IVORY-BILLED WOODCREEPER

Creeper, it says, not Woodpecker. Woodcreepers are tropical American birds, and 13 species are listed for Mexico. You can see the big-billed, heavily spotted, generally rusty-red species frequenting the cenote's shadowed tree-trunks, the Ivory-billed Woodcreeper, below:

Though woodcreepers aren't closely related to anything up north, they forage on tree trunks and limbs like woodpeckers, and in shape, form and behavior are very much like the North's Brown Creeper. Brown Creepers are little birds, however, only 4-¾ inch long (12 cm). Our Ivory-billed Woodcreeper, XIPHORHYNCHUS FLAVIGASTER, averages around 9-½ inches (24 cm).

Sometimes woodcreepers are hard to identify because the species are so similar. In this part of the Yucatan it's not so bad because only three species occur and they're fairly distinct from one another. However, in lowland Chiapas around the ruins of Palenque I've spent many hours trying to separate that area's eleven potentially found species. Woodcreepers tend to hectically flit from shadowy spot to shadowy spot and you end up anguishing over how spotty the spotty backs and breasts you glimpsed where and what the spots' shapes were, how pale the pale bills were, how reddish the reddish backs and breasts, etc.

I hear this bird more than see it. As it glides from tree to tree it issues occasional sharp, explosive calls. It seems to keep a pretty tight schedule, too, arriving at about the same time each morning, rushing through the cenote area, then leaving.

Ivory-billed Woodcreepers are distributed from Mexico to Costa Rica. They're considered common in forests, forest edges, plantations and mangroves.