Counting Birds

The annual Christmas Bird Count is nearly finished for the season. Miguel managed to struggle out one early morning to peer rheumy-eyed into the pre-dawn chill and pencil some candidates for posterity onto a sheaf of lists - from the social (flycatcher) to the solitary (vireo), from the greater (pewee) to the least (sandpiper), from the rough-winged (swallow) to the silky (flycatcher), plain (startthroat) to elegant (trogon), gray-ish (saltator) to mottled (owl). I could go on. A grown man can sometimes feel a bit precious when reciting the names of birds - the yellow-bellied, rose-breasted, red-naped, green-tailed, violet-crowned, or even saying a word like "kiskadee." (I note that a kiskadee has no relation to a chickadee, nor will the one acknowledge or speak to the other.) "Buzzard" seems a manly word but not every bird is a buzzard, nor for all of that, is every buzzard a bird.

Nonetheless, in this age of data management and cheap digital storage they require to be counted, so off I went with Madame de Montaigne and two other volunteers to tabulate numbers of species and little fuzzy heads. At a time when wiser heads are chary of close association, the count in Alamos this year was largely curtailed to a few local areas. I volunteered to do one of the less populous and least scenic areas on the verges of town, figuring that the nicer walks would already be spoken for and that the head counter would appreciate having an additional purlieu in his final tally.

I had engaged my small party to walk up an arroyo known locally as Las Cabras, fully knowing that no one else would choose to go there. The birding is only fair, the arroyo itself a matter of navigating rock and sand where a quarter-mile can seem like a mile, not quite the same as a walk on the beach. It is also the arroyo that runs just below the municipal waste ponds. It goes without saying that the municipal infrastructure in Mexico, much like its impoverished, Spanish-speaking neighbor directly to the north, is not all that its founding fathers could wish. The air is redolent, nearly visible with various essences, the trickles of water along the bottom of the arroyo do not invite trespass. The birds seem to like it just fine but what do they know, presumably having nothing like a glass of Domaine Romanee-Conte '47 with which to compare it.

Four hours and about two miles later we were back at the truck. The birds were gone for the day, we needed some lunch and a rest, and we were done as well. We tallied 30 different species, a modest number but not bad for the arroyo we had walked. The fellow who organized the Alamos count sent me a jubilant email that evening - 40 species and a 14-mile hike up the mountain behind Uvalama. "Young people," chuckled Dave, my fellow bird counter.