Early this week, I took a birding information and his spouse from Cancún to my favourite website for Michoacán’s Scorching Nation endemics. However the enjoyable started earlier than we ever bought all the way down to the 1,000 m elevation of this website. As we drove via the municipal seat of Tzitzio, at round 1,500 m, my visitors shouted “Parrots!”. I rapidly pulled over, and proper there in the course of the city, we spent some ten minutes watching a bunch of no less than 4 lovely Lilac-crowned Amazons work their means over a local Silk Floss Tree. Many pictures have been taken, and pleasure was skilled.
It wasn’t till I began doing a little bit of analysis for this submit that I skilled, as we are saying in Mexico, sentimientos encontrados — contradictory emotions, combining pleasure and sorrow. Wikipedia instructed me that half of all of the parrots on this planet stay in cages. Now that’s a miserable truth. I additionally found that precisely half of Mexico’s 22 parrot species are at risk of extinction inside just a few years. The Lilac-crowned Amazons we noticed are thought-about endangered, though not but critically endangered.
The explanations for the decline in Mexico’s parrot inhabitants have advanced through the years. Within the 60s, 70s and 80s, huge numbers of Mexican parrots have been poached and smuggled into the US. As soon as this commerce was suppressed, poaching continued to feed a rising market inside Mexico itself. This commerce has additionally now been largely suppressed through publicity campaigns. However habitat destruction continues to hazard the nation’s remaining parrot inhabitants.
(On a private observe, these details assist clarify why, in my years of birding in Mexico, I’ve solely seen 7 of the nation’s 22 species.)
Since pictures don’t present sufficient context to evaluate dimension, I’ll point out that Lilac-crowned Amazons are over a foot lengthy (33 cm).
And but, there’s a curious aspect impact to this historical past. Through the 70s and 80s, launched Mexican (and South American) parrots started to ascertain self-sustaining populations in cities of California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida. Probably the most extraordinary instance of this entails a detailed relative of the Lilac-crowned Amazons we noticed on Monday. Northeastern Mexico’s Pink-crowned Amazons could now solely quantity round 1,000 birds of their native vary. And but, estimates of the inhabitants of Pink-crowned Amazons in southern California go as excessive as 5,000 people. One other wholesome inhabitants can now be present in southern Texas. It has typically been noticed that the survival of untamed parrot populations could sometime depend upon the reintroduction of those city birds.
I ought to point out right here that final 12 months a number of of my birding buddies and I noticed one other endangered parrot, the Yellow-headed Amazon, in our goal city of Paso Ancho. Each of those Amazons embrace coastal Michoacán of their vary.
Simply sufficient picture to verify the ID of this Yellow-headed Amazon. These parrots are a bit bigger, 37 cm.
So have been these Amazons escaped or launched pets, or did they happen naturally in Tzitzio and Paso Ancho?
Paso Ancho is 1000 m (3,300 ft.) excessive, and a great 400 km (250 miles) from the ocean. However the Río Balsas basin, on whose edge the city might be discovered, is an odd habitat. For a number of species, it’s the solely basin the place their vary extends far inland. I’ve repeatedly seen Mangrove Cuckoos there, in addition to one sighting of a Black-bellied Whistling Duck; in idea, each species ought to be restricted to the coast in western Mexico. So we couldn’t rule out our lone Yellow-headed Amazon having made its means there naturally. In jap Mexico, this species can happen far inland, and at a substantial elevation.
The case of our Lilac-crowned Amazons was much more intriguing. This parrot’s vary has at all times been restricted to Mexico’s Pacific coast. Nonetheless, it has been seen from sea stage to 2,000 m (6,600 toes) close to that coast, so Tzitzio’s 1,500 m elevation will not be a dealbreaker. Extra importantly, we noticed 4 parrots all transferring as a bunch. It appears unlikely that these would all be escaped cage birds, particularly in a city with lower than 10,000 inhabitants. (Nonetheless, I might not rule out their being the offspring of a pair of escapees.) On the very least, they appeared to symbolize a small naturalized or native inhabitants, in a habitat just like, and fairly near, their official vary. That truth provides me a little bit of hope for the way forward for these pretty birds.
One factor that struck us was that these birds have been transferring via the very heart of the city, with plenty of automobiles and other people transferring close to the tree on which they perched, very calmly. May that point out that they have been as soon as pets? I want there have been a method to know.
As typical, I’ll throw in just a few pictures of different pretty birds that we noticed that day:
My visitors have been excited to see our native Russet-crowned Motmots, that are totally different from the Motmots they get pleasure from on the Yucatán peninsula.
We bought a pleasant view of their specialised tail feathers.
The sunshine was nice for a shot of this Streak-backed Oriole.
It wouldn’t be a visit to Paso Ancho with out an encounter with a Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl.
Blue-gray Gnatcatchers are exceedingly widespread winter birds. However you possibly can’t at all times see them feeding on… what’s that, precisely?
It’s at all times shocking to search out orchids blooming wild within the semidesert thorn forest.
