Birds of Paradise

That river/lagoon with the crocodiles looked like a likely spot for bird watching so the next morning we got up early and went for a walk along the river. 

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The path was full of locals and vacationers jogging and walking their dogs.

Right away we found a tree full of yellow-winged caciques, greater kiskadees, topical and thick-billed kingbirds.

  One of the first birds we spotted was this ferruginous pygmy owl.  We saw it every day we walked the river.

I spotted a cinnamon hummingbird, a lifer and the Bird of the Day.

The next day we found this rufous-crowned mot-mot quietly resting on a low hanging branch.

There were some beautiful big trees along the path.  

This one had pink blossoms.

The riverbed was full of snowy egrets, black-necked stilts and various herons,  including this bare-throated tiger-heron.

Other common birds included golden-cheeked woodpeckers, streaked-backed orioles and some snowbirds on their winter  vacation like yellow and Wilson's warblers, and blue-gray gnatcatchers, which we've seen in Arizona and southern Ontario. .

 New birds for us were rose-throated becards, cinnamon-bellied saltator, white-tipped and red-billed doves.

We ran into a fellow birder on vacation from Longpoint, Ontario, where he'd worked for years as a biologist in the bird observatory we'd visited last May.

Another Day in Paradise

 

The next morning we walked over to a nearby mall to find a bank machine for pesos.  The condo is right next to a river (dried up now in the dry season so more like a slough).  

Rob told us that last year he saw a crocodile on the beach in front of the condo.  So we thought the slough would be a place the crocs might hang out.  On our way back we stopped on the bridge to look for signs of crocodiles.

We did see some very suspicious footprints.

Heading back to the condo 

Later we were looking out from our room toward the slough and sure enough we spotted a crocodile in the water.

Our field trip today was to a bar called Café Roma to hear a band called Shadrack.  The singer was from Kentucky and the rest of the band were locals.

The filled player was late because his car broke down but eventually he showed up.

The music was country-rock with standards like Margaritaville and the devil went down to Georgia and some of his own tunes.  The place was packed.  At the end the singer gave a heartfelt speech about the friendships between Canadians, Americans and Mexicans and how he regretted the current political atmosphere. 

Condo Resort Life

 

View from condo

On our second day in Mexico we started off with a walk over to Costco to pick up food for the week.

Later we took a walk down the beach.

In the afternoon we hung out at one of the six swimming pools.

For supper we walked about 30 minutes to a nice lively neighbourhood to check out a restaurant that Mark and Gina really liked.  But the owner was apologetic, they were closed today as they had no water.

We wound up at another neighbourhood restaurant that specialized in seafood called Raya ( as in manta ray). I had a marlin taco and a machaca mantaraya taco (like saltcod). They were both good.

Leo had a large shrimp burrito which he wound up trading half with Rob who'd also ordered one but wound up with arrachera (grilled marinated beef) by mistake.  So they both got some of each.

Burrito almost finished.

This restaurant was a big hit because the beers were only 35 pesos ($2.45 Canadian), the cheapest we found in a restaurant here.