We started our Oaxaca birding trip with some birding around an ancient Zapotec ruins site on the overlooking OaxacaCity. Things were very quiet and hard to come by, although for me in my very first Mexican outing there was enough to amuse, including Slaty Vireo, White-throated Towhee, Gray-breasted Woodpecker, Boucard’s Wren (see photo), Orange-billed Nightingale-thrush, and Blue Mockingbird.
Up at La Cumbre in the afternoon we ran into a Rufous-capped Brush-finch, many noisy Gray-barred Wrens, Rufous-capped and Golden-browed Warbler, Rose-throated Becard, and White-eared Hummingbird.
A pair of tits (Blue and Great) in a London park 30 years back changed my life; I became a birder, and an obsessive birder by the following weekend. Works like Bill Oddie's Little Black Bird Book and Richard Millington's A Twitcher's Diary helped in no small part to nurture this in my formative years.
30 years on I am still an avid birder but have also learnt to appreciate other sectors of the natural world, especially frogs and primates in particular, through the undoubted influence of David Attenborough The Great and others. I now work as a full-time professional tour leader for Tropical Birding Tours, and now reside in the Andes of Ecuador. I love my job, sharing birds with people provides every bit of a buzz as a lifebird, which, of course, still creates a wave of excitement every time. I have been lucky enough to see well over 6550 bird species on my travels, which does not make me any more talented than anyone else, just one that is always greedy and impatient for more, which has taken me to all seven continents, and always yearning for that ONE...MORE...B-I-R-D!
I use Swarovski binoculars & scope, & shoot with Canon 7D and Canon 400m f5.6L lens.
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