THE BIRDS OF CHRISTMAS

On Christmas morning as soon as it was light enough to walk around I carried my breakfast makings into the center of the rubble heap next to the building where I sleep. The rubble is what's left of the big structure where once they milled henequen but it was destroyed by a hurricane and now nothing remains of it but one wall with useless, high-hanging doors and windows, and lots of rubble. I make my campfire amidst the rubble because there's less chance there that my fire will escape. At 6AM it was 64°, foggy, and the sky was just light enough for me to see that it was going to be blue. A fine day was dawning and the fog's chilly wetness felt good.

While I composed the campfire the sky lightened minute by minute, the fog grew denser, and the morning chorus of birdsong began. These are the species I noted, in the order they came to me:

1: WHITE-WINGED DOVES, several of them, soulfully hooing from all around me out in the fog

2: GREAT KISKADEE excitedly calling his sharp ki-DEER call from Coconut Palm silhouettes between me and the eastern sky now acquiring a pink hue, and I see nothing of the bird's bold yellow, brown, white and black plumage

3: MELODIOUS BLACKBIRDS, all black, also inside the palms prettily and enthusiastically calling what- CHEER, what-CHEER

4: GOLDEN-FRONTED WOODPECKER with his zebra-striped back and red-topped head calling his rough a-a-a-a-a from somewhere behind the big ruin-wall

5: PLAIN CHACHALACAS, large, brown, wild-turkey-like birds calling from the foggy scrub beyond our walls. Their hilarious chorus is made up of very loud, fast- given, squeaky KNOCK-it-off, KNOCK-it-off calls and gruffer, lower-pitched KEEP-it-up, KEEP-it-up calls

6: FERRUGINOUS PYGMY-OWL with his pulsating, monotonic whistle gamely keeping a friendly beat with my flickering, orange campfire flame

7: YUCATAN QUAIL, looking and sounding so much like North America's Bobwhite briefly calling with sharp dog-whistles from deep within scrubby chachalaca territory

8: GREAT-TAILED GRACKLE, a large, black, slender bird erupting with sharp, sassy whistles and grinding feather-flaps from high in a big, spreading Guanacaste tree

9: TROPICAL MOCKINGBIRD issuing his warning check- call from inside an orange tree deep green with bright orange oranges, reminding me of the tangerine my friend Karen gave me for Christmas in 2003; I ate it during that morning's birding walk along Sandy Creek near Natchez, and how good it was with that day's cornbread

10: KILLDEER's sharp DEEEEE call slicing through the heavy fog from far away, surely somewhere on the rocky ground of someone's citrus orchard

11: TURQUOISE-BROWED MOTMOT articulating his hoarse look-at-YOUUUUUU call from the windmill tower rising in the fog, the bird's long, pendulous tail nervously tick-tocking beneath his gorgeous green, brown, black and turquoise body

12: RUDDY GROUND-DOVE with rusty-red body and gray head scurrying mouselike into 50-ft-long wall of abundantly orange-red-flowering Bougainvillea along the stone wall behind me, the overload of gaudy color somehow made brighter by the gray fog, and what must it be like to be a nervous little ground-dove inside such an incandescent bouquet?

13: ALTAMIRA ORIOLE, 3 of them, hunting bugs among bushel-basket-sized, diffuse, yellow inflorescence of Coconut Palm blossoms, sometimes perching atop large green coconuts, the birds' yellow-orange-and-black plumage shining against palm-frond greenness like shiny oranges in an orange tree

14: GROOVE-BILLED ANI the size and black color of a sleek grackle but somehow primitively shabby looking instead atop an arching Bougainvillea stem, holding his wings away from his body to dry and warm in the day's first direct rays of sunlight, like a Mississippi Anhinga

15: LEAST FLYCATCHER catching flies in and around a Dwarf Poinciana now past flowering but heavy with flat bean pods, and I can identify this tail- flicking, mousy-colored flycatcher only because the Least is the only species of the genus Empidonax overwintering in the Yucatan, and I know an Empidonax when I see it.

"Thank you, man," I hear myself saying as I get up from the campfire carrying my blue tin cup and chopsticks whittled from Neem-tree twigs. I feel silly saying this but somehow right now with the fog dissipating the morning feels jazzy and I'm in a groovy mood just like the morning itself breaking out with sunlight and the birds' morning chorus in full swing and I'm thinking the Creator jazzes the whole Universe, improvising, sometimes going flat, sometimes really swinging, and the whole thing at the end elegantly comes together and things are further along than just a little while ago. I please myself with this notion heading into the burning-off fog full of fried eggs, "cornbread" and two liters of steamy hot water. "Thank you, man," I say again going into the scrub whistling Silent Night so jazzed up the Tropical Mockingbird turns his head and listens as if I were a squeaky hinge.

16: SOUTHERN HOUSE-WREN brown and plain-looking as can be bubbly-singing from inside the rampant Bougainvillea wall

17: NORTHERN PARULA, little warbler gray, yellow and white, quietly but assiduously gleaning bugs inside a strangler fig tree astride a white limestone wall

18: RUFOUS-BROWED PEPPERSHRIKE like an overgrown yellow vireo with rust-red eyebrows belly-laughing its descending whistle from neighboring citrus orchard

19: INDIGO BUNTINGS, five of them, chubby, brown and nervous like sparrows in tall grass, the males looking like they're breaking out in blue measles

20: ROSE-BREASTED GROSBEAK at tip-top of Ceiba tree in brown juvenile plumage but issuing sharp PEEK call like a rosy-breasted adult

21: WHITE-EYED VIREO with yellow spectacles, white throat but no white eyes stealthily calling from dense bushes just as if he were in a Mississippi summer

22: CATTLE EGRETS, three of them, flying over, white spots in blue sky, nice curved necks, graceful, graceful, graceful

23: BLUE-GRAY GNATCATCHER like tiny gray mockingbird sometimes calling a thin, buzzy CHEEE, foraging for bugs in a Neem tree

24: PALM WARBLER mostly yellow with a bright yellow rump above its nervously wagging tail silently but assiduously gleaning bugs inside a Neem tree

25: GREAT HORNED OWL perching silently and greatly, even ponderously, a black silhouette in deep shade inside a Neem tree

27: YUCATAN JAYS, six of them, noisily complaining from fire-killed tree snags rising in seriously weedy cornfield near hacienda, and every cornstalk has been broken halfway up so that the stalk's top part hangs straight down, the ears thus pointing earthward so rain can't enter, and this is the way this farmer dries his ears of corn before picking them, but I think that this way the jays and raccoons get their share

28: BLACK VULTURE soaring now that the morning breeze is getting up

29: RUBY-THROATED HUMMINGBIRD looks like he's gathering spiderlings whose ballooning gossamers have caught in the cornfield's snaggy dead trees

30: TURKEY VULTURE soaring over henequen field

31: SHARP-SHINNED HAWK fast soaring over henequen field like kite on stiff breeze drifting southward

Amazing how by 9 AM nearly all birds just stop singing and start lying low. When I return to my casita at 10:30 AM it's 82° and a good breeze keeps the windmill busy. I stand there watching its blades whir and its piston makes a good beat and I'm thinking this has been a pretty good Christmas Day.

*****

BIRD-STARS OF CHRISTMAS DAY
Of the above 31 species, probably the prettiest and "most exotic" was the Turquoise-browed Motmot, which I see several times every day and you can see at http://ontfin.com/Fav/TBMO2.htm.

The most rarely seen here was the Sharp-shinned Hawk, a very small accipiter often spotted in Mississippi, but visiting here only during the winter. See him at http://www.ownbyphotography.com/newpage93html.htm.

The only Yucatan-Peninsula endemic species was the Yucatan Jay, which you can see at   http://www.mangoverde.com/birdsound/picpages/pic189-16-2.html.   

The kind of bird that you as a Northerner probably have heard about least was the peppershrike. You can see the Rufous-browed Peppershrike at http://www.mangoverde.com/birdsound/picpages/pic195-51-2.html.

Maybe the weirdest looking bird was the Groove-billed Ani, because of his thick, curved and grooved, Jimmy Durante beak. I'm not sure what the bill's grooves do. There's another ani species in southern Florida and the Caribbean called the Smooth-billed Ani and it does very well without grooves. You can see our groove-billed one at http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/id/htmsl/h3840pi.jpg .

In the above list, nine of the 31 species are winter visitors -- 29%. When you think about it, it's quite a change when a neighborhood is enlarged nearly a third by visitors from the outside.