On my first morning in the Mexican state of Yucatán, in a nearly deserted wilderness area, a ruby-throated hummingbird dashed toward me, flitted away, then dove back for a second encounter. Likely he wanted to mark his chosen territory, a patch of riotous shrubs braced against the pull of the coastal winds that scour the northern edge of the Yucatán peninsula.
The hummingbird had made its winter home here, where white sand dunes featured a dense weave of mangrove, wax mallow, geiger tree, seagrape, bay cedar and lily. At the water’s edge, shoreline purslane stretched its arms out to meet the jade-colored sea, which kept hoisting brown strands of seawrack onto the beach in long striations. The hummingbird had probably been feasting on the showy red blooms of the geiger trees, in addition to the abundant insects.
Like many people, I had discovered birding during the pandemic, when the hobby proved a welcome outdoor (i.e. safe) distraction. Two nonprofit organizations had provided me with a basic education.
For nine weeks, I attended a superb naturalist training class conducted by the Denver chapter of the Audubon Society, in which bird experts employed by Audubon worked with guests from additional entities such as the Colorado Native Plant Society to explain the entire local ecosystem. We learned the names of myriad native plants and local insects that support bird species, as well as fascinating information about how and why so many flocks migrate along routes marked by geological formations.
Certain flocks trace the Pacific Coast, while others navigate by the Atlantic, the Mississippi River or the Rocky Mountains, and night-flying birds use the stars to chart their way. So many birds trace their path by the foothills along the Front Range that local birders see all kinds of migrating species in addition to our typical year-round residents.
After I hung squirrel-proof feeders in my yard, I beheld a brightly colorful Western tanager, many rosy finches and endless streams of chickadees. I also went on several walks organized by Denver Field Ornithologists, and during one that focused on songbirds, our guide helped us spot yellow warblers, a Lazuli bunting with stunning turquoise plumage, and a dozen others he could identify by color or call.
Where were all those birds heading? Large numbers fly south in the winter by following the Rocky Mountains and other formations down to the Gulf of Mexico, which many then cross to spend the winter in the Mexican state of Yucatán.
I happily discovered the Mexican budget airline Volaris offers cheap flights to that country, as low as $180 one-way from Denver to Cancún. Once I got there, the whole impetus to fly such enormous distances made complete sense: Who wouldn’t want to spend the winter in such a balmy place?
I arrived in November, when most of the migrating flocks had just settled in. My destination lay 3 1/2 hours to the northwest of Cancún, close to a protected wilderness area called the Parque Natural Ría Lagartos. The park contains 233 square miles of wetlands, estuaries, semi-evergreen forest, low shrubby deciduous forest, coastal dunes, marshes and savanna that serve as ideal nesting sites for marshland and sea birds. The hotels in the area were clustered in the nearby town of Río Lagartos, where the basic Hotel Posada Mercy featured rooms that cost approximately $35 a night, and the charming Hotel Villa de Pescadores had rooms for about $50.
In the park itself, a small strip of beachfront had remained in private ownership, and landowners had constructed a handful of homes that functioned off the grid. A villa called Nirvana Blue stood beside the beach, while I was staying in a property called Ríaluz, owned by Colorado artist Ana María Hernando. Her home featured whitewashed walls, vivid blue doors and a wraparound deck. I fell asleep to the sound of surf and woke to birdsong. Solar panels generated power and water flowed from a large collection drum. There was no landscaping to allow the natural landscape to flourish uncompromised.
On the second day, while I was sipping my morning coffee, a compelling thread of birdsong lured me outside. An incandescent orange oriole observed me from a safe perch, then fluttered away. In this area, one did not have to go “birding” in a formal way, as birds of every stripe populated the thick shrubbery around us, and many seemed to enjoy “peopling,” as they visited regularly. Reddish egrets surveyed the area with regal pride, then flapped off with their legs hanging down like rope ladders, while brown pelicans patrolled the beach, diving headfirst into the shallow surf along the shore to catch fish. Least sandpipers competed for brine flies in the seaweed strewn on the beach, and frigatebirds manned the skies above fishing vessels.
Many of the birds lived in Yucatán year-round, some stayed only for winter and others stopped for a short while to fatten up before they continued farther south. Approximately 400 different species could be found here during the winter months, after the migrating birds arrived — one of the highest densities of abundance anywhere in the world.
Elena Conde of the Hotel Villa de Pescadores introduced me to a guide named Paco, and he took time out of his busy schedule to help name what I was seeing. So robust was the local biosphere that hardly a minute passed in which I did not hear rustling or flute-like calls from some invisible hideaway. The one challenge to the serenity came on the tides, which heaped human-made detritus on the beach. Plastic water bottles, containers of dishwasher soap and soda bottles that bore the labels of Coke, Sprite and Pepsi lay strewn along the sand.
Farther south on the peninsula, where dense high rises commandeer the ocean views, workers remove trash from beaches before the tourists wake up, so the sand looks pristine by breakfast. The full dismaying reality can be seen in unmitigated fashion in the areas where nobody hides what is happening. I picked up what I could, and eventually realized my task was not to render the beach perfectly clean, but to find a sense of satisfaction in making this spot a little less sullied for a while.
It rained all afternoon on my last day in Ríaluz. When the clouds lifted, seemingly the entire bird population surfaced at once to dry off. In every direction, birds perched in high locations, plumping wet feathers with their beaks, fluffing and fluttering until they shook off the effects of the shower. Then they sang.
Given my novice status, I could not name them all, but to see such an abundance of birds at once was stunning. Tiny green birds with yellow tummies flitted about in the foliage so quickly that it was hard to match them up with the right image in the birding book, but Paco advised that I had probably been watching palm warblers. Then the talkative oriole reappeared, this time with his mate, a slightly less colorful version of the same creature.
After they were dry, the two of them pirouetted away and plunged back down into the green shrubs, where somewhere safe and unreachable they had hidden their winter nest.
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