More from Mexico

We got a lot of lifers on our recent trip, Ray is estimating 50 but I haven't actually tabulated yet. The tricky part is that we only have photos of a few. Many were glimpses through foliage, or, worse yet, came during the time my camera battery had died and I had left the spare at the hotel.  (Talk about being disgusted with one's self!)

Here are a few more of the new ones for which I do have photos.  Some of my photos, the ones I'm not posting, ID the bird, but are fuzzy or grainy so have no aesthetic appeal.

My goal was to see colourful birds, trogons and parrots being at the top of that list.  Here is the only trogon I was able to photograph.  This Elegant Trogon was directly over our heads, he (she?) sat there for a long time calling something that was somewhere between a cough and the caw of a crow.

Next is a San Blas Jay, a bird that does not live at San Blas.  Something to do with two jays looking similar, and the people naming them thinking they were one. When they separated them out, here is the one that kept the name it didn't deserve. This photo was taken at the Botanical Gardens in Puerto Vallarta where they attract birds with feeders, I think this guy is eating papaya, but we also saw them in a more natural habitat, but further away from my camera.

The new bird we saw the most often, almost everywhere we went, was the Yellow-winged Cacique.  It is pronounced Ka SEEK.  The Spanish speakers pronounce the final e turning it into Ka SEEK eh.

Not colourful at all, but this pretty little bird looks like he should be migrating to Saskatchewan every spring.  The White-throated Thrush.  Formerly called a robin, till the world birders decided that New World thrushes can only be called robins if they have red on their fronts, otherwise they are thrushes.  Apparently birders in the Old World rather resent our using the word robin to describe a bird not related to their robin.  Having seen their very pretty little robin, I can almost understand. However, the New World birders won a partial victory by explaining that the name robin is so culturally accepted here that changing our robin to a thrush would never succeed. No one would use the new name.

Following this same decision, this Rufous-backed Robin gets to keep his name. You will have a hard time seeing the red chest in this photo. Turns out, the Rufous-backed Robin became a bit of a Nemesis bird to me.  He just would not let me take a good photo, no matter where I saw him. This was the best.  From the front he resembles the American Robin with the striped throat of the thrush above.

Another bird we saw several times.  The Stripe-headed Sparrow.

While the above photos were taken in the general area of Puerto Vallarta, the last three photos are  from San Blas.

Shore birds are often easier to photograph. They are more inclined to stand around than perching birds. We didn't see as many new shorebirds because many of the birds here were the same as those we had in Mazatlán.   Two I had been hoping for, and saw, were
the Boat-billed Heron

 and the Bare-throated Tiger Heron.

The last photo is of a Spotted Rail, reportedly a shy bird who surprised our guide by posing for several minutes.  It was late in the afternoon (6:21 local time) and the mangroves were hiding the sun. I changed the camera to a low light setting and was impressed with what it could do.