at dawn, bought some bean tamales, and ate in a little park in Juárez while Great-tailed Grackles clamored among the palms overhead. There's no traffic on the road right now, the only sound being my own breathing, and the rustling of a light breeze around my ears. All this sunlight, the broadness and blueness of the sky, and this silence... I just stand for half a minute or so, looking around. The village of Samalayuca lies to the west, a fifteen-minute walk down an arrow-straight, broken-asphalt, treeless stretch of little road. To the east, white sand dunes rise above a level plain of waist-high scrub. However, I can't say how far away the dunes are. Are they huge and far away, or small and nearby? For the first of what will surely be many hundreds of times this trip, I dig out my binoculars and take a closer look: Nothing jives with how things usually announce themselves and fit together and the question remains unresolved.. I pick up my backpack, walk across the highway, and embark on a sandy, two-rut track leading toward the dunes. After about twenty minutes I can see by how much the dunes have grown that they must lie two or three hours away. The track passes a low-strung ranch house built of rough boards, rusty tin roofing and having only two or three tiny windows with heavy, dirty towels covering them. Presently the sand road jags hard to the left, though the dune field looms more and more to the right. I abandon the road and take wildlife trails snaking through the scrub. *** WALKING THROUGH SCRUB The sky is blue with a white sun in it. Without haze, the sky reaches all the way to the jagged, stone-gray, ridge- horizon-frame. A good distance away the dunes glare so violently that they are almost white, even ghostly. They seem to hover over the blue-gray scrub with its spines. A certain randomness seems to have set the dunes in their places. They are like circus tents beneath poles of varying heights. They are clustered, with the highest ones gathered in once place. Two shrubby species comprise this scrub, Mesquite and Creosote Bush. Both grow waist- to head-high, and as I walk among them I notice that in some places Mesquite grows in pure stands while in others there's nothing but Creosote Bush and, still in other places, the two species mingle indifferently. There's also a lot of knee-high Sagebrush with its ash-colored leaves, a few mostly nonflowering desert wildflowers, and several kinds of grass. I am having a problem with the grass called Sandbur. Sandbur grows about halfway to the knee and produces straw-colored fruits smaller than peas and bristling with hard, needle-sharp spines. Each spine is hooked at its tip, but the hook is almost too tiny to see with the naked eye. The hooked spines latch onto passing-by furred animals, and socks and trousers. Several Sandbur spines have worked themselves through my socks and they're pricking my ankles. To remove them I sit down -- absentmindedly right onto some Sandburs -- and instantly I'm reminded of the most vicious thing about Sandbur spines: Their hooks are so tiny that they don't keep the spines from entering your skin, yet when you try to withdraw a spine, the hook anchors in your flesh, and pulling the spine out hurts much more than when it jabbed into your skin. By the time I recall the old trick of removing the burs with a comb it's too late to save my fingers. *** INTO THE DUNES Walking, walking, walking through the scrub, toward the dunes, the vegetation thins imperceptibly and eventually I realize I'm walking among old, very low dunes stabilized by the plants growing on them. The dunes figure on the landscape like lazy swells at sea. As I continue toward the higher dunes the swells gradually increase in size from less than knee high to over head high. Finally they give way along a well defined boundary to dunes mantled by plants only on their lower slopes, their crests being naked sand. Inside the main dune field vegetation finally disappears leaving just windblown, shifting, glaring sand. From inside the dune zone it seems that there's just one very broad-based dune maybe five to ten stories high, but up the sides of this mother dune there climb scores of house-size smaller dunes. Maybe the mother-dune is two to four miles across and ten to fifteen miles long. Having arrived, I just wander around, the wind blowing hard in mid afternoon, making my backpack's loose straps flap hysterically. The starkness around me, the blinding sunlight, the heat, the choking clouds of sand and dust, stun me. But what troubles me most is this: The landscape itself is uttering an ultra- base ommmmmmmmmm just like the sacred word the yogis use when going inside themselves. *** HARRIS'S HAWK & KESTREL Two specks plummet from the hollow sky toward the dune field's dead center. Through the binoculars the specks are barely identifiable as a Harris' Hawk chasing a Kestrel. I know it's a Harris' Hawk because in the sky's overwhelming brilliance I can barely make out a dark tail with a white rim and even patches of chestnut on the shoulders. I recognized the Kestrel because of its size relative to the Harris', and the typical streamlined falcon shape, with swooped- back wings. The little Kestrel, with half the Harris's wingspread, easily outmaneuvers its adversary, but the Harris' keeps up the attack. The whole drama lasts no more than a couple of seconds, then they drop behind the mother dune's crest and do not reappear, and I am left to deal alone with the wind, the sun, the heat, and the blowing sand. *** HUDDLING One dune after another, the sand that's pouring into my shoes burning through my socks... The heat, wind, and glare, and all I want to do is to set up my tent and crawl into its shade... But pegging a tent in this wind is impossible. Again and again it billows and tries to fly off like a kite, more than once dragging me onto the searing sand. I peg one end and go to work on the other, but the pegs pull loose and the tent rages into my face. Gathering the tent into my arms, I go huddle next to a knee-high Sagebrush and simply wait. Hours I wait. An hour before dusk the wind lays enough for the pegs to hold. I enter and lie on my back panting and sweating, feeling searing, banana-size sand-ripples beneath me. Gradually the wind subsides more, then the temperature plummets and finally a raw chill creeps into the air. Black shadows pooled in troughs between dunes swell until they overflow the tent. When Jupiter hangs suspended in the western sky the air is like crystalline glass holding everything in suspended animation. Though no Creosote Bush is in sight, its medicine odor suffuses the air. I fall into a stunned, empty sleep. *** MAP ORIENTATION At daybreak I peep from beneath the tent's flap to see what kind of day there is. In this first week of October the temperature stands at 57º F (14º C), the sky is clear, and the air is calm. The passage from night to day takes place fast. In a matter of twenty seconds sunlight breaks over the eastern ridge and floods dune tops all around. One moment the desert is slate- gray and somber, the next, dune tops flair alive. For a minute right after this high- speed dawn, from the Mesquite/ Creosote-bush zone surrounding the dunes, a pack of Coyotes calls -- not with dignified, lonely howls, but with silly sounding yelping and squealing, like half-drunk teenage boys. As soon as there's enough light in the tent to read I pull out my map. The elevation here is about 4,300 feet (1,300 meters). That ridge to the east, I see, is the Sierra el Presidio, and according to the map it's only nine miles away (15 kms). To the west the ridges with clouds heaped around their peaks are the Sierra Boca Grande and Sierra las Lilas, 60 miles distant (100 kms). This western ridge had seemed much closer. The desert has tricked me. The map shows that between here and the western ridges there's a vast plain of sand dunes interspersed with temporary lakes. I know the lakes are temporary because on the map the blue lines delimiting them are dashed. Streams leading into the lakes also are dashed, so they flow only after rains. I love maps. I like the idea that right now I can tell you that I'm at latitude 31º21'N, longitude 106º27'W, and if you're interested you can look in your atlas and see exactly where I am. *** "HEY, YOU!" With dune crests blazing, I walk along chilly, blue-shaded dune slopes. With immense satisfaction, before having even crossed the first dune, the desert's silence is shattered by a piercing, almost startling whit-wheet, enunciated like the "Hey, you!" whistle some people use to get attention. The call comes from a car-size thicket of yuccas atop a sand ridge connecting two nearby dune peaks. Despite my slow approach to the yuccas, the whit-wheeter spooks and escapes to the crest of the next dune, landing starkly silhouetted against the glaring eastern sky, fairly galloping onto the ridge, kicking up a silhouetted spray of sand atop the silhouetted dune. The running silhouette displays an eleven-inch long (28 cm) songbird with a curved bill and a longer-than-usual tail. Anyone familiar with American birds would know that it's a kind of thrasher. Circling the dune for a look at the bird's sunny side, I'm ready to say which thrasher it is after catching a glimpse of nothing more than its eye color, for it's the only thrasher in this part of Mexico with reddish-orange eyes, the Curve-billed Thrasher. Except for its orange eyes it's a drab bird, the dark, dingy hue of a rag that's been used to wipe off a very dirty car. Filthy House Sparrows in sooty Third-World cities are this color. Indistinct streaks on the bird's chest show like curdles formed atop sour milk. This dramatic appearance pleases me greatly. Even though the species is common in this region wherever sparse desert scrub occurs, I would never have seen it when I first started birding as a farmboy in Kentucky. The closest Curve-billed Thrashers came to my childhood home was central Texas, some 700 miles (1,100 kms) southwest of Kentucky. This is something I've always done -- related plants and animals seen during my travels to the species I knew so intimately as a kid. In a way, the degree to which I always "feel at home" varies in direct proportion to how many plants and animals around me are the same as I knew as a kid. When I see something like this Curve-billed Thrasher, I am thrilled by its exoticness. Now, with an immense sense of satisfaction, I bring out my notebook and write: October 5 latitude 31º21'N, longitude 106º27'W MEXICO: Chihuahua; ±10 km NE of town of Samalayuca, elev. ±1,300 m (±4,300 feet); sand dunes with some sparse herbs, grasses and low shrubs in dune troughs, a few yuccas on dune slopes 1. Curve-billed Thrasher *** ARABESQUES Flying low, like a skipping stone striking upon every wave crest, the Curve-billed Thrasher departs for the Mesquite and Creosote Bush zone, and once again the desert is very quiet. In this dawn silence there unfolds a shadow show. The sun surges into the open sky and the dunes' shadows withdraw into their troughs, all the while metamorphosing abstract forms. During the time taken for aesthetics on the right side to be absorbed, shadows on the left create a whole new theater to be reexamined, and when you finally absorb what's on the left, the right has changed yet again... Sand grain by sand grain the wind has sculpted the dunes' crests, slopes and troughs. Shadows lie around these forms like patches of black silk jigsawed into long, sinuous patterns. This blending of shadow-and-light curlicues and long sweeping lines puts one into the mind of arabesques. Now I understand the relationship between Arabic script and the desert's sand. *** TRACKS Footprints in the sand show that during nights a broad community of animals come and go. There are jackrabbits, mice and rats, a Kit Fox, lizards, insects, and critters I can't identify. Sometimes pencil-thin ridges atop shallow tunnels begin nowhere, wander aimlessly, then suddenly end, and I have no idea who makes them, or why. Most tracks lead briefly in one direction, then jag for no apparent reason in another direction, zigzagging across the sand. The Kit Fox, in contrast, travels in a straight line, over dune crests and into troughs. After thinking about it awhile, I realize that it makes sense for a fox to travel like this, to pop over dune crests, for among sparse grass and wildflowers down in the troughs there might be rabbits, rats, and mice. *** BUTCHER BIRD At 10 AM a raspy call erupts from the next dune's slope. Something white perches there on a brown, decaying flower-stalk emerging from a wastebasket-size cluster of bristling, bayonet-shaped yucca leaves. The binoculars show an old friend, a bird I've known since I was a kid on the Kentucky farm, the Loggerhead Shrike. It's a handsome bird and it's handsome not because of colors, which are merely gray, white and black, but because of the boldness of its patterns. It's mostly gray with a white throat, black tail, and black wings with white patches that flash during flight. And shrikes wear black face masks like cartoon characters robbing banks. For beginning birders, the black mask separates it from similar-looking Mockingbirds. You expect hawks and owls to be hunters of small animals other than insects, but not songbirds like shrikes. Nonetheless, Loggerhead Shrikes prey on rodents and birds as well as insects. Songbirds aren't supposed to have hooked beaks like hawks and owls, but even from thirty feet away I can see this shrike's upper mandible curving downward into a conspicuous hook. Shrikes, like all other predatory birds, have the problem of keeping their prey stabilized while they dissect their prey. However, shrikes don't have the powerful feet that owls and hawks do to hold their prey, so shrikes sometime impale and immobilize their victims on sharp things like spines and thorns. I've often found mice and grasshoppers on cactus thorns and barbed wire spines, surely the work of shrikes. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a shrike without there being something spiky nearby. Once in Mississippi I spotted a Loggerhead Shrike perched on a fence surrounding a suburban home's backyard garden, and I thought I'd finally seen one away from all spines. But then I noticed that the bird was perched on a chainlink fence with the top border wires snipped off, forming sharp spikes jutting into the air every inch or so. This bird simply has an irrepressible passion for spikiness. *** TEMPERATURE RISING Except for birds on and around bodies of water, and for most birds during nesting season, it's typical that the most active times for birds are early in the morning and right before dusk. Here this routine is accentuated to the extreme. Once the shrike departs, all is quiet. From 57° F at dawn (14° C) the temperature rises to 82° F at noon (28° C) and 92° F at 2 PM (33° C). These temperatures are recorded waist high, in a sliver of shade next to the tent. Keeping the thermometer in the shade but lowering it to six inches (15 cm) above the ground, 100° F is recorded (38°C). Holding the thermometer in sunlight at waist height the mercury rises the column's full length, to 130° F (54° C). At noon, a Pyrrhuloxia, a bird similar to a female Cardinal but wilder looking, alights for about two seconds on a yucca flower-stalk on the opposite dune, but immediately flies away not to be seen again. A couple of times four or five Mourning Doves zoom low above the dunes, as if the devil himself were after them, their wings whistling with a fast-pulsating, wheezy sound, but those incursions last only seconds. Occasionally throughout the day the Loggerhead Shrike erupts with a burry call, but it stays hidden, probably deep inside the shade of its yucca thicket. Once a few Turkey Vultures circling far over the Mesquite/ Creosote-bush zone more or less wander over the dune field's perimeter, but they never come close. Mostly, between dawn and 2 PM, there's just the sun, the wind, the sand, and me. *** A LITTLE DIZZY At 2 PM I walk among the outrageously glaring dunes, my skin tingling in the unrelenting sunlight, the wind like dry heat from a just-opened oven door. I know I'm sweating, but the sweat evaporates so quickly that my skin stays dry. I hear myself breathing, breathing shallowly as I shuffle across the sand, but the air inside me feels artificial, like plastic air, doing its job but not the right way, and I'm a little dizzy, all the dunes crooked, not much sense of what's truly up and down. I head for a high dune possibly half an hour away, where a small, isolated gathering of trees spotted with the binoculars lies surrounded by naked sand. There I find ten Quaking Aspens, their sparse, stiff leaves rattling in the wind but affording little shade. On one trees' smooth, white bark someone has carved his initials. Because it's so hard to focus my mind I have to count several times to be sure that it's ten trees. For a long time I lean on the tree with initials in its bark. I feel more alone here than out among the dunes. Maybe it's because as I approached these trees I saw how isolated they were, with nothing but sand around them. I know that to the trees I looked the same, but I didn't have to see myself. I just saw these trees, and their isolation was awful. By the time I make my way back to the tent I am anesthetized to everything, everything except the heat, and it's hotter inside the tent than outside, and outside there's no shade. Hunkering next to a knee-high Sagebrush for company, I try to keep the exposed skin on my hands and face covered with bandannas, but the wind always blows them away. I sit trying to figure out whether this strange feeling is physiological or psychological. The landscape is ommmmmmmmming again, now so loudly it's like overhead wires in a hard wind. By the time the sun sinks low enough for a hint of coolness to return to the air, a certain oscillation inside me has harmonized with the landscape's humming and I am absolutely aloof, untouchable, like a flake of ash drifting among the dunes. *** FIRST OFFICIAL BIRDLIST Here is our Official List of birds spotted on our Official Birding Day among the dunes: October 5 latitude 31º21'N, longitude 106º27'W MEXICO: Chihuahua; ±10 km NE of town of Samalayuca, elev. ±1,300 m (±4,300 feet); sand dunes with some sparse herbs, grasses and low shrubs in dune troughs, a few yuccas on dune slopes 1. Turkey Vulture 2. Mourning Dove 3. Ash-Throated Flycatcher 4. Curve-billed Thrasher 5. Loggerhead Shrike 6. Pyrrhuloxia Of the species listed, only the Loggerhead Shrike gives the impression of being at home among the dunes the whole day, and for most of those hours it remains hidden, apparently deep inside yucca thickets. The Curve-billed Thrasher and Ash-throated Flycatcher must spend nights in yucca clumps, but during most of the day they remain in the Mesquite/ Creosote Bush zone. The Turkey Vultures, Mourning Doves and Pyrrhuloxia were clearly "just passing through." *** THE DIGGER Wherever sand grains are finest on the dunes' lower slopes, animal-dug pits averaging three inches across (7.6 cm) and three-quarters of an inch deep (2 cm) appear. Around these pits there are no tracks indicating what animal has been there. Obviously something flies there, digs, then flies away. But the pits are surely too large to be excavated by any insect, and I've never heard of any bird or bat digging such holes. An hour before sunset as I wander across the lower slope of a dune where the wind hardly stirs I spot a black and white, thick-bodied wasp measuring one inch (2.5 cm) from the tip of its head, not including its short antennae, to the tip of its abdomen, and it's digging the very kind of hole just described. "Digging" is too mild a word to describe this creature's activity. It's engaged in what seems to be a mad rush to eject from the pit as much sand as possible as quickly as possible. With its two back legs anchored far apart, again and again the insect lunges forward, thrusts its two front legs into the sand, and jerks them back so spasmodically that a nearly continual spray of sand flies from the pit, landing three inches away (8 cm). With each thrust forward the insect's head and short antenna butt into the sand. If a human worked liked this, one would say that that person is hysterical. The wasp clutches a fly in the two middle legs bent beneath it. I think that this is a sphecid wasp, a kind of wasp that deposits its eggs near or inside animal prey. When the eggs hatch, the wasp larvae then have something to eat. I'll bet that this wasp plans to bury the fly, then lay one or more eggs next to it. However, the wasp seems unable to get the pit the way it should be. It digs a few minutes, stops and looks around, flies away, returns, makes a loud buzz, and then it either continues work in the same pit or starts a new one. Several times this cycle is repeated; sometimes the sand ejected from a new pit lands inside a pit already mostly finished. As darkness grows the wasp's behavior becomes even more frenetic and seemingly erratic. During a paroxysm of lunging and leg-jerking it loses grip on the fly, the fly is cast from the pit along with a spray of sand, and is quickly buried. Again the insect gives up, flies away, returns empty handed, buzzes, and starts another pit. Finally it just stops digging and for half a minute stays frozen in the growing darkness. Then, slowly, it drags itself from the pit, and drones away. A change has occurred in its nervous system imparting to it a whole new demeanor. I'm tempted to call the new slowness a sign of the insect's having accepted defeat. This time the wasp does not return. A grasshopper's brain can be removed, but the grasshopper will still be able to walk, jump and fly. Therefore, it's dangerous to make anthropomorphic comparisons when talking about insects. Probably it's true that insects don't think at all; they are practically little machines responding automatically to stimuli. Yet, I feel strongly that I have just witnessed something of myself in this wasp. *** NEGATIVE FEEDBACK Dawn was clear, except for a few clouds clustered over distant western ridges. At 10 AM white cumulus clouds materialized in the open blue sky and the wind started to stir. By mid afternoon and until around four o'clock, about a third of the sky was occupied by ragged, dark-bottomed cumulus clouds, and the wind blew briskly. Then in late afternoon the clouds thinned out, and by dusk they practically disappeared. In other words, precisely when the day's heat was greatest, that's when clouds were thickest. Of course this happened because mid-afternoon sunshine heated up the land, hot air swirled upward in convection currents, and when this hot air cooled high in the sky, what little moisture was present condensed into clouds. The lovely thing about this is that shadows of these clouds cool the hot ground that spawned the clouds in the first place. It's a negative-feedback situation preventing the desert from becoming even hotter than it is. *** STRAWBERRY-SHERBET HUES An hour or so before my second dusk among the dunes the sun plunges into a thicket of clouds heaped around the black-silhouetted ridges to the west across the vast plain of dunes and ephemeral lakes. Clouds that all afternoon have shown white with slate- colored bottoms now grow purple and take on pink linings. Here among the dunes, everything takes on sunset's strawberry-sherbet hues, especially the dust and fine sand blowing horizontally across the desert floor between the sun and me. Most of this fast-moving dust and sand constitutes a cloud not rising over knee-high. The cloud does not move like a diffuse carpet being dragged horizontally, but rather in fast-moving waves behaving like excited snakes tangling and disentangling and rolling one over another across the dunes. Inside this hypnotic display on the opposite dune's leeward slope a black object heavily and deliberately creeps into view. It's a tarantula. But no tarantula could be as large as this one, surely at least the size of a dinner plate. My mind still buzzing from the day's heat and glare I walk through the pink dust-snakes toward the lumbering black spot. Up close, in the dune's wind-shadow, to my profound relief, not only is the air's agitating pinkness resolved to a more manageable grayness, but also the tarantula measures only four inches (10 cm) from tip of front hairy leg to tip of back hairy leg. The tarantula, like my own mind, wanders aimlessly, changing directions frequently. It begins to enter a Sagebrush but ants inside the bush stream out and attach themselves to its legs. The tarantula shakes them off, backs up and goes elsewhere. I follow it across several dunes until darkness sends me to the tent. The wind drops to hardly a breeze, the desert grows dark and somber, and chilly currents creep into the air, exactly as on the previous night. When I close my eyes to sleep, everything inside me is heat, glare, wind, blowing dust and sand, and a surreally wandering, impossibly large tarantula. GRASSLAND - MESQUITE October 6, 1996 Ducks and geese from Canada and the United States have been settling for the winter on northern Mexico's scattered shallow lakes and stubbly grain fields. I want to see this close up. Books describe yearly fall invasions of clouds of Mallard, Northern Pintail, Gadwall, Northern Shoveler, Green- winged and Blue-winged and Cinnamon Teal, American Widgeon, Ring-Necked Duck, Lesser Scaup, Canada Geese and more. Now I want to make my tent into an observation blind, setting it up among cattails right at the water's edge just feet from daylong duck circuses. I need some cool, moist breezes off a lake, too. According to the map a lake called Laguna Encinillas lies along the main highway some 210 kilometers (130 miles) south of the dunes. On the day my water runs out I hike back to the road and catch a bus south. El Lucero, Ahumada, Moctezuma, El Sueco, Arados, El Carrizalillo... The map shows the highway passing through these towns between Samalayuca and the lake. On the map the nearest town to Laguna Encinillas is Arados, so that's where I tell the bus driver I want to get off. But the bus driver, who must have driven this stretch a thousand times, says there's no town along the highway called Arados. I say that on the left there'll be a lake called Laguna Encinillas. He knows about a lake on the left, but it's not called Laguna Encinillas, and there's no town of any size even halfway near the lake. I ask to be let off as close as possible to the lake he knows about. I've seen maps list ghost towns before, just to fill up empty spaces in desert regions. It turns out that along the entire road the only settlement with more than one permanent-looking, occupied building is Ahumada, where we stop for a break. With a population of maybe a thousand Ahumada survives on a little ranching, some irrigated orchards, and the fact that it's the only stop for busses and trucks between Juárez and the Chihuahua City area, a total distance of 350 kilometers (220 miles). With empty desert all around, Ahumada is bustling, noisy, and self-absorbed in the manner of someone keeping obsessively busy trying to ignore their loneliness and vulnerability. Eventually the bus driver nods to me in the mirror above his head and points with his chin off toward the east. Like quicksilver shimmering in the mid- afternoon sunlight, there's the promised lake maybe fifteen kilometers (ten miles) away, across an unbroken plain of small trees and grass, and just this side of a barren ridge rising into a meager cluster of clouds. The driver asks if I'm sure I want to disembark in such a God-forsaken place. Hearing that this is exactly what I'm looking for, he dramatically, even theatrically, rolls the bus to a slow stop, looks at me as if I'm making a very big mistake, and opens the door. *** SOFTER, FRIENDLIER AIR This landscape here does not ommmmmmmmmm. The air is moist, soft, and friendly. Breathing it deeply is almost like drinking spring water. Feeling very good indeed I strap on my backpack, heavy with bottles of water from Ahumada, cross the road and wade into the vast mosaic of intermingling grassy openings and thickets of short trees. I am simply transfixed by every hint of moist lushness. The wind shakes large tree branches and the waist-high grass rolls in graceful waves. In the forest areas the main woody plant is Mesquite, the same species as at Samalayuca, but here it grows much higher. Spiny acacias with short, slender spines and feathery leaves are common, and there are several species of wildflower, vine, and grass. The grassy openings prove to be complex communities of different grass species. As I walk along I spot Blue Grama, Three-awn Grass, Lovegrass, Muhlygrass, Bluestem, and plenty of species I can't identify. No Sandbur, though, which prefers drier, sandier soil. This pleasing diversity of grasses suggests that, despite the occasional livestock trail with its cow paddies, this vegetation is fairly natural, probably just what wandering Apaches saw hundreds of years ago. Once vast natural grasslands mantled much of northern Mexico, but now most of that is so overgrazed that the native grasses have been usurped by weeds, or else the entire landscape has been simplified to cropland. Walking through this surviving species-rich ecosystem, I feel honored. After half an hour of hiking I catch glimpses of the silvery lake through the Mesquites' upper branches. A few minutes later the Mesquite comes to an abrupt end and a stunning view spreads before me. *** PLEISTOCENE LANDSCAPE Confounded by the scale of things, a long time I stand dumbly gawking, incapable of synthesizing what I see into a coherent understanding. Alternately looking with the naked eye and through the binoculars, normal and magnified images mingle in my mind, increasing my disorientation. The lake looks no closer than it did half an hour ago. Between the lake and me there's an ocean of blackish green, waist-high grass, the wind making enormous, silvery waves in it, and in this grass ocean there graze hundreds, maybe thousands of cattle with magnificent, wooly-white heads and lustrous, meaty, chestnut-colored bodies, looking like Pleistocene mammoths. The whole landscape tilts crazily toward the lake. Then beyond the lake there's a wall-like ridge rising almost vertically. At the ridge's base, of all things, there's a long train so far away that the entire train fits within the binoculars' narrow field. That ridge behind the train reaches into clouds. Through the binoculars, white specks along the lake's shore are probably the ducks, herons, and seagulls I'm looking for. But in this vast grassland, spaced every two or three kilometers apart, there are men on horseback, unmoving, hunched beneath dark serapes, just sitting there absolutely still as grass waves move around them. There's lots of money tied up in these fancy cattle, the taut-strung barbed wire encircling the whole scene, and the horsemen staying all day at their posts, so there's no place here for a wandering naturalist along the lake's shores. The whole thing unnerves me. The tent gets pegged beneath a widely spreading mesquite about the size of a mature apple tree, and with leg-thick branches running horizontally waist high above the ground. A limb passes right over the tent, pressing down on the canvas top. Inside the tent, again and again I push the palm of my hand against the solid beam. After the phantasmal dunes, the substantial feeling of rough, unyielding wood above me is comforting. *** A DREAM I didn't dream among the dunes, but on this first night in the grassland- mesquite I have a vivid one. I am two books hovering horizontally above the grass, bearing the library number BK 539. I see from the number that I belong in a certain section of the library but, because the number is incomplete, I don't know my exact location. I hover exhaustingly all night, expecting at any moment to receive the missing numbers, but they never come. At dawn a Coyote calls, or I dream the call, and with this wild howl it becomes perfectly clear that I am to be planted exactly here, as a grass, and the idea of being two books needing numbers is completely forgotten. *** SPARROWS Sparrows, so many sparrows this morning, peeping and rustling in the leaves outside the tent. So as to not frighten them away I furtively peep through a pinhole beneath the tent- flap's zipper. Outside I see a carnival of mostly brown and gray, stubby- billed, chubby looking little sparrows, hopping about, scratching in the soil, preening, stretching, and flitting from one grass stem or sagebrush branch to another. Mexico has about thirty-eight sparrow species and they all are variations on the themes of smallness, being gray and brown, typically having striped backs, and having bills that are short and conical, and thus well adapted for eating small grass seeds. Not a species among them bears a single feather of blue, green, or red. Male and females look the same, but juveniles have their own plumage which are even less striking than the adults'. And around me this morning, seventy to eighty percent are young birds in various stages of drab juvenile plumage. They are this year's new crop. Identifying them will be a challenge and a pleasure. I'm able to name two or three species immediately because of the presence of a few adult birds with distinctive fieldmarks. However, to positively identify six sparrow species it takes two days of patient watching, of reading and rereading species descriptions in my field guide, of studying habitat preferences and species ranges, and of vainly hoping that an adult male will break into its distinctive song. For two days I drift through the tall grass and among the low, spiny mesquites and acacias, meditating on the meanings of lesser or greater degrees of brown striping on backs, lesser and greater degrees of spotting on chests, mere hints of eye rings or eye stripes, mere hints of median crown stripes, and occasional, half-hearted, fractionally articulated songs. And these two days are a joy. You need special powers of observation to identify birds well. I look at one of these sparrows, make all the mental notes I can on breast spotting and back streaking, on whether it has an eye stripe or an eye line, or maybe a line through its crown. Once I think I've noted everything, I put down the binoculars and look in the field guide, and then I realize I hadn't seen nearly enough. Had the bird's tail been forked, squared, or rounded? Had its lower mandible been the same color as the top one, and had its legs been dark or pale? Nearly always by the time I realize that I must look at the bird again, already the sparrow has flown away. I feel as if all these sparrows orbiting around me in their flitting, ephemeral, seemingly unconcerned manner comprise a kind of diffuse Zen master who half teasingly, half tauntingly draws me into a frame of mind where, to glimpse the essential beauty of the thing, ever greater self-discipline is needed, ever clearer vision. In the end, knowing that I've probably overlooked two or three species, here, in alphabetical order, are the six sparrows I identify with absolute certainty: * Black-throated Sparrow * Clay-colored Sparrow * Rufous-crowned Sparrow * Song Sparrow * Vesper Sparrow * White-crowned Sparrow Now let me tell you about each of these: BLACK-THROATED SPARROW Adults wear conspicuous black bibs below their bills, and bold, white eyebrow lines over their eyes. The species limits itself to desert scrub and has a special fondness for creosote bush. The bird's range is smaller than a lot of sparrows', only nesting as far north as southeastern Colorado, and wintering as far south as central Mexico It's absent throughout the East. The bird flies erratically and close to the ground, nervously flicking its tail, almost as if it were jittery about something. This a restrained, neat-looking, nervous little bird. CLAY-COLORED SPARROW Particularly small, this bird has no striking feature of plumage other than a modest, pale stripe across a dark- brown head-crown. More a generalist than the scrub-loving Black-throated Sparrow, it inhabits a hodgepodge of habitats -- scrub, second-growth, edges of both deciduous and coniferous forests, burns, along rivers... Its song, which isn't being sung now, is nothing musical, rather just three to four identical, slow, low-pitched, flat, unbirdlike buzzes. Studies have shown that the pure, clear whistles of forest birds become severely distorted by strong temperature gradients and air turbulence. The Clay-colored Sparrow's low-pitched buzzes, then, is adapted for windy, open places just like this. Most North American birds are found in either the East or the West, or from coast to coast, but Clay-colored Sparrows only occupy the center of the continent. You can see its summer breeding distribution here. The species winters from southern Texas to southern Mexico. RUFOUS-CROWNED SPARROW This is by far the most abundant species here, with more juveniles in more intermediate stages of confusing plumage than any other. It forages on the ground seldom moving high in vegetation. Often it scurries from one bush to another instead of flying. Sometimes it sings a few snippets of song, even though nesting time is far away. The song is a little musical, with many rapid notes, but the notes are weak and jumbled with no discernable structure. One feature setting it apart from the other five sparrow species is that it's the only one that doesn't migrate. I take this to mean that of all the birds here, this is the one most at home. SONG SPARROW This bird is "family" for me. Distributed from southern Alaska to Newfoundland, south at least to southern Mexico, it was with me in my old Kentucky home. Though several generations of bird were probably involved, my mother considered the Song Sparrow claiming our backyard as the same individual year after year, and she called him Chesty. "Chesty," because when he sang he threw back his head and puffed out his boldly striped chest. My mother would always say, "Just listen to Chesty out there singing his little heart out." You can hear that song here. VESPER SPARROW The books always speak of the Vesper Sparrow's sweet song. I've never been up North during the species' nesting season so I don't know how sweet the song is. To see if you agree with The Audubon Society Master Guide to Birding's description of the song as ". sweet, musical opening notes, usually 2 pairs of clear, unhurried, slurred notes, second pair higher pitched, followed by a descending series of rapid trills," you can hear the song here. Not having its song to help with identification, I'm glad that Vesper Sparrows have an easy-to-see fieldmark. Their shallowly notched tails have white outer feathers that flash when the bird flies. A few other sparrow tails have white outer feathers, but those tails are rounded, not notched. WHITE-CROWNED SPARROW This bird also has a vast range, nesting as far north as northern Alaska and northern Quebec, and wintering as far south as central Mexico. Though as a child in Kentucky I knew this bird, it was fairly uncommon and appeared there only during the winter. In the picture, notice the bold, black-and- white head striping. In Volume 146 (1964) of Science magazine, L.R. Mewaldt reported on an experiment for which he'd captured White-crowned Sparrows in San Jose, California, marked them and flown them by aircraft to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Laurel, Maryland, where the birds were released. The following summer they presumably migrated to their nesting grounds, most likely in Alaska, and then the following winter they showed up once more in San Jose, California... If you know how hard it is to get a fix on one's longitude (east-west position), you'll understand how surprising this is. *** HAWKS When a hawk or falcon's silhouette mounts into the sky, alarm calls in various sparrow idioms, tense with apprehension, filter through the grass. The sparrows, typically on the ground or perched low in clumps of grass or inside short bushes, freeze and cock their heads looking upward. If the silhouette sails too close the sparrows shrink into the nearest heavy cover. Once an American Kestrel, a falcon also known as the Sparrow Hawk, swooped in so unbelievably fast that even though it struck at something only two car- lengths from where I sat, I couldn't determine whether a kill was made. Probably I would have seen at least a feather settling to the ground if it had been. Often I hear the loud,raspy squeal of a Harris' Hawk. With a wingspread of about 110 centimeters (forty-three inches), throughout the days of my stay, frequently it perches conspicuously on a snag about three minutes walk from the tent. This is a beautiful, unusually dark hawk, with a brownish-black body, chestnut-colored shoulders and thighs, and a black tail with a white tip. This bird keeps the sparrows on high alert. Usually the sparrows travel in small, loose flocks. Some years ago ornithologist Thomas Caraco and his team trained a tame Harris' Hawk to fly over an area where flocks of Yellow- eyed Juncos frequently fed. Juncos are ground-feeding birds closely related to sparrows. In one experiment the junco's average flock size increased from 3.9 birds when the Harris' Hawk was absent to 7.3 when it circled over the feeding grounds. Sparrows know that there's "safety in numbers," and from the large flocks around me I'd say the sparrows here are very nervous indeed. *** MONARCH ON A MESQUITE LIMB A few days ago, on September 21, I visited my grandmother in western Kentucky. From her front yard that afternoon I saw high in the sky dozens of orange Monarch Butterflies sailing southward toward their winter grounds in the highlands of central Mexico. At dusk a few landed to spend the night in trees around Grandma's house. At dawn on my first day in the grassland-mesquite I find a Monarch with its wings folded, daintily at rest on a Mesquite limb head-high exactly over the tent's door. It's the first of many I see sailing southward during my days here. *** BIRDLIST #2 Here are the birds spotted at this stop in northern Chihuahua's Mesquite- grassland: October 7 latitude 29º28'N, longitude 106º23'W MEXICO: Chihuahua; ±100 kms N of Chihuahua City, on west side of lake on some maps named Laguna Encinillas; elev. ±1,500 m (±4900 feet); Mesquite averaging 3 m high, interspersed with house- lot-size natural grass meadows. 1. Turkey Vulture 2. Cooper's Hawk 3. Harris' Hawk 4. Red-tailed Hawk 5. American Kestrel 6. Mourning Dove 7. Northern (Red-shafted) Flicker Verdin 8. Cactus Wren 9. Loggerhead Shrike 10. Wilson's Warbler 11. Yellow-rumped (Audubon's) Warbler 12. Green-tailed Towhee 13. Black-throated Sparrow 14. Clay-colored Sparrow 15. Rufous-crowned Sparrow 16. Song Sparrow 17. Vesper Sparrow 18. White-crowned Sparrow *** THE VERDIN To my mind, the list's Verdin is the "most exotic" species. Restricted to mesquite and other desert scrub, it's a tiny bird, only nine centimeters long (3.5 inches), and closely related to chickadees and titmice. Anyone knowing those birds might guess, then, that Verdins are full of nervous energy, constantly flitting from perch to perch and flying jerkily for short distances with quick, erratic wingbeats. *** "RED-SHAFTED" FLICKERS The list's "Northern (Red-shafted) Flicker" needs a comment. When I was learning my birds in the 1960's, my Peterson Field Guide told me that in Kentucky one of our common woodpeckers was called the Yellow- shafted Flicker, and that out West there was a similar woodpecker called the Red-shafted Flicker. When our birds flew, you saw yellow in their wings, while the ones out West showed red. After my old Peterson Field Guide was published, people began considering the fact that in certain areas at mid- continent where the ranges of the two flicker species overlapped the birds freely interbred, producing fertile hybrid individuals. When a hybrid flicker flies away, instead of yellow or red flashing in its wings, it flaunts a nice salmon color. The traditional definition of a species is that it is a group of individuals capable of interbreeding under natural conditions. Consequently, nowadays the Yellow-shafted and Red-shafted Flickers have been "lumped" into the single species known as the Northern Flicker. There's an almost identical story about eastern North America's Myrtle Warblers and western North America's Audubon's Warblers, which are now "lumped" into the name Yellow-rumped Warbler, which also appears on the above list. Notice that with both the flicker and warbler, here in northern Chihuahua I'm seeing the Western forms. As far as the birds are concerned, right now I'm more "out West" than I am "back East." These highlands can be considered an extension of the Rockies. *** FALL SONGS At dusk here in early October when there's no reason for a bird to advertise for mates or defend its territory, three species are singing, and who knows why? They are the Rufous-crowned Sparrow, the White-crowned Sparrow, and the Cactus Wren. The sparrows' songs are rather tentative, with rapid, short, jumbled notes. To me their singing, very pleasant to hear, suggests the unfocused, self-absorbed gibberish of small children. The Cactus Wren's song is different. Cactus Wrens are much larger than most other wrens. The familiar House Wren is about eleven centimeters long (4-1/4 inches) while the Cactus Wren reaches about 16.5 centimeters (6-1/2 inches). To be making such a robust sound, it has to be large. The song is low and rough, highly variable, and sometimes written in the field guides as choo-choo-choo-choo. To me the song is more like that of a car starting up on a very cold morning, grinding away but just not firing. Cactus Wrens are common and not terribly afraid of humans. Their songs are one of the most familiar sounds of the desert. *** FOG At dawn on my last day in the grassland-mesquite I am amazed when I poke my head from the tent to find a very dense fog enshrouding me. My previous mornings have been completely clear. It's dark inside this fog, and the grass is even darker with wetness. But spiderwebs, hardly noticed before, suddenly are draped everywhere, conspicuously white and sagging with shining dewdrops. Walking through the tall grass and Mesquite, quickly my trouser legs become sodden and where they stick to my skin it's very cold. Thousands of tiny, straw-colored grass seeds stick to my legs because of the wetness. Though the air temperature is only 13º C (55º F), soon I'm shivering from the cold, wishing for the sunlight of which lately there's been almost too much. I can see about as far as the width of a house. Beyond that there's just a pale, white glow. My world consists of no more than one or two Mesquites and a few clumps of grass, and as I walk that small world constantly changes, materializing before me, disintegrating behind me. The birds are so subdued, so silent and secretive, that when I catch glimpses of them they could as well be mice leaping from grass-clump to grass- clump, twig to twig. At 10 AM, directly above, a hint of unbroken blueness comes into the grayness. A few minutes later the sun's pale orb can be distinguished. At 10:15, the fog breaks, not by becoming more and more diffuse, but by coagulating into pale curds. Vagrant breezes move into the scene and the curds are carried upwards, becoming very low clouds. The sun, already high over the eastern ridge, again becomes as brilliant and potent as ever. The three above-mentioned dusk-singing birds break into song, and a few other species occasionally add song fragments, chips, and chirps. A Mesquite standing alone in a small prairie is absolutely bustling with small birds. Up close I see that at the tree's top about half a dozen Clay- colored Sparrows are repeatedly fluttering into the Mesquite's leaves, wetting themselves. These birds are dew-bathing!. *** DEW-BATHING Mesquite leaves are compound, looking like two green feathers joined at their bases onto a single stem. Each section of the compound leaf, or pinna, is divided into forty to fifty tiny leaflets, with the result that Mesquite leaves appear diffuse. In the present sunlight, every leaflet shows itself as adorned with a glistening dewdrop. The Clay-colored Sparrows hop along a stem sideways until they come near a sparkling cluster of leaves, then in an instant flutter into them, land back on the stem, and more often than not shake their heads, possibly to jar dew from their nostrils or eyelids. The dewdrop bath continues for ten minutes or so, and then Yellow-rumped Warblers arrive. It appears that the warblers have been watching and now want to join in the fun, for they land in the mesquite's crown and immediately begin excitedly flitting from spot to spot and flying about. However, they do not make contact with the wet leaves. They simply flit about the leaves and fly into the air a couple of meters or so above them. It's as if they want to share in the experience, but can't quite grasp the entire concept. After three or four minutes, they seem to catch on. They also begin fluttering into the leaves, dousing themselves with dewdrop spray. Have I watched one species teaching another how to take dew baths? What a shame that in this Mesquite- grassland so many discoveries like this surely remain to be made, but I'm out of water, and have so many other places to go. THE PINE FOREST OF LAKE ARAREKO October 9, 1996 Chihuahua City, capital of the state of Chihuahua, lies just inside the vast Chihuahuan Desert's west-central boundary and is a sprawling, cluttered, and raucous city of about half a million people. It lies about 100 kms (60 miles) south of our grassland- mesquite. I take a bus there, then a series of local buses westward, toward the Western Sierra Madres. Approaching the Sierra Madres at this latitude and from the east, the mountains do not announce themselves as a high ridge or even as a series of peaks. Despite the fact that here one crosses the Continental Divide and that the elevation is so high (over 2000 meters, 6,600 ft), I'm traveling across a kind of undulating plain. Still, there's a sense of being at the edge of something significant. Maybe it's the clouds boiling over the too-close western horizon and scudding close overhead. The tilted plain breaks into low, rolling hills and the grassland fractures into patches of Mesquite, of juniper, and pine. Ranches appear here and there, and unirrigated cornfields and apple orchards confirm that the Chihuahuan Desert has been left behind. The clouds pull even lower, the horizon draws even nearer, and suddenly vertical-walled canyons of surprising depth open next to the highway. Finally the landscape fractures into a jumble of towering ridges and deep canyons, and any spot mantled with a little soil bears pine forest. In late afternoon, still within the boundaries of Chihuahua State, I arrive in the tourist town of Creel, elevation 2295 meters (7650 feet). With a population of about 3,500, Creel is the main entry point for Copper Canyon, known in Spanish as Barranca de Cobre. Copper Canyon is almost four times wider than the U.S.'s Grand Canyon, and some eighty-five meters deeper (280 feet). Creel lies not far from the canyon's northeastern rim. Because of its isolation, surprisingly few tourists visit Creel. People flock around the bus offering me, the only gringo aboard, every grade of fancy hotel, super-cheap room, kayaking trip, mule ride, and hike into Copper Canyon. I've been here several times before so I recall that a road leads southward out of town, soon entering pine forest, so after buying food and water I take a reading from the setting sun and start hiking southward. Six kilometers later (four miles) I spot a freshly painted sign announcing the Complejo Ecoturístico Arareko, or Arareko Ecotouristic Complex. It sounds too fancy for my blood, but it looks hardly developed at all. I follow the arrow and immediately meet with another new, hand-painted sign reading (translated from somewhat awkwardly composed Spanish): "Welcome. For the administration and operation of the Arareko Ecotouristic Complex, all us inhabitants of the village of San Ignacio de Arareko made a society of social solidarity, formed by 400 Rarámuri members of this place. The entrance fee is used for the expenses of maintaining roads, latrines, printing tickets, maps, and a payroll of 27 people. Moreover, it helps fund our organization so that we can repay the money the federal government gave us through solidarity organizations." This campground, obviously just getting organized, is operated by a village of Tarahumara Indians, the Tarahumara calling themselves Rarámuris. I like the idea of supporting local folks in ecotourism projects, so I continue inside. The camping fee is about the price of a Coke. A very pretty lake, Lake Arareko, adjoins the campground, but there's not a single other person in the "complex." One curiosity of the landscape is that innumerable, dark, rounded, elephant- and hippopotamus- size boulders of basalt lie atop and project from the forest floor, often looking as if they had been dropped in place. With just enough daylight left to see what I'm doing, I peg the tent between two boulders and next to the trunk of a very large pine. *** A BUBBLE OF BIRD SOUND At my first dawn here, on October 9th, the temperature stands exactly at the freezing point. My breath has frozen into hoary rime coating the tent's inner walls. I scratch the canopy, feel shattered crystals shower onto my face, and clumps of frost gather beneath my fingernails. I rub meltwater from the frost into my eyes and across my face, deep into my beard-whiskers. I smell the meltwater's wetness, its freshness, and at this moment I could not feel more alive. Though yellow sunlight filters among the pines' tops, the campground with its boulders and trees remains somberly blue. For a long time I just lie keeping warm, delighting in the fact that I am right here, right now. Then comes a gentle pecking on wood, some familiar-sounding cheeps and calls, and birds begin foraging around the tent. I lie still with my eyes closed, focusing on the sounds, letting the bubble of bird-sounds move around me. There's a woodpecker making pecking sounds and I can visualize him chipping off loose flakes of tree-bark. There's some kind of chickadee or titmouse out there with an accent I've not heard farther north. And there -- a single, very high, thin note I can hardly hear... a Brown Creeper. And then the nasal yank-yank-yank of a White- breasted Nuthatch, and a few other notes I can't quite place. *** THE COOPER'S HAWK In mid morning I sit on a log, letting sunlight warm me. Then there's movement to the left, and not five car-lengths away an immature Cooper's Hawk with its brown-spotted breast and brown back and tail alights on the forest floor. With a wingspread of 70 centimeters (28 inches) the bird immediately stretches wide its wings as if to fly but instead starts hopping across the ground with its wings spread. It passes not two car-lengths before me, and continues on perfectly oblivious to my presence, always with its wings open. Cooper's Hawks are streamlined beautifully for rapid flight, but on the ground this one looks as if it's constantly about to stumble. Cooper's Hawks have long legs, so this one looks like a wobbly clown on stilts. For the length of a large house the young hawk hops and wobbles with its wings spread wide, then vanishes over an outcrop of basalt, and when I go looking, is gone. Back on the log I sit trying to figure it all out. Surely the young bird had been hunting. It had hopped with the sun behind it, so any animal on the forest floor looking toward it might have been partially blinded. Maybe it spread its wings only to stabilize itself during its clumsy run. It had not seemed to be using its wings to keep its equilibrium. I have never seen or read of a raptor behaving like this. It was a wonderful thing to see. *** ARIZONA PINES It's so quiet. The mixed-species flock forming a bubble of birdsong around my tent at dawn continues drifting through the little valley just below but, here on the rocky ridge near my tent, even though sunlight speckles the forest floor and wind sighs among the Arizona Pines' boughs, the solitude is nearly as intense as among Samalayuca's dunes at dusk. In fact, ecologically, this forest strikes me as similar to a desert. The mere facts that it consists of a single species of tree and that there are few wildflowers and grasses on the forest floor indicate that the environment here is harsh. If it were more hospitable, several tree species would be competing for space, and undergrowth would be dense. But here I can walk unimpeded below the pines, as if I were in a park. These Arizona Pines are very closely related to the Pondorosa Pines so common in the mountains of much of western North America. In fact, earlier Arizona Pines were considered to be a variety of Pondorosa Pine, a variety specializing in high-elevation canyons of Mexico's Western Sierra Madres. The variety was known scientifically as Pinus ponderosa var. arizonica. Now most specialists regard this tree as a distinct species called Pinus arizonica, the "Arizona Pine," despite the fact that only a small part of its distribution extends into Arizona. For my part I'd be glad to call it the Tarahumara Pine. You can read about Arizona Pines and see a map showing their distribution along with the Pondorosa Pine here. *** STELLER'S JAYS A shrill, sassy shack-shack-shack erupts from the little valley below. I go there and find three or four Steller's Jays orbiting around one another as the flock drifts among the pines' mid-level branches. Steller's Jays are well known in western North America because they are so loud, colorful, and don't mind living near humans. In the East our Blue Jays look a little similar, and behave in the same aggressive, flamboyant manner. The favorite food of Steller's Jays is acorns, but in this oakless forest they are content to flit from one half-open pine cone to another, with their big bills probing for pine seed not yet fallen to the ground. A jay lands on a branch, spots me, does a double-take, bounces to a more open spot on the limb, bends toward me so far he seems about to fall, looks at me with his right eye, and then, with a theatrical flourish of wings and tail, snaps his head about to look at me with his left eye. This head-turning goes on for a couple of minutes, each turn his long, black crest flopping clownishly and prettily in the crisp morning air. Then a second jay lands nearby, the gawker turns and looks at his visitor, appears to decide that this second jay should be avoided, and instantly flees deep inside a neighboring pine. The second jay, though I am in plain view, simply ignores me. I decide that maybe it hasn't discovered me so I clap my hands just to see what its reaction will be. It pauses and for ten seconds -- without moving a feather -- stares at me as penetratingly as a bird can manage. Then it continues ignoring me. It begins probing for pine seeds making no superfluous moves at all. This bird's crest concisely expresses certain levels of interest in this and that, but by no means does it flop. I admire its economy of motion, the way it appears to think out its foraging plan beforehand, and how frequently it finds something to eat. This bird projects a regal image just opposite to the first one's. *** RUNNING RARÁMURIS Sometimes Tarahumara Indians enter the campground to accompany the two men theoretically renting canoes to visitors to the lake. When the visitors are younger than about fifteen years old they're nearly always running. The very moment young Tarahumara children see me, they run toward me full speed, come to a fast stop just steps away, then beg for pesos. As I hiked from town to the campground, for a good fifteen minutes I watched a Tarahumara girl perhaps five to seven years old running down a trail in the valley paralleling the road. She was barefooted and kept her back erect in good jogging style. When she reached the gate at the trail's end she simply turned around and ran back. In Tarahumara villages, the favorite toy seems to be a hoop, which children run behind, keeping it rolling with a stick. Tarahumara are famous for their running. The name they call themselves, Rarámuri, means "those with fast feet." *** THE TARAHUMARA LANGUAGE Each dawn frost coats the tent's interior and I go sit along Lake Arareko to warm in the sunlight. Tarahumara women also come, some of them stationing themselves along the highway so if tourists pass by they can offer their gaudy handiwork. Mostly they sell blouses, dresses, belts, and bags with shoulder straps. By the second day they ignore me. We are all just silently and gratefully warming in the sun. Of the approximately 65,000 people who speak Tarahumara, about 99 percent live in this southwestern corner of the state of Chihuahua, the rest being in the neighboring state of Durango. The Tarahumara language belongs to the Nahua-Cuitlateco group of the Uto- Nahuan stock of the Pima-Cora family of languages. It's closely related to North America's Hopi and Comanche indigenous languages, and central Mexico's Nahua. Nahua was spoken by the Aztec civilization, whose king Montezuma was the ruler when Hernán Cortéz and his Spanish conquistadors arrived and destroyed the Aztec kingdom. I speak to a Tarahumara man along Lake Arareko who tells me in heavily accented Spanish that he understands the Tarahumara who live deep inside Copper Canyon but, to tell the truth, the way they speak sounds awfully funny to his ears, and the folks down there have some strange words. *** SUN-WARMING ALONG LAKE ARAREKO So, Tarahumara women sit with me at virtuous distances along Lake Arareko's shore, some alone and some in clusters of two or three, silently warming themselves in the sunlight. They wear calf-length, much-pleated dresses and loose blouses of the brightest colors. Most wear shawls, or rebozos, also brightly colored, looped across a shoulder, holding a small child on the back. On their heads they wear bright, store-bought bandanas highly decorated with print motifs. Because their dresses blouse out so much, one dress worn over another, as they sit along shore they look like multi-hued bubbles randomly spaced among the black elephant-rocks, and when they walk, they look like scurrying bells painted Easter colors. A Tarahumara man sees me watching ravens across the lake. He comes and sits, looks through the binoculars, and then my field guide. I ask him if he knows anything about birds and he says that he knows nothing. I ask if any bird eats his corn. His eyebrows arch high and he says, "Ah, yes, the Pájaro Azul. I show him the Steller's Jay's picture in my field guide and he thumps it with annoyance. Then he thumbs through other pages. He points to the Le Conte's Thrasher saying it eats his corn in May. He goes on and on identifying birds and describing what each does. He both reveals that he knows a lot about many birds, but also that his eye is not as sharp for details as a real birder's, for he misidentifies several species. The Le Conte's Thrasher, for instance, is not found in Chihuahua, and is a denizen of open deserts, not pine forests. I suppose his corn-eater is the Curve-billed thrasher we saw among the dunes. It's good to see his wonder as he scans every page of illustrations. He says he cannot imagine any purpose great enough to make it worthwhile for someone to put so many pictures of birds in a book, for everyone knows which birds eat the people's corn. *** A MIXED-SPECIES FLOCK During most of the morning and then again in late afternoon the mixed- species flock of my first morning's awakening floats up and down the little valley below my tent, the White- breasted Nuthatch's nasal yank-yank- yank always announcing the flock's location. As I approach the yank-yank- yank other calls become apparent and a flurry of silhouettes of small, hyperactive birds appears among the pines' lower branches. At the heart of the flock are five White-breasted Nuthatches, only one of which is calling. Also there are three or four Ruby-crowned Kinglets -- none showing a hint of a ruby crown -- and three or four Mexican Chickadees. These species are among the smallest of the forest and they all flit nervously from branch to branch, probing with their tiny, slender bills into open pine cones, clusters of pine needles, and any irregularity of bark or twig, foraging for very small insects, spiders, and other arthropods. There's been a good bit of study on mixed-species flocks such as this one. Flocks can consist of as few as two species, or more than a dozen. Some flocks are semipermanent, others are dissolved and reformed at more or less regular intervals, and some are completely transitory. They can be very loosely organized, or tightly integrated with complicated social structures. Their abundance and complexity is greatest in the humid tropics. It's easy to imagine that a flock of flitting birds is more likely to jar a spider from beneath its leaf, or cause a bug to run from cover, than a single bird. However, woodpeckers often join such flocks, and their prey resides unshakably beneath flakes of tree bark. Also, we saw among the Mesquite that grain-eating birds also form mixed- species flocks. More than one serious ornithologist have suggested that often birds of different species flock together just for the company. From time to time other bird species are drawn into my present flock's general vicinity but they do not join the active nucleus, just remain loosely on the periphery. After a few minutes the wandering flock drifts on without the visitors, or else the visitors fly away, abandoning the flock altogether. Among such visitors are Northern Flickers, Williamson's Sapsucker (shown at the right), and a single Yellow-eyed Junco with its eerie, schoolbus-yellow eyes. Mixed-species flocks of nuthatches, chickadees, and titmice often flock together during the winter in North America and Europe. I was thinking about this when it occurred to me that, if I were in Kentucky with such a mixed flock, very nearby there would almost certainly be a Brown Creeper hopping up and down tree trunks, probing bark fissures and beneath loose bark flakes for miniscule arthropods. As soon as this thought comes to mind, perfectly timed, a familiar, very high, thin seeeeep call of a Brown Creeper filters among the big pines. *** THE BROWN CREEPER When the Arizona Pine's lowest, more or less horizontal branches die they generally remain on the tree for a few years giving it a scraggly look, and then they fall off. Often these dead lower branches are encrusted with brittle lichen with relatively humid microclimates beneath their crusts. Naturally gardens of miniscule creatures congregate there. In this Lilliputian world the little (4- 3/4inches, 12 cm) Brown Creeper is the tiger, the ever bill-probing predator. Much of the time the Brown Creeper works with its back toward the ground, seemingly impossibly hopping along the undersurfaces of lichen-covered limbs. A good deal of its prey appears to be taken at the tips of dead branches and broken-off twigs. Certainly spiderlings are drawn to these branch tips, where they eject gossamer strands into the wind. When the wind's pull on the silk reaches a certain point, the spiderlings release their hold on the stem and balloon away on air currents - - unless the Brown Creeper comes first. *** VULTURES Vultures sailed above us at our previous two stops, they're here, and surely they'll be with us at all our stops farther south. Along Lake Arareko's shore two vulture species take to the sky as soon as thermals form. First Turkey Vultures appear, then Black Vultures. In the sky these two species are easy to distinguish, for Black Vultures bear large, white patches at the tips of their wings, while Turkey Vultures don't. Also, Black Vultures have shorter tails and longer necks than Turkey Vultures, and to my mind fly much less gracefully. Turkey Vultures will probably appear in our bird lists more frequently than any other species, and Black Vultures may well come in second. Vultures are so abundant not only here but throughout most the US that often I wonder how the land can support so many. Part of the answer lies in the Vultures' ability to ride air currents for incredibly long periods without flapping, thus lowering their need for "fuel." Another answer is suggested by the discovery that Turkey Vultures are among the few birds who at night lower their body temperatures, thus saving energy trying to keep warm. Their temperatures drop about 6° C (11° F). During my early days of birding, field guides placed vultures in the falcon family, along with hawks and eagles. However, since the early 1980's, largely based on DNA analysis done by C.G. Sibley and J.E. Ahlquist, New World vultures are now considered to be most closely related to storks, not hawks or falcons. *** BIRDLIST #3 Here is this stop's Official List: October 9 latitude 27º43'N, longitude 107º38'W MEXICO: Chihuahua; Arareko Ecotouristic Complex ±6 kms south of Creel; elev. ±2,330 m (±7600 feet); low hills mantled almost exclusively with Arizona Pine, Pinus arizonica, little underbrush, much basaltic outcrop 1. Black Vulture 2. Turkey Vulture 3. Cooper's Hawk 4. Northern (Red-shafted) Flicker 5. Williamson's Sapsucker 6. Steller's Jay 7. Common Raven 8. Brown Creeper 9. Pygmy Nuthatch 10. White-breasted Nuthatch 11. Mexican Chickadee 12. Ruby-crowned Kinglet 13. Yellow-rumped (Audubon's) Warbler 14. Yellow-eyed (Mexican) Junco For North American birders, the most "exotic" species in the list may be the Yellow-eyed Junco and Mexican Chickadee. In the U.S., both of these species are restricted to the mountains of extreme southeast Arizona and southwest New Mexico, but in Mexico they follow the western highlands all the way into the deep south. Yellow-eyed Juncos, called Mexican Juncos in older books, look just like one of the phases of the Dark-eyed Junco common farther north -- except for the eyes. Those eyes are the bright orange-yellow of U.S. school buses. They are so conspicuous that they look unnatural. Mexican Chickadees look almost identical to Black-capped and Carolina Chickadees common farther north, but their voices are a bit lower and more buzzy than those species'. The list's Pygmy Nuthatch may not seem so unusual to Westerners because they are found at higher elevations all through the US West. However, they're "exotic" to Easterners. In the US Southeast we have the very similar Brown-headed Nuthatch, but that bird has a brown cap while Pygmies have gray ones, and the Brown-headeds are strictly low-elevation folks. Despite these differences, sometimes the two species have been lumped. The field guide says that Pygmy Nuthatches forage in small flocks high in the pines. The one I saw, drawn at the right, was lower down on a trunk, and alone. Maybe it had descended just for a quick look at me, for I had only that brief sighting before it disappeared. The list doesn't convey an important feature of Lake Arareko's birdlife. Large parts of the forest here, at least during the middles of days, are absolutely birdless. Except for wide- ranging hawks, vultures, jays, and ravens, all the other species were seen almost exclusively in the little valley below the tent. *** BEAK-POUNDING One day a Mexican Chickadee lands nearby carrying in its beak a clear- winged insect, possibly a lacewing. The bird hops to the limb's most level part, pins the insect onto the bark with its feet and, vigorously swinging its whole body up and down, chisels at the insect with its bill. Once the wings are chipped off the bird keeps beating at the body until it is limp and soggy. Then the insect is swallowed. Pinning prey with the feet and then chiseling it with the beak seems a natural thing for a bird to do, but most birds don't do it exactly that way. This special behavior is typical mainly of members of the Chickadee- Titmouse Family (the Paridae), and the Jay-Crow Family (the Corvidae). If you look into your own field guide, most likely your book will place the Chickadee -Titmice Family right next to the Jay-Crow Family. That's because these two families are considered to be closely related. It's assumed that these families arose from a single ancient ancestor, and that the holding- with-the-feet-while-pounding-with-the- beak behavior arose with that ancestor, or perhaps somewhat earlier. *** LAKE ARAREKO'S FLYCATCHERS Though absent from our Official List, flycatchers are found at Lake Arareko. In fact, I observed several for lengthy periods. They are missing from the Official List simply because I couldn't figure out which flycatcher I had. This won't be the last time this trip I have trouble with flycatchers. Mexico is home to over sixty members of the Tyrant-flycatcher Family, the Tyrannidae, an incredible number of which are mousy little birds with hints of eye rings, hints of crests, hints of wingbars, and they all occasionally fly from hidden perches to snatch up flying insects. To make identification harder, at this time of year they're not calling. In Mexico, I find the flycatchers and hummingbirds to be the hardest large bird-groups to identify -- the flycatchers because of so many look- alike species, and hummingbirds because they usually buzz by so fast that their fieldmarks are impossible to see. After working an hour or so with Lake Arareko's flycatcher, I'm guessing that I have a Pine Flycatcher, but it might be a Dusky, or maybe something else. A Field Guide to Mexican Birds ratifies my indecision by saying that the Pine Flycatcher is "probably not distinguished with certainty in the field from [the Dusky] and other similar species except during nesting season." THE OAK-PINE FOREST OF BAHUICHIVO October 12, 1996 One of the most awe-inspiring railroad tracks in the world runs between Creel and Topolobampo on the Pacific Coast. With 39 bridges and 87 tunnels, and ranging from 2,417 meters(8,056 feet), to sea level, this stretch of the Chihuahua-Pacifico Railway passes through a rainbow of ecological zones, from Creel's cold, high-elevation forests of Arizona Pines to Topoloampo's tropical beaches. In Creel, when I board the train headed westward, downslope, I ask the conductor for a ticket to the first town surrounded by forest in which oaks appear among the pines. To my vast surprise, without a single comment or wry look, the enlightened man simply writes out a ticket reading: Bahuichivo. At first the track courses through pine forest and keeps to more or less level ground and there is no hint of what the map shows as reality: That we are actually coursing along the top of a large peninsula of highland jutting out southwestward into the Pacific lowlands. Eventually we do break from the forest and it comes as quite a shock. We're gazing blankly through the windows as pine and more pine blurs by and then instantly our car rumbles onto a dizzyingly high bridge spanning a vertical-sided abyss. Then just as suddenly we're back into the somber pines. This happens several times. Sometimes from the bridges we can see that the canyons being crossed are just arms of the much larger Copper Canyon, the northern rim of which the train's track is paralleling. The view into Copper Canyon is a panorama of enormous gray walls of exposed edges of horizontal rock strata and jagged rock chimneys with bonsai pines atop them. But distances and dimensions in these views are so otherworldly that it's impossible to sit in a train and relate to them. The views are like images flashed on walls and it's hard to believe we're right at the edge of something so immense. A couple of hours out of Creel, the map indicates that the highland spur is about to come to an end. The track crosses a narrow ridge, careens over a canyon wall and descends, not to ascend again. Within ten minutes we've lost enough elevation for oaks to appear among the pines, and right on cue the wonderful conductor appears. "Ya llegamos," he tells me; "We're arriving." *** CHIMNEY ROCK Bahuichivo is dinky and mud-splattered, not much more than a train station and a sawmill. Coming into town I'd noticed a fine camping spot along a pretty stream upslope so I hike back along the track. After about an hour I find the location. It's a perfect camping spot in every respect except one: Now that I think about it, probably the dozen or so local men lounging around the station as I hiked out of town could guess exactly where I was heading with a backpack. And that sets me up for being robbed. A few years ago in Durango not far south of here a couple of fellows near a sawmill town just like this one knocked on my tent one night and when I peeped out they put a pistolo to my head and took everything... With a twinge of regret I cross the parklike opening along the stream and head up a slope so steep that I must draw myself upward by pulling on the very dense, shrubby undergrowth. The elevation here is about 680 meters lower (±2230 feet) than Creel, so it's warmer than I've experienced for a few days. However, it's still about 1650 meters high here (±5,400 feet), so it's not long before I'm very sweaty, and gasping for air. Often I must rest, usually straddling a small tree trunk to keep from sliding downslope. With sweat burning my eyes and my shoulder muscles searing from lugging the backpack, I think about my fears, about the possibility that with this white beard and balding head I should really be somewhere else this dusk, doing socially acceptable things, not slinking about in such a shape, in a nameless Mexican canyon. After twenty more minutes of looking I still haven't found a spot level enough for a tent, or even for simply lying down in a blanket, and it's almost dark. I'm near the slope's top, at the edge of the vertical rock cliff forming the canyon's upper wall. Then through the undergrowth I spot a chimney rock about ten meters high (thirty feet) rising next to the cliff face. I make my way to the gap between the chimney and cliff, remove my backpack and tie a rope to it, then with my back to the cliff walk my way up the crack between the cliff wall and the chimney, and when I'm atop the chimney pull the backpack up after me. I lie there wet with sweat until my breathing slows down. The chimney's summit is just large enough to park a car on. It's occupied by one medium-size pine and a small oak, and there's a more or less level spot just big enough for the tent, right at the pine's base. The view into the valley is fantastic. I'm right even with the treetops that are bound to be filled with birds in the morning, and from here I could hold off a large band of banditos. Barely with enough light to see what I'm doing, I stake the tent, enter it and feel very lucky indeed. *** UNSEEN SINGERS At dawn, inside the tent there is no sensation that I am atop a chimney rock. I could as well be awakening in the middle of a vast grassland, on the muddy banks of the Mississippi, or back in Belgium, where I was living just a month ago. That's a lovely thing about tents: Though you may awaken in a different spot every day, inside, it's always the same, and the homey familiarity is comforting. My tent with its known splotches of mildew on the ceiling and ant-gnawed holes in the floor is someone else's homey breakfast table and kitchen-window curtains. It's not as bitingly cold here as it was during dawns at Creel. Through a slit in the tent I retrieve the thermometer left leaning against the pine's trunk. Here in the middle of October, at an elevation of about 1,650 meters (5,400 feet), some two-thirds of the way up the western slope of the Western Sierra Madres, it's 8° C (47° F). Worming my way outside, I cocoon in a blanket, lean against the pine's trunk, and look around, listening for birds. Almost instantly the first bird-call of the day sounds, one of my favorites. From among a jumble of boulders along the cliff's base at the canyon's head arises the piercing, liquid call of the very wren to be expected here, the Canyon Wren. It's a brown and rusty- colored little bird with a pure white throat and chest. The song, to my ears, is exactly like a whistled rendition of someone laughing so hard that their last laughs trail into gasping heaves. But what makes the song beautiful is that usually, as is the case here, rocky backdrops create an acoustical situation that amplifies and projects the song-laugh. It seems impossible that a bird only 11.5 centimeters (±4.5 inches) can be responsible for such a resounding call. Then another birdcall, also from the canyon's head, and this one represents an important milestone in our trip! It's the call of a Brown-backed Solitaire, and this is the first species encountered on this trip that is not also found in the United States. For the first time a species we've listed is one not illustrated in North American field guides. Here in the southwestern corner of Chihuahua we are at the northwestern extreme of its distribution. From here it ranges south through the Mexican mountains, to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Solitaires, along with thrushes and bluebirds, are members of the Thrush Family, the Turdidae. Except for their longer tails, they are similar to the mousy, look-alike species of flycatcher that have been giving me so many identification problems. They are exceedingly plain-looking creatures. The thing about solitaires is their song. Many would say that they are the champion singers of all Mexican birds. Well, it is often the case that the most plain-looking birds are the best singers, and this may be the best example of that. Sadly, this bird is often sold in Mexican markets, even though its song from a cage is nothing to be compared to what I hear here. The song begins innocently enough with a soft wenk, wenk, and then metamorphoses into a chortling jumble of flutelike notes ascending the musical scale with ever increasing velocity. The older bird books say that the song suggests the cranking up of an old-time motor car. *** ATTACK FROM ABOVE For an hour the pines and rock outcrops rimming the canyon glow in sunlight and the blue sky dazzles with its clarity, but the canyon itself remains chilly, shadowy, and somber. At mid morning, still in the shadows, warm breezes begin stirring. Hot air is supposed to rise but, here, air feeling warm and dry and smelling of pine appears to be draining from the canyon's head and flowing down the canyon, streaming around the chimney rock and me. And this strange wind is bringing me visitors... They are stink bugs. Brown, shield- shaped hemipterids of the family Pentatomidae, hoards of them, not lazily drifting with the warm currents, but flying hard with the current, as if embarked on stink-bug kamikaze missions. They thump into the tent, against the pine, and against me, my legs, chest, and face. They roll to the ground, flounder struggling to get upright, and if their flailing legs happen to snag something they yank themselves onto their bellies and immediately fly off again. Soon the ground is littered with them and if I nudge one with a finger the finger ends up smelling like the nauseating stinkbug defense. No sooner has the invasion subsided than another onslaught begins, this time conducted by black, plump, two- millimeter-long (±1/12th inch), blood- sucking black flies -- Dipterids, probably of the family Simuliidae. They swarm around ankles, arms, neck, and face, and do not diminish in numbers once sunlight arrives. They become a plague with repellent keeping them away only a few minutes. Atop my chimney, as the canyon at last receives its full share of sunlight, I sit fuming over the godly humor that sets a mind so acutely alert and informed in a body that, by virtue of its very nature, draws black flies that make elevated thought impossible. *** TREETOP VISITORS With the sunlight's arrival, birds begin stirring at eye level in the treetops around me. First a hummingbird comes out of nowhere, hovers right before my face, contemplating the tip of my nose. Before I can overcome my surprise and begin registering its features, it's off, and will not appear in the Official List. Ten minutes later a flycatcher lands in a pine snag a mere car-length before me, in full view in bright sunlight, and silently perches in profound nondescriptness long enough for me to figure out, mostly by comparing habitat and distribution remarks of all the look-alike flycatchers, that it's probably a Buff-breasted Flycatcher. However, it might also be a Western Flycatcher. I told you about these flycatchers. Neither of these names will appear in the Official List. Then five Gray-breasted Jays, called Mexican Jays in older books, rampage over the rim of the cliff above and settle in the treetops around me. Gray- breasted Jays are about the size of North America's Blue Jays and Steller's Jays, and they also are predominantly blue. The big difference between them is that Gray-breasted Jays are crestless. There atop the chimney rock it's as if I were perched among them. Wrapped in my blanket more against black flies than because of the cold, I'm struck by how alert each bird seems, constantly glancing around, and how vivacious and subtle their interactions are. Silent and unmoving inside my blanket, I feel like a mud-caked turtle watching a flurry of butterflies. Sometimes jays are described as "nature's alarm system" because they tend to be drawn to any commotion or deviation from the norm. When disturbed they cluster around the object of concern disturbing the neighborhood's peace with shrill, grating, cawlike calls. One endearing feature of Gray- breasted Jays, however, is that their voices are not nearly as harsh as their northern relatives'. Gray-breasted Jays fly about asking in fairly civil terms, Wink? Wink? Wink?. One jay in the flock carries a small acorn onto a branch of the little oak next to me, wedges it between its feet, and with the same exaggerated seesawing motion observed at Creel with the Mexican Chickadee, chisels at the acorn with its beak. A Painted Redstart flies out of the woods right at eye-level and exactly just a few feet before my face snaps an insect from midair. He's so close that I see very plainly how he closes his eye the moment he reaches the insect. I've never read this before but it makes sense. If he misses the insect, the eye might be damaged. What a grand observation post this chimney rock is! So far all the birds seen here are species not observed at our previous three stops. The pine and oak sharing the chimney-rock's crest with me likewise are species not seen before, and I'm not sure what they are. Prickly-pear cactus clings to vertical rock outcrops of the canyon wall. On the canyon's drier slopes stand juniper and Madrone trees, as well as waist- high clumpgrasses. In the deepest, moistest, most shaded valleys there are very tall, dark, stately fir trees. Not everything here is new, though. Flitting among the pines, just as they did among the mesquite in the grassland-mesquite zone, and among the pines at Lake Arareko, are Yellow- rumped Warblers. *** NORTHERN FLICKERS A couple of Northern Flickers forage for ants on the ground at the base of the rock cliff. I can't see a flicker without thinking of a classic experiment. Adult male Northern Flickers bear conspicuous "mustaches" like the one on the right in the picture at the right. The mustaches are black in the Yellow-shafted race but red in the Red-shafted race, the one we have here. Females do not have mustaches. Thus a female flicker was caught, a mustache was painted on her, and her romantic life was utterly devastated. Here's something else I think about when I see flickers. Ornithologists distinguish between bird species that are "determinate layers," which lay a fixed number of eggs, and "indeterminate layers," who lay extra eggs if some are removed from the nest early during the incubation period. Northern Flickers are indeterminate layers. In fact, one flicker laid seventy-one eggs in seventy-three days, trying to replace eggs removed as soon as they were laid. *** LOOKING INTO TREES For two days I remain atop the chimney rock, for seldom have I ever enjoyed such a perfect perch level with treetops. It's good to be atop the chimney rock when sunlight floods into the canyon. In afternoon wind my neighboring pine's branches knock together and the dry rapping sounds travel down the limbs into the trunk, sounding like heartbeats deep beneath the coarse, black bark. When the wind is greatest, tree tops heave and leaves quiver franticly, like children waving arms and wiggling fingers to get attention. When the sunlight is brightest, I can see through several trees at one time, everything moving, knocking, sighing, rustling, even whistling, and I am glad to be on the chimney rock right inside the tree-top feeling. Late in the afternoon of the second day I place my ear to the pine's trunk and listen for a while to the heartbeat. Then hardly able to hear my own voice over the wind-roar all around me I whisper into the bark that soon I must descend. *** THE TROGON Next day, down next to the stream but keeping away from the perfect campground, a round boulder near the bank is perfect for clothes washing, and tree branches hanging low over the stream are perfect for drying. After the morning's scrubbing and hanging of clothes I sit on a boulder in mid- stream, staring blankly into deep shadows pooled behind a sycamore along the stream bank. A pale spot among the sun flecks twitches, and automatically my binoculars rise for a look. Silent and unmoving, an Elegant Trogon -- called Coppery-tailed Trogon in older books -- perches gazing right back at me. Now, from a Northern birder's point of view, the five "most exotic" kinds of Mexican birds are probably the tinamous; parrots and parakeets; motmots; toucans... and; trogons. With their size, bright colors and stubby tails, Trogons look a little like parrots, but they lack the parrot's sharply downcurved beak. The Trogon Family, the Trogonidae, is represented in the U.S. only in extreme southeastern Arizona, by the Elegant Trogon, and, very rarely, the Eared Trogon. Though some of the thirty-seven or so of the Earth's trogon species occur in Asia and Africa, trogons are mainly tropical American birds, with nine species breeding in Mexico. The trogon before me now is behaving typically for trogons. They like to perch in fairly secluded, hidden locations, remaining very still. This lifestyle makes sense for trogons, whose main food is small fruits, with only occasional insects. Thus their diet is not nearly as energy-rich as that of a pure carnivore or nectar sipper. Trogons need time for fruits to work their way through lengthy intestines while enzymes break down the fruits' complex carbohydrates. They grab a fruit, then sit quietly as it digests. Trogons have their own peculiar manner of "grabbing fruit." They flutter up to a small fruit and without landing take hold of it in their stubby, thick beaks, the upper mandibles of which are equipped with serrated edges. Not letting go, and most likely "sawing" at the fruit's moorings with those serrated mandible-edges, they simultaneously let the momentum and weight of their chunky bodies help them snap the fruit from its point of attachment. It all happens very quickly. Within five seconds a trogon can leave its perch, acquire a fruit, and then be back on its perch placidly digesting. Most birds have four toes directed forward, with one toe pointed backward. A few, the best known of which are woodpeckers and parrots, have zygodactyl feet, on which two toes are in front and two behind. On normal zygodactyl feet the first and fourth toes are directed backward. However, there is one bird family in which the first and second toes are directed backward, not the first and fourth. This is the trogon family. The special word characterizing trogon feet is heterodactyl. When I need to identify a trogon first I note whether the belly area is red or yellow, for all Mexican trogon bellies are one or the other. Then I make a mental snapshot of the barring on the tail's undersides, for it is true that trogon tails are bar-coded. The sketch at the right shows the tails of males of several species. Female tails are usually a bit different. Usually I hear trogons before I see them. They make very distinctive, low, nasal-sounding, far-carrying, monotonous calls like cow-cow-cow- cow... However, the Elegant Trogon I'm seeing now deep inside the sycamore's shadows looks at me for fifteen minutes never making a peep and then in a wink of the eye silently flutters away. It's strictly by accident that I've seen this species, for I just happened to be staring at the very spot where it was. It hadn't even crossed my mind to be looking here for trogons. *** DIPPERS Just opposite to the secretive, silent manner of trogons, all day long, up and down the middle of the stream, shrilly calling with excited-sounding trills and musical runs, two American Dippers fly low over the water very often passing right by my sitting rock. Related to thrushes and wrens, only four dipper species exist in the whole world, though dippers as a group are found throughout much of the Earth's uplands. They all have the same roundish, short-tailed, long-legged shape and all live along mountain streams with cool or cold, clear, flowing water. And the ones I've seen always struck me as irrepressibly hyperactive. Dippers eat aquatic larvae of insects, especially those of beetles and caddisflies, and moths, snails, small fish, and fish eggs. Not only do they work along the water's edge like sandpipers, they also float atop water like ducks, and, incredibly, "fly" underwater, and walk along the stream's floor as they forage. They can fly from below the water's surface into the air, and visa versa, almost as if they simply don't recognize the boundary between water and air. Underwater, a movable membrane over the nostrils keeps water out. When operating above water but in the spray of a waterfall, another membrane, the "nictitating membrane," slides over their eyes. Since the water in mountain streams is often very cold, the dipper's plumage is well insulated with a thick undercoat of down. Dippers have preen glands about ten times the size of any other songbird (ducks aren't songbirds), which provide the oil used for waterproofing their plumage during preening. *** BIRDLIST #4 Here is this stop's Official List: October 13 latitude 27º25'N, longitude 108º04'W MEXICO: Chihuahua; ±5 kms east and upstream of Bahuichivo; elev. ±1,650 m (±5,400 feet); oak-pine forest in canyon 1. Turkey Vulture 2. Red-tailed Hawk 3. Elegant Trogon 4. Northern (Red-shafted) Flicker 5. Yellow-bellied Sapsucker 6. Gray-breasted (Mexican) Jay 7. Steller's Jay 8. Common Raven 9. American Dipper 10. Canyon Wren 11. Spotted Wren 12. Brown-backed Solitaire 13. Ruby-crowned Kinglet 14. Yellow-rumped (Audubon's) Warbler 15. Painted Redstart Of the List's two non-U.S. species, the Brown-backed Solitaire is distributed from approximately here, southern Chihuahua, south through the Mexican highlands to Honduras. The Spotted Wren is a purely Mexican bird, found only in oak-pine woods and semi-open dry country from here south through the uplands to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. This is a large wren, some eighteen centimeters long (seven inches). It's closely related to the Cactus Wren of the U.S.'s southwestern desert. *** ROCK IN A STRANGE PLACE Deciding that after two days of not being seen it's now more or less safe to camp along the stream, in late afternoon I scout for a camping spot there. Well hidden behind a tangle of briars, eroded into a vertical rock face about five feet above the little stream's floodplain, I find a cavity almost too perfect to be true. Perfectly dry, a little longer than I am, and deep enough for my whole body to fit into, nature could not have provided a better sleeping platform. An egg-size rock lies in the hollow's exact center. The rock is of a curious shape, color, and texture, completely different from the material forming surrounding cliffs and boulders. Clearly, someone has carried this rock from some distance away and left it here on purpose. Has someone just wanted to see if the rock is still here the next time they drop by and look? Or might this person be generous enough to simply wish to greet me, the wandering stranger, no matter who I am, no matter what I'm doing, and no matter when I come here? I prefer to think it's the latter. I like this concept, and as darkness comes and I feel snug and safe in my hidden hollow, I come up with this idea: Someone has sent a greeting to me. Now I pass it along to you, and I hope that someday when you are properly sensitized and alert, in just such a subtle manner as has happened here, you will leave a special rock in a perfect place, keeping the greeting alive. HOT & STEAMY AT TÉMORIS STATION October 16, 1996 Between Bahuichivo and the next train stop in the direction of the Pacific lowlands the elevation drops another 650 meters (2100 feet). Even though the two stations lie only thirty straight- line kilometers apart (about eighteen miles), the drop produces enormous changes in vegetation. My ticket for the next station reads Témoris. The diesel-powered train lumbers along slowly providing sensational views into the canyon. Since the cars are old- style I can hang over the bottom half of the two-part door at the end of the last car. Standing there I feel increasingly warmer air gush around me and when I look around the side of the train and see an interesting flower or leaf coming up it's easy enough to lean out and snatch it as it passes by. As the track plummets the vegetation changes and I know the birds are changing, too. At around 1,200 meters (3,900 feet), pine forest abruptly yields to thorn forest in which spiny acacias dominate. After these days of solemn, blue-green pines, what a pleasure to see luxuriant thickets of elephant's-eye-high Castor Bean with broad, star-shaped, glossy, yellow-green leaves shimmering in the dazzling sunlight. Agaves and cacti crown rocky ledges along the track. Among the cacti are species of prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, cholla cactus, columnar cactus, and a spectacular, giant organpipe species. Eventually the train eases into a settlement. With sweat beading on my forehead my eyes drink in the passing tableau: Scarlet hibiscus blossoms explode inside dark green shadows; succulent papaya trees laden with ripening yellow fruit; crowded thickets of glossy-leafed banana trees; guava trees heavy with yellow guavas, and ;children playing along the track, dirty, healthy, happy-looking children, their white teeth and brown skin glistening in the sunlight. Through the engine's diesel fumes I smell random odors of wet, green herbage, ripening and rotting fruit, the perfume of orange blossoms mingling with the emanations of outdoor toilets and standing pools of sewage, and, from the little open-walled restaurant across the parking lot to which I direct myself, the smell of wood smoke, hot coffee, hot tortillas, hot-sauce, and hot refried beans. *** FIG-TREE CAMP This is Estación Témoris, or Témoris Station, they tell me. The real Témoris lies over the mountain. Here there are only a few houses and a couple of little stores, nothing more, so I'll have to take a taxi to Témoris. I tell them I'd like to walk for the exercise. Of course, my real plan is to follow the river downstream and make camp. Water in the river is so low that it can be crossed by jumping from rock to rock. However, the gravelly, bolder- strewn, unvegetated flood plain portion is broad enough to hold a baseball diamond. Obviously there are times when unimaginable amounts of water rush through here sending house-size boulders rolling and scouring away even the willows. Cliffs along both sides of the floodplain rise almost vertically to towering, round-top peaks. Two craggy volcanic necks frame the river downstream. The view downstream reminds me of Japanese watercolor scenes of an impossibly pretty landscape. After about an hour of hiking below town, at the edge of the barren floodplain, a large fig tree has accumulated enough level soil among roots behind it for the tent to be pegged there. The fig's branches are heavy with green, spherical, marble- size, inedible figs. The tent is erected and a poncho and some trousers are spread across its roof to break its contour lines -- to help camouflage it. It's so deeply shaded and weedy below the fig that from just a few feet away the tent becomes invisible. It's a good site. However, as the sun dips behind the high peaks, a melancholy murkiness spreads across the valley's floor, even though dusk is still hours away. I lie in the tent cooling off, listening to mosquitoes thronging outside the tent's screen window. *** WATCHFUL VIREO In the late afternoon I sit on a boulder next to the fig's smooth, slate-gray trunk. Not three arm-lengths away, a Solitary Vireo alights on one of the tree's lower branches, assumes a comfortable-looking perching position, and cocks his head slightly. He holds his head sideways so that his left eye, highlighted with a thin eye-ring, stares exactly at me. He makes not a sound and twitches not a feather. In such a manner this bird perches for a solid hour, absolutely unmoving, always with that left eye riveted right on me. [UPDATE: The Solitary Vireo's taxonomy is complex. Some authors separate the Solitary Vireo into the Blue-headed, Cassins and Plumbeous Vireos. Judging from distribution maps in Howell & Webb's field guide, this could have been either the Cassin's or Plumbeous Vireo.] Though it would be interesting to see just how long this bird can look at me, after an hour I want to move to another rock. The moment I stand up the vireo takes flight. He lands in the top of a nearby tree and for a full minute goes into a paroxysm of alternately hopping and flitting about, and ruffling his feathers -- giving a clear impression of "letting off steam" after his period of intense observation and inactivity. At the minute's end, he flies away. I have never seen a bird behave like this. At dusk, however, he returns to another nearby perch and continues his earlier intense watchfulness until darkness enshrouds all, and I feel my way into the tent. Awaiting sleep, I can't shake the feeling that the vireo's behavior is downright spooky. I wonder what a superstitious person would make of the visit? Here in the shadowy belly of an almost supernatural-looking canyon, I wonder what omens, what kinds of vision, what spirits or apparitions a mind could attribute to this little bird's behavior if one just allowed the mind to wander... ? *** JAKAJAKAJAKAJKAJAKA... !!! At daybreak the thermometer reads 19.5ºC (67º F). Sunlight kindles the peaks, but here on the canyon floor it remains somber and quiet. Certain hesitant-sounding peeps, quickly smothered outbursts of song, and faint, drawn-out whistles break the hush from time to time, and surely these are voices of interestingly rare and exotic species. However, I can't identify them and can't get a glimpse of what's making them. An hour passes but sunlight makes hardly any progress entering the canyon. The whole canyon remains more than half asleep. Jakajakajakajakajaka... !!! Godzilla thrusting his scaly head above the fig tree could not be more shocking than the sudden explosion of this shrill, frenzied call sounding very much like a squealing tire on a gangster's car. There's a beating of wings and then three silhouettes materialize from the fig tree's shadows and in loose formation sail across the canyon. Big birds, these, with long tails and long necks ending in little heads. They look like archaeopteryxes, those half-bird, half-reptile bird- ancestors living 150 million years ago during the late Jurassic period. The three primeval silhouettes come to rest in another giant fig across the river. Binoculars reveal them to be the northern form of the West Mexican Chachalaca, a mostly brown, slender, turkeylike bird with a wingspread of some eighty-five centimeters (thirty- three inches). Mexico has three Chachalaca species and all are impressive, but this northern race of the western species is the most handsome of all. Its belly and the tip of its tail are possessed of a rusty red hue that in such a gloomy canyon as this appears to radiate warm light. When I began birding in Mexico about thirty years ago, I was sure that chachalacas would soon disappear. They were conspicuous birds and men in the countryside often were met carrying guns in the hope of running across them, for chachalacas are favorite hunting fare. However, today in most of the country chachalacas seem as common as ever. Probably that's because they do well in weedy, overgrown areas, such as abandoned cornfields. Also, they are less persnickety than most birds with regard to their food, eating a wide variety of fruit, seeds, leaves, and insects. What a pleasure to watch these birds walking along the big fig's massive horizontal branches, breathing through their open beaks, and their heads atop those long necks pumping like a chicken's when it walks. There's something ungainly about chachalacas, something in the character of a lanky, loose-jointed teenage boy with big feet and a gigantic Adam's apple. Watching chachalacas, you just like them. *** DEEP IN THE CANYON'S SHADOW By the time the chachalacas glide into a thicket behind the big fig, sunlight has begun reaching mid-slope on the valley's opposite wall. Far above, birds can be heard heartily singing, and the binoculars can barely pick them up flying from rock to rock. However, down here, things remain calm, chilly, and clammy. With the binoculars I vacantly scan the tangled wall of trees and woody vines across the boulder-strewn floodplain. This random searching discovers two Brown-backed Solitaires, the magical singers from Bahuichivo, silently and unmovingly perched side by side, simply gazing into the valley like a couple of married folk at breakfast staring from the kitchen window. Sexes are similar in this species, but I have to believe that these are male and female. In the canyon's continuing gloom a Spotted Sandpiper -- in winter plumage immaculately spotless -- comes gliding down the stream and lands right before me. Spotted Sandpipers are plain- looking little wading birds who bob their tails as they walk, and who are common as sin wherever water occurs nearly throughout the Americas. One reason they are so common may well be that Spotted Sandpipers are polyandrous. By that I mean that female Spotted Sandpipers entertain more than one male mate. During the breeding season the female typically lays in succession up to four sets of eggs, of four eggs each, and she supplies each nest with a compliant male who incubates the clutch. The female may incubate the season's final clutch herself. If a male loses his clutch of eggs to a predator, the female quickly replaces it with a new set. Female Spotted Sandpipers are a quarter larger than the males, and as such defend the nesting territories while the male incubates. Females also fight each other in competition for males. *** SUNLIGHT REACHES THE CANYON FLOOR Sunlight at last penetrates into the canyon's deep-seated belly but the anticipated outburst of bird activity doesn't materialize. The early flush of bird activity glimpsed on the cliffs above has already dissipated there but birdlife on the canyon floor remains as subdued as ever. Birds do appear here and there, but they are the expected species doing the expected things. Turkey Vultures circle high above. A Great Blue Heron alights on a boulder downstream, spots me, then leaps into the air with its wings spread 175 centimeters wide (nearly six feet). American Dippers occasionally bolt up and down the stream just as at Bahuichivo. A Black Phoebe works the river systematically, first perching conspicuously atop this rock, then that one, frequently darting out to snatch flying insects in mid air. One species already encountered during the grassland-mesquite stop deserves special mention if only because it is so thoroughly to be expected here. Today, right on cue, it appears among thick bushes next to the river. It's the Wilson's Warbler, shown at the right, a mostly yellow, slender little bird, incessantly working among streamside branches stretching over the water reaching for light. The bird darts beneath this leaf, then that one, flits a tiny distance, pokes its tiny, slender bill into miniscule angles between leaf petioles and the stems they arise from, habitually twitches its tail, flits a little farther or maybe does an aerial cartwheel to catch something too small to show through binoculars, suddenly hops onto side- branches to snap up spiders or mites, and it does most of this poking and bill-snapping so fleetingly that once it's over it's hard to say whether it happened at all. Frenetic activity is typical warbler foraging behavior, but the pace of the Wilson's Warbler is more lively than most. Témoris lies a little north of the winter range the field guide describes for Wilson's Warblers. The winter range extends from central and southern Mexico all the way south through Central America to Panama. Therefore, probably the bird seen now is just resting during its continuing migration south. Moreover, since this is so late in the migrating season, it's a good bet it has come from the northern part of the species' summer range. After some thirty years of birding in Mexico, my impression is that this species is probably the most ubiquitous, or at least the most frequently seen, wintering songbird of all of Mexico. This is curious to me since in the eastern US I seldom see it. *** BUTTERFLY FLOOD Dazzling sunlight bakes the canyon's floor through late morning and into the afternoon. In mid-afternoon the temperature reaches its maximum for the day of 29.5º C (85º F) and the wind picks up and gushes down the canyon in a hot, unremitting flow. The remarkable thing is that this hot, too-rough wind carries with it a bounty of orange-yellow butterflies. Not Monarchs, these, but a smaller, less boldly marked species, more yellow than orange. At first there are just a few gaily flitting above sparkling water and among hippopotamus-size boulders. As butterfly numbers increase, it becomes apparent that four out of five butterflies are heading downriver, with the rest en route the opposite direction. Most fly about waist high above the water but a few soar high, and the binoculars reveal some flying so high that the naked eye can't see them. There are thousands of them, thousands... By four o'clock the passage of orange- yellow butterflies is general, and overwhelming. A single glance across the canyon reveals dozens at a time, and the view down the canyon is like looking into an orange and yellow dust storm. Let the eyes drift out of focus, and the butterflies become a diffuse, apricot-colored river, and I am on the river's bed, looking up through the water. *** MAGPIE JAYS In late afternoon the canyon wall across the river darkens with its own shadow so that the still-lit butterflies flowing downstream over the river appear as thousands and thousands of bright, pulsating points of light. The mood of this strange and beautiful scene is suddenly shattered when three crow-size, long-crested, streamer- tailed, boldly blue, white, and black Black-throated Magpie Jays kite from the wall of my side of the canyon across the river to the other wall. The stately passage of these large, elegant birds above the river of yellow butterflies, all highlighted by tropical sunlight with the dark canyon wall behind them, is thrilling. Magpie jays are related to North America's Steller's Jays and Blue Jays but, whereas Steller's Jays are only about twenty-eight centimeters long (eleven inches) and the Blue Jay a bit shorter, Black-throated Magpie Jays reach over seventy centimeters (about twenty-eight inches). About two-thirds of that length is tail. The dark blue tail, embellished along its edges with white spots, stiffly streams behind the birds as they fly across the river. It's obvious from the birds' steady flight that the tails stabilize the flight through what must be highly unstable air. When not flying, maybe the long tail can be problematical. I watch a jay perched on a limb inside a tree across the river try to turn in the opposite direction, but the tail catches on neighboring branches. The jay works himself along the branch to a more open spot but again it's the same thing. Later I watch a jay perching quietly on a limb minding its own business when a rogue updraft catches that tail, carries it upwards like the handle of an old water pump, and the poor jay topples over as if an invisible hand were pushing him from behind. Why has nature equipped this species with such an impractical tail? Both males and females have them, so it's not a case like the peacock's, where the male's tail impresses the female. It's not to counteract the aerodynamic effects of the large crest, for Steller's Jays also have large crests. After thinking about it for a while, the only conclusion I can draw is that Black-throated Magpie Jays have long tails with white spots along their edges because, having them, they are so pretty. Sometimes Mother Nature simply expresses herself with panache. *** VULTURE-MIMICKING HAWK In late afternoon, the whole canyon again in deep shadows, I sit on a rock near the fig tree. Upriver, a large, dark bird appears flying low down the middle of the valley, directly toward me. The binoculars reveal a powerfully built black hawk. As the bird approaches I focus the binoculars closer and closer, until the big hawk spreads its wings and breaks its flight directly over my head. When I twist around for a better look the bird realizes that it's not alone and flies away. The field guide carries a whole page of illustrations of "Black Birds of Prey Overhead," pinpointing subtle differences between eleven species, but I didn't see all I needed for a solid identification. With ninety percent certainty I'll say that it was a Zone- tailed Hawk, but that's not good enough for the Official List. One reason Zone-tailed Hawk are interesting is that they mimic Turkey Vultures. They soar with them circling in the sky holding their wings in a shallow V just like vultures. Prey on the ground familiar with the vultures' innocent circling pay less attention than they should, and sometimes pay with their lives. *** BIRDLIST #5 Here is this stop's Official List: October 16: latitude 27º16'N, longitude 108º16'W MEXICO: Chihuahua; ±5 kms southwest and downstream of Estación Témoris; elev. ±1,000 m (3,300 feet); tropical deciduous forest with thorn forest element in large canyon with stream and considerable gravel and boulders 1. Turkey Vulture 2. American Kestrel 3. West Mexican Chachalaca 4. Great Blue Heron 5. Spotted Sandpiper 6. Belted Kingfisher 7. Yellow-bellied Sapsucker 8. Black Phoebe 9. Black-throated Magpie Jay 10. American Dipper 11. Canyon Wren 12. Blue Mockingbird 13. Brown-backed Solitaire 14. Solitary Vireo 15. Wilson's Warbler *** ANOTHER SPOOKY VISIT Early on the second morning I break camp and return up the canyon toward Estación Témoris. Again it's the time of somber shadows and from the deepest of those shadows, inside heaps of vines sprawling over bushes and rocks, there come once more the hesitant-sounding peeps, drawn-out whistles, and quickly smothered outbursts of song so peculiar to this canyon's somber hours. Where my foot trail joins the gravel road leading upslope to Témoris the town, from a viney heap cascading over an embankment there arises a single note so sharp and piercing that at first I think it can be nothing but a person right beside me trying to catch my attention with a whistle. But there is no one. Once again, shear luck carries my gaze deep into the thicket where I spot a bird's silhouette. The binoculars reveal a Blue Mockingbird, a wholly dark-blue bird, except for the black bandit's-mask across its face, and eerie, red eyes... This species is not know as a particularly mysterious or enigmatic one. Its general haunts are woods, brush, and second growth. Yet right now this weird single note and the silent red eye staring from within deep shadows create an unearthly mood. A chill passes over me, setting my hairs on edge. My last moments on the canyon floor perfectly balance the first ones, when the Solitary Vireo so uncannily watched me upon my arrival. It's as if a spirit of this gloomy canyon wished to tell me that it was watching me, and now tells me that I have been watched. What notions might a superstitious person come up with? *** ON THE ROAD TO TÉMORIS The gravel road to Témoris begins in tropical deciduous forest next to the river. Mostly there are broadleaf trees that will lose their leaves sometime during the dry season, from approximately November to May. Soon the road climbs into thorn forest composed mostly of spiny bushes and small trees, especially common among which are various species of acacia. The binoculars clearly reveal pine forest atop the canyon's walls. The hike up the canyon wall is a pure joy. The road snakes in and out of sunlight while calls of Brown-backed Solitaires echo continually in the background. Small, noisy flocks of Gray-breasted Jays roam along the slopes like bands of teenage boys out on the town. Two species of brilliantly yellow-and-black orioles, the Black- vented and Scott's Orioles, appear on open snags, seeming like ornaments on Christmas trees. A third oriole, probably the Streak-backed, gets away. Occasionally thickets of a weedy Mimosa appear along the road bearing spectacular heads of red flowers. These are abuzz with hummingbirds zipping about so fast that seeing their field marks is hard. I put the backpack in some shade, sit down and lean back on it, and after about twenty minutes of catching exceedingly brief glimpses of the birds I manage to determine that the hummers possess extensive areas of emerald-green, and that dark rufous- purple appears in their wings and tail. This is enough to enable an entry in the notebook: Berylline Hummingbird. The higher I climb, the less the black flies plague me, and the cooler and drier the air becomes, ever more agreeable. Among pines at the very top it feels like Lake Arareko again. The road winds past a few widely spaced, recently built cabins, which are rough- hewed, and spattered with mud. Women spreading washed clothing to dry on shrubs have loads of kids around their feet, and are themselves gaunt and washed-out looking. The dogs here all behave as if they expect me to throw rocks at them. *** INTO TÉMORIS Finally I round a corner and there's Témoris in a shallow valley below. It looks like any Mexican town with a population of about 1,500, and sounds that way, too. Even from a kilometer away there is a continual din of Diesel-engine noise, a sawmill's buzz, a merchant with a loudspeaker hawking bananas, papayas, and pineapples, the school bell ringing, dogs barking and roosters crowing. All this is remarkable because the binoculars show that the single gravel road leading into town from the other side is as narrow, pot-holed, and untraveled as this one. Témoris has one street paved for a short distance and on that brief paved section there's something of a traffic jam! Témoris is the best tempest in a teapot I've ever seen. In town I'm directed to the house of Manuela Guerrera, known to fix meals for strangers. She is astonished that a man like me comes from so far away just to look at birds. It is a revelation to her and something she will be talking about, I judge from her amazement, for years to come. She says that everyone in Témoris is like everyone else, and that, typically, even people who visit Témoris are only like people already there. But, a man like me, just looking at birds... I ask her if she knows anything about birds. "Absolutely nothing," she replies with an exasperated shrug of the shoulders. "Except for the swallows. They come in the spring, April maybe, perch on the wires across the street and they look here and they look there and they fly around, they make nests, they raise their young, and then they fly away in the fall. They left here several weeks ago." Manuela probably refers to Barn Swallows or Violet-green Swallows. Dozens of the latter right now line up along a wire just down the street, twittering to one another and flitting about as excitedly as if it were the middle of summer. I ask my hostess if my plan of reaching the Pacific lowlands by taking the road on the other side of town is a good one. It's impossible, she tells me, because water is over the road now and I might get stuck for days waiting to cross the low spot. The only dependable route to the coast is by train. Visualizing myself stranded along a flooded bank someplace inside a cloud of black flies, I decide that hiking back the way I have just come would not be unpleasant. *** OAK-ELF CAMP Not far from where the road begins descending toward the river, a narrow ridge projects a hundred meters or so from the road into the canyon, then drops precipitously. The ridge is overgrown with a single species of low- spreading, gnarled, scrubby oak. Because the ridge is so exposed to winds through the canyon, a stiff breeze streams through the oaks all the time. Since the oaks' leaves are leathery and crisp, and the twigs are hard and rigid, as the wind beats leaves and twigs together, it's noisy within the oaks. A thick carpet of dry, brittle oak leaves carpets the ground, so every step beneath the trees is accompanied by loud crunches. Here is where I camp for the night. The wind blows all night, the noise never ceases, the moon reels above the canyon, leaves blow onto my tent and scrape as they slide down the sides, a skunk leaves its odor lingering despite the wind, and I lie suspended inside this strange universe more than once laughing into the wind and moonlight, and then laughing at my own laughing. Awakening the next morning, an oceanic body of dry quaking, leafy rustling, woody knocking, breezy sighing, and tent flapping has insinuated itself into my soul. As if I have danced with elves all night, I am weary but fresh, and still giggling. *** ON A HIGH ROCK On a high rock with a good view into the canyon, I take position and watch as the valley awakens. Hours pass fast as I savor the simple watching of birds doing what they will. Ravens soar along the cliff's edge across the canyon. A hidden Canyon Wren someplace sings its piercing, descending, laughing-to-dry- heaves song. The glorious Brown-backed Solitaire's strain shimmers continually in the background. A House Wren claiming a shadowy heap of weeds nearby whines at my intrusion. A small flock of Gray-breasted Jays raucously drifts all over the canyon. Rufous-capped, Townsend's, and Wilson's Warblers, and a Painted Redstart, all belonging to the Wood Warbler Family, lithely forage for bugs and spiders in treetops just below me. Nothing spectacular happens the whole morning, but each tiny event is so fascinating, so perfectly fitting, that the hours blossom into a meditation, and feel like minutes passing. *** GILBERTO ALMERÓN GONZALEZ In the afternoon a barefoot fellow on a burro enters the ridgetop cornfield above the road behind me. He dismounts, stretches, gazes into the canyon awhile, spots me on my rock, removes his broad sombrero and waves at me with it. He spends half an hour wandering all over the cornfield, which has already been picked and now is straw- colored and dry, then mounts up and rides away. Sometime later, here he comes riding down the road, coming for a visit. Gilberto Almerón Gonzalez is a handsome, bright-eyed, self-assured boy of about fourteen, and his burro's name is Mentiras, which in Spanish means "lies." Gilberto's little brother told his mother he wanted to eat squash, so Gilberto and Mentiras were sent to the cornfield to look for them. Planting squash among the corn is an ancient Indian practice, but Gilberto says his family doesn't belong to any Indian group. Animals seem to have eaten all the squashes except one about the size of a basketball, one with such a hard rind that Gilberto says he'll use a rock to break it open. Gilberto holds my field guide to birds in the manner of someone utterly unfamiliar with how books should be held. He tries hard to be delicate with it but ends up scrunching and soiling th