Camille Cusumano

A fowl obsession in Mexico

By Camille Cusumano

Armando Santiago Navarrette is impressively quick on the draw. Where I see only the dense canopy of the Mexican cloud forest’s coffee bushes, palms, gumbo limbo, and soft-shell fig trees, he sees a rufous-bellied chachalaca, a citreoline trogon, a red-headed tanager, or a golden-cheeked woodpecker. Upon each sighting, he positions and focuses his high-powered spotting scope. As I look through the lens, he flips open to a colorful line drawing of the scoped bird in A Guide to the Birds of Mexico by Steven Howell. All this takes place in under 30 seconds.

A fluent English speaker who has worked as a guide for more than thirty years, Armando has led bird lovers from as far as Great Britain, Canada, Germany, and, of course, the United States around his native San Blas. His tranquil Pacific Coast fishing village of 45,000 sits along a major flyway, a pleasant two-and-a-half-hour drive north of Puerto Vallarta.

“I have never met such cooperative fowl,” I joke with Armando after I have just logged species numbers 27 and 28—a black-throated magpie jay and Sinaloa crow—on my newly initiated life list. Both are among some 20 species, along with the purplish-backed jay, rusty-crowned ground-sparrow, and red warbler, that are found only in West Mexico.
I hadn’t planned on becoming a birder on this, my first visit to San Blas since the late 1970s. My boyfriend Dan and I had driven up from Puerto Vallarta only to take a couple of days’ backward look at my old haunt. We checked into the Hacienda Flamingos on Calle Juarez, formerly a weathered, but cheap and sturdy, 100-plus-year-old hotel where I had made my nest in ’70s.

Having noted on our drive into town some unsightly damage from the 2002 Hurricane Kenna—downed power lines and peeling or abandoned buildings—I was delighted to find that the Flamingos, had morphed into an upscale gem with gorgeous décor and landscape. Our spacious room with marble bathroom opened to an arcaded courtyard patio with leather chairs.

After a bathe in the aquamarine pool, I was content to laze, taking in a riot of color—a yellow-and-lilac stone bench here, a terra-cotta wall overhung with yellow trumpet vine and magenta bougainvillea there. But Dan, a de facto naturalist never content to leave stones unturned, or feathers un-keyed, had found in the hotel lobby this 38-page booklet, A Birding Guide to San Blas, Nayarit by Thomas P. Ryan.

In it, Ryan recommends three local guides, and it was serendipitous that we chose the first name on the list, Armando’s. When we called him to set up a trip, he must have run (flown, perhaps) over to the hotel, because he was there in five minutes outlining our plan for the next morning: “Bring lunch, bug repellent, and water. See you at 6 a.m. sharp¬—cost is $100 for the day.”

And so at this morning’s darkest hour, he arrives cocking his ear, naming the playful hooting sound we barely notice—of a pygmy owl. We drive in our rented car for less than 30 minutes to the cloud forest above nearby La Palma and hear the call again.
Dawn breaks, and the first bird we see is the fashion-conscious russet-crowned motmot. It styles a notch in its long tail by pecking away a circle of feathers a few inches deep in the tail and it makes us think of the mullet hairdo on hipsters who similarly clear-cut their hair in a circle around their skulls.

I keep waiting for a lull between sightings. But nothing eludes Armando. His eyes are peeled, his ears are ever poised. “Here that? A happy wren. It’s very speckled.” The book is already open to the image. I’m grateful I’ve worn long cargo pants, a hat, and a Buzz-off shirt which minimize the need to swat, so I can write as fast as our chirping guide names things.

“Birders love it here,” Armando exclaims, “because they can stay in one hotel in the village and depart daily to a different habitat within a sixty-mile circle and watch an astounding variety of species: pelagic, coastal, shore, marshland, flatland, mid-mountain, and high-mountain (4,800 feet) birds. In other words, they can see migratory birds, non-migratory birds, endemic birds, occasional visitors, and vagrants. They can increase their life lists by up to 300 species in a week.”

Jump-starting my own list, which will eventually number fifty-seven species in two days under his tutelage, I’m a believer. I recall a day of birding during a trip to Belize that didn’t bring this many colored feathers to my eye.

San Blas hosts the country’s largest estuary (some 200,000 hectares), which has its headwaters in the Sea of Cortes (called the “world’s aquarium” by Jacques Cousteau). So Armando leads many tourists on sea-faring trips to watch bottle-nose dolphins or humpback whales or to fish the teeming waters. But he makes the most money at bird guiding.

He tells us that San Blas started becoming a well-known secret among birders with the publishing of a guidebook in 1969 by Peter Alden, Finding Birds in Western Mexico. In 1986, another popular book followed, Where to Find Birds in San Blas, Nayarit by Rosalind Novick and LanSing Wu.

Our spirited guide’s expertise seems so second nature that it is hard to believe his amusing account of his first bird guiding trip 30 years ago. “I identified birds solely by their color, black or brown,” he says. Today he owns 17 birding books and his enthusiasm is infectious and persuasive. When he wrote an editorial in his local newsletter column, Ecologia, criticizing well-to-do Mexicans who for personal prestige kept birds caged, a rash of these pet owners set their birds free.

Even as we look for a spot to sit, he names and describes things. “Watch this vine—it’ll tie you up like a rope. . . thrrrr, thrrrr . . . that’s the call of a jay. Ah, here’s a royal lemon tree. Taste the best citrus there is— no acid.” We squeeze the proffered fruit into our water bottles for a pleasant agua fresca. He points to an elongated maroon flower, that falls and leaves finger-size would-be banana-lings.

“The Japanese import them and make banana flower soup,” he says as we plop on rocks to eat. Butterflies flit through the forest. Armando recounts an Aztec tale for one, the papillote, that received its name for its white and papery appearance. One fritillary the color of papaya lands on this very fruit which we are sharing, then flies off. “He found his papaya—now he is looking for his mamaya,” Armando laughs.

He says we absolutely must see, the nocturnal northern potoo (Nyctibius jamaicensis), a bird that scrunches up its face by day to blend in with a tree snag as it sleeps. The line drawing reminds me of a cabbage patch doll. But we would have to take an evening trip San Blas’s Rio San Cristobal. Dan and I, overwhelmed with the spectacles of six hours and some 28 species, beg off. But we enlist Armando and his boundless energy for another early trip the following day.

We take the afternoon to look around the San Blas of my “mis-spent youth.” I tell Dan how Playboy magazine had called it a dump not worth the effort it took to get there. Which was why I had made beeline for the place that is still low-key, charmingly time-warped, and not overrun with tourists or fleshpots like PuertoVallarta.

Along with waves of other aimless gringas, I had parked my bikini-clad body under palm fronds at the still-popular nearby Matanchen Bay scoping out two-legged creatures—young bronzed surfers, domestic and foreign. We all threw back cervezas and Presidente brandy. We roasted freshly caught shark on a beach grill and ate it with our fingers. We watched ingenious Mexicans burn green coconut husks to stave off sand flies. Ah, but then, most of us spread our wings for the flyway of life.

The Flamingos, a former German consulate, is across from the remains of a 19th-century customs house, which recalls San Blas’s glory days as a port center of trade, with flamboyant Spanish galleons passing through. It was also from here that the Franciscan friars embarked on their indoctrination of the Californias.

Dan and I stroll two blocks to the plaza, where we visit the decaying old church El Templo de San Blas (circa 1810), its stone and wood, a place of worship as much for the faithful as for life forms from fungi to smut to termites. Right next to it, the never-completed newer one (La Apostolica Romana de San Blas—begun in the 1960s), also in sweet decline, stands like a metaphor for the never fully conquered spirituality of Mexico.
Off the plaza is the mercado that still purveys, among the various raw ingredients of lively Mexican cuisine, much tropical produce. We buy some sugar cane to snack on and look for the vendor whose seething slabs of chile-lime-spiked jicama were once the sole and satisfying bulk of my midday meal.

We drive down the main street, Calle H. Batallon to Borrego Beach for a pleasant sunset walk, then consider where to dine. The restaurants from the old days—Amparo’s, MacDonald’s, Diligencia, Torino’s, Las Islas—are all still there offering their simple interpretations of the fresh local shrimp, oysters, lobster, red snapper, pampano, or butterfish.

But we try a new place, El Delfin, the restaurant in Canela Garzas Hotel, where the Cordon Bleu-trained chef cooks the best meal of our trip. We start with a crisp Semillon white from Chile that pairs deliciously with the tender, chunky ceviche; the butter-sweet squid; seafood-and-goat-cheese-stuffed poblano chile in a creamy salsa verde with almonds; and grilled garlic shrimp in a caramelized brown sauce.

San Blas, with its liquid boundaries on all sides, whether ocean, lagoon, or mangrove swamp, is practically an island. So there are many places to choose from for our second outing, including a hardcore birder’s paradise, the local sewage pond. We opt for a popular La Tovara (a Nuahat word meaning “where water is”), an excursion on Rio San Cristóbal, in a panga, a motorized boat, through one of San Blas’s jungle-smothered estuaries.

As we ply the brown waters through dense mangrove, dragonflies swarm the air, vibrant red bromeliads—related to the pineapple plant—burst into view. We hear the tick tick of a Louisiana water thrush. A Mexican treefrog goes burp, burp.

Within minutes, we spot the memorable boat-billed herons (they remind me of Heckle and Jeckle), ahninga (a waterfowl that hangs its wings out to dry like cormorants), belted kingfish, calandria (a stunning black and yellow bird that builds hanging nests like over-sized beehives), and several other herons —yellow-crowned night, green, black-crowned night. Oh my.

We hardly use our binoculars. The feathered creatures appear to us in foliage, tree snags, or fly so close, we can key them quickly. A cloudy sky affords perfect flat light, too. At one turn in the lazy river, Armando is uncharacteristically quiet as he keys a bird, then hands me the binoculars.

“You are lucky—it’s a rare Colima warbler.”

I don’t tell him I’m not impressed—it’s so small . . . and brownish. (But a couple of days later I read about this very species in Mark Obmascik The Big Year, in which three inveterate birders undertake extraordinary and bank-account-breaking adventures to spot, among others, that very bird. This “tale of man, nature, and fowl obsession,” proves to be the perfect companion for the trip.)

We spot from the safety of our boat three crocodiles—looking lazy, cartoonish, and benign. Armando explains that they were almost extinct but the government brought them back through farms. They grow up to 21 feet long and live to be 100 years.
We also see several coatimundi (an odd creature somewhere between a raccoon and an anteater) lounging in trees. Crows high in a sour custard tree drop the fruit to feed turtles below. And many fat, bright green iguanas camouflage themselves by hugging branches.

“The green iguana will make you a friend in five minutes,” says Armando, “but the black iguana, never. It’s very aggressive.” He explains that in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero, the iguana eggs are a delicacy. “You pay about two pesos for 20 eggs and they taste like chicken eggs.”

Driving back to town from La Tovara—having logged 26 species—we spot what at first looks like pink flamingoes. But it’s the roseated spoonbills They mingle, just off-shore on their breeding ground along Highway 15, with the snowy and great egrets They are related to the ibis, says Armando. It’s one of the most thrilling sights—and we didn’t need binoculars.

We tell Armando that we will spend a couple of nights in San Pancho (or San Francisco) on our way back to Puerto Vallarta. Naturally, he has a bird that we must see there, the lilac-crowned parrots. “It’s easy. Just turn left as you go out of town, go under the bridge. Take the trail about 300 yards. You’ll see a flock of them. You can’t miss them.”

Easy for Armando to say.

We did just as he instructed (though to this day, I wonder if we only went 200 yards). We saw no parrots. We did see a calendria and its tenement-size nest. But heck, you can see them everywhere. Now, It’s those lilac crowns I dream of now and of that comical potoo’s scrunched up face. My list will grow by at least two next time—with Armando’s guidance, of course.

SERVICE INFORMATION:

GETTING THERE – I flew Alaska Airlines direct/nonstop from San Francisco.

SLEEPS
Hacienda Flamingos , Juarez No. 105, 63740 San Blas, Nayarit,
Tel: (323) 285-0485- 285-0930; about $77/doubles til December (seems to have gone down since my visit in 2005)
Hotel Garza Canela, Paredes #106 Sur, San Blas, Nayarit, Mexico, 63740; tel/fax: (323) 285—112; about $110/doubles including breakfast.

EATS – For breakfast or lunch, ou can get some good fish tacos and other local Mexican food at the counters in the mercado off the plaza where local eat.
For fine dining and a great wine list: El Delfin in Hotel Garza Canela.
Other good local restaurants: La Isla, Mercado y Paredes, (328) 5-04-07
McDonalds, Juárez No.73, (328) 5-04-32.

BIRDING INFO:
Look for A Birding Guide to San Blass, Nayarit by Thomas P. Ryan in Hotel Garza Canela, Hacienda Flamingoes, and other hotels in San Blas. You can also order a copy at www.sanblasbirds.com or by emailing sanblasbirds@aol.com.
The local guides:
Armando Santiago – 011-52-323-285-0859
Chencho - 011-52-323-285-0716
Manuel Lomeli - 011-52-323-285-0558

WHEN TO GO – November through April.

DRIVING: We rented a car when we arrive at Puerto Vallarta airport, from National–$230 with all taxes and full insurance for 8 days. The road near San Blas was a little potholed in areas, but nothing serious, and we heeded the guidebooks’ advice to drive only by day. You can also take a bus to San Blas from Puerto Vallarta.
Highly recommended “traveling companion”: The Big Year by Mark Obmascik, an exhilarating and inspiring account of three dogged birders competing to spot the most North American species in one year.