Desierto de los Leones Recreational Park, Mexico City26 March 2005.

Mexico City is located near the southern end of the plateau of Anáhuac, at an altitude of c.7,800 ft (2,380 m). The horizons of the city are almost obscured by mountain barriers, and the peaks of Popocatapetl and Iztaccihuatl are not far off. The climate is cool and dry. Much of Mexico City’s surrounding valley is a lake basin with no outlet, and in the past during the rainy seasons, mountain runoff swelled the lakes

In other words, try not to breathe in while you’re here…

Open area in Desierto de los Leones

Easter weekend in a bastion of Roman Catholicism - would everyone be inside praying or out partying: or this being Mexico City would they first pray then celebrate like crazy? Oh, that would be the second option then…

Mexico City is as every bit as vast and sprawling and polluted as every guide-book in every bookshop would tell you. From an aeroplane window the entire valley the city has poured itself into looks to be smothered in a thick, brown smog which even a plane as big as a jumbo jet seems to have to muscle through on the approach to the airport. The traffic once you get outside is rabid, nose-to-tail with battered Volkswagen Beetles which weave around each other like demented bugs. The air stains your lungs and sticks in your throat. Pavements are packed solid with an odd assortment of wrinkled, small brown elderly people; burly, broad men; sulky looking teenage boys; and the most beautiful, black-haired girls. Chaos is king. If you don’t particularly like cities, you’ll probably not particularly like this one: if you loathe them like I do, you’ll just want to leave straight away…

But somehow this madness seems to work. The people are friendly, there’s a wealth of culture, and just outside the city (though who knows for how much longer they’ll be there) are some really excellent birding areas - and some really excellent birds…

I have to admit I knew very little about birding sites in Mexico City before this trip (and am hardly an expert now). The last time I went to Mexico I spent most of the day off that we had in the huge Chapultepec Park (below) in the city centre: it’s a good place to visit in the way that any city centre park can be good - it’s convenient, taxis can get you there easily and it’s easy to get a taxi back again, for a first visit getting close views of the local birds is helpful, and there’s no chance at all of getting lost. The drawback, of course, is that like any “green lung” in a big city it gets very crowded by mid morning, doesn’t feel all that safe (especially when you’ve got some pretty expensive optics round your neck), and the species are fairly limited and not usually the “sought-after” ones. No, if you want the “specials” you’ve got to go a little further afield…

I’d already decided that going too far afield on a National Holiday could be asking for all sorts of logistical problems - small cog that I am, missing a return flight because I couldn’t get back to the hotel understandably wouldn’t endear me to the upper echelons of airline management - and a trawl of the net revealed a number of reports on birding sites close to the city. I have wanted to see Red Warbler - amongst hundreds of others of species worldwide - for a long time, and every report I read casually listed Red Warbler sightings at Desierto de los Leones - a mixed pine/oak forest in the south of the city. At nearly 10,000ft/3000m the diversity and density of species was never going to be high, but the day lists were impressive enough, and I figured that perhaps if I got there early enough I may well beat the crowds…

And so it proved: I was out bright and early and there was no-one around at all! Fantastic!

I caught a taxi from the street corner outside the hotel* and off we went - weaving slightly in and out of the non-existent traffic (probably force of habit on the driver’s part - either that or the can of tequila and coke he was swigging from) - and a journey I’d expected to take nearly an hour took only about half that….

Desierto de los Leones Recreational Park is actually very easy to find: it’s on Desierto de los Leones Road - which as directions go are pretty straightforward really. The turning is signposted off the huge Avenue Revolucion which cuts through the city, and once on it the steep ascent to the park begins. Climbing up out of the city is a rather depressing affair - the pitted road winds up through recently stripped hillsides, ramshackle and disorganised housing, human life piled up on top of each other squeezing out pretty much everything else…the usual stuff I guess, but it never gets any better seeing it over and over again all around the world…but - before you shut down this page and before I get really fed up thinking about this stuff - the taxi pops out from the last of the houses and small allotments, and into a spectacularly beautiful forest.

Starting from a sharp left-hand bend a wide paved access road (right) - similar to the one at Tai Po Kau in Hong Kong in fact - goes up into the park “proper” towards an old monastery about 3km further on. Built by a group of rather optimistic nuns, the monastery was abandoned after they realised just how cold it gets in winter at 3000m: and who can blame them - it’s cold at 07:00am in late March, so what it must have been like without electricity and duvets I can only imagine…

The reports I read gave the impression that the monastery was likely to be the busiest area of the park - and on an easter weekend my guess was that “likely” would be “certainly”. The birding along the access road is pretty good - I had good views of Rufous-capped Brushfinch for example, and the air rang with the excited calls of the ubiquitous Grey Silky-flycatchers as they flew across the gap between the trees on either side of the road - but about half-way up the paved road I noticed a small open area tucked away on the left (see the photo at the top of the page). Anywhere off the “well-worn route” is likely to be better than the more disturbed areas of course, and it was here I saw my first Olive Warbler (who named a bird this beautiful bird “olive”? It’s not olive, it’s the most incredible combination of orange and grey - stunning), Yellow-eyed Juncos, Cedar Waxwings, and Mexican Chickadees of the day. At the back (upper) end of this little clearing was a track going up the hill.

I’m not suggesting that this “track” is the best way of doing the park (it was my first visit of course) but I have to say that as soon as I’d got away from the main road and into the trees, I a) saw virtually no other people for the next seven hours, and b) was almost immediately looking at a pair of Crescent-chested Warblers (listen out for a buzzy trill) - which I only saw at this relatively “low” elevation.

The path I took here climbed very steeply and followed the remains of an old stone wall through pretty dense secondary forest. After about another 500m it opened up into a more open area of older pine and oak. It then became apparent that while the main road has followed the bottom of the valley around to the right towards the monastery (which could just about be seen from this height ), the track had climbed up high along the left-hand edge.

The views became really spectacular and the birds were considerably more “typical” and even more exciting - in that I was hearing, and occasionally glimpsing, the endemic high-elevation Brown-backed Solitaire (one report I read described the call as “weird” - to me it sounded like a tin bird falling downstairs, a loud, hollow, melodic, tumble of metallic notes: unmistakeable even if, like me, you’ve never heard it before), had brief views of a Russet Nightingale-thrush pulling berries off a bush, and every time I pished I seemed to be attracting Slate-throated Redstarts, as well as Ruby-crowned Kinglets and Orange-crowned Warblers.

Slate-throated Redstart

High elevation forest at Desierto de los Leones

Now, far be it for me to say that these birds weren’t enough, but the one I really wanted to see was the Red Warbler. The rather large photo below makes trying to create any sense of anticipation in this note a little redundant, but suffice to say that when I reached this higher, more open area (with less secondary cover and more small gullies and tall trees) I was already sensing that the effort was going to pay off - and it soon did.

And what a fabulous bird a Red Warbler is! I don’t normally go in for gaudy - I’m the sort of birder who raves about White-throated Sparrows and Capped Wheatears - but this bird is just superb…delicate but flashing like a lit firework from the dark branches. I mostly saw them in pairs and watched them feeding equally in the pines and the oaks. I probably saw about eight all told, but it wasn’t until I’d nearly given up trying to get a photograph and was just deciding that dehydration was winning the day when a pair flicked across the path in front of me into some low bushes: I grabbed the camera off the tripod and raced (as in “ran very slowly” - after seven hours at over 3000m it was the best I could do) towards them. I managed to get three quick shots before they vanished and the large one below was the best by a country mile, but - wow - I say again, what a fabulous bird…

The same higher areas also produced the only two Golden-browed Warblers of the day and my first Green-striped Brushfinch - though it may be worth noting that I actually saw both brushfinch species within about 50m of each other about half-way back down the hill.

I mentioned at the start of this note that the trip reports I’d read hadn’t hinted of much of a species diversity - and in fact my trip list almost plagiarises their’s the accounts are so similar - down to the same three species of hummingbirds that we all saw! Whilst I’m more than happy with what I did see, there were some odd “misses” - I only saw one flycatcher for example, a Cordilleran, and not the “many unidentified empids” that others reported (maybe there would have been more in the open areas around the monastery?). I saw no sparrows at all here which seemed unusual given how common Song Sparrow is in Chapultepec Park, and no doves or pigeons. I’d love to be in a position to go back regularly and check this place out, but given how infrequently I get to Mexico, I’m more likely to try other sites if I do get back…even if Olive and Red Warblers are right up there in my top 20 or so…

Cordilleran Flycatcher

Olive Warbler

Finally, it’s probably worth adding that by the time I got back to the “small open area” it had become a picnic site; the access road one long car-park; and there were hordes of Mexicans out enjoying some superb weather - much to the detriment of the birds apparently, as they’d all vanished completely.

I’ve no idea whether this would normally be the case on a weekend, but it’s worth bearing in mind just how popular the city’s parks are…and just how difficult it might make the birding!

Rufous-capped Brushfinch

Mexican Chickadee

White-eared Hummingbird

Referring back again to the reports I’d looked at before coming here, most had mentioned good numbers of North American-breeding kinglets and parulinae. The commonest two species that I saw were about twenty Ruby-crowned Kinglets and ten or so Yellow-rumpeds, plus - as mentioned - a few Orange-crowneds, with ones or twos of Wilson’s, Townsend’s, Hermit, and Virginia’s: hardly “good numbers”. Given that these species don’t breed in this part of Mexico, they must have been either winter visitors or migrants: and that simple statement is far more important than it may at first seem. America’s warblers are in terrible decline. Years after Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” prodded a sleeping nation into becoming aware that some of their best-loved birds were vanishing, surveys of breeding birds are returning ever-lower numbers.

The view across the valley to the hills around Mexico City give a clear clue as to why that is happening: vast areas of the wintering and staging areas of these birds are being wiped away as if they never existed - not just here, of course, but throughout the region and beyond. Looking across the valley to the unprotected, cleared hills on the other side reveal just how much of an island this park really is…I’ve no idea whether this report from 2005 gives an indication that birds here have declined since the reports of 1998/99 I referred to, but it’s hard to imagine that the situation hasn’t got worse in the intervening years…

Day List (note, numbers are in some cases approximate):

Red-tailed Hawk Buteo jamaicensis 2; White-eared Hummingbird Basilinna leucotis 3-4; Blue-throated Hummingbird Lampornis clemenciae 1; Magnificent Hummingbird Eugenes fulgens 1; Brown Creeper Certhia americana 1; Cordilleran Flycatcher Empidonax occidentalis 1; Steller’s Jay Cyanocitta stelleri 3; Mexican Chickadee Parus sclateri 5-6; (Black-eared) Bushtit Psaltriparus minimus personatus 10+; Brown-backed Solitaire Myadestes occidentalis 3-4; Russet Nightingale-thrush Catharus occidentalis 1; Golden-crowned Kinglet Regulus satrapa 1; Ruby-crowned Kinglet Regulus calendula 20+; American Robin Turdus migratorius 3-4; Grey Silky-flycatcher Ptilogonys cinereus 20+; Cedar Waxwing Bombycilla cedrorum c)20 (two flocks); Crescent-chested Warbler Vermivora superciliosa 2; Orange-crowned Warbler Vermivora celata c)10; Virginia’s Warbler Vermivora virginiae 1; Yellow-rumped Warbler Dendroica coronata 10+; Townsend’s Warbler Dendroica townsendi 2; Hermit Warbler Dendroica occidentalis 2; Slate-throated Redstart Myioborus miniatus 5-6; Wilson’s Warbler Wilsonia pusilla 2; Golden-browed Warbler Basileuterus belli 2-3; Olive Warbler Peucedramus taeniatus 3; Red Warbler Ergaticus ruber 8; Black-headed Grosbeak Pheucticus melanocephalus 1; Pine Siskin Carduelis pinus c)10; Canyon Towhee Pipilo fuscus 1; Spotted Towhee Pipilo maculatus 1; Green-striped Brushfinch Atlapetes virenticeps 3-4 (left); Rufous-capped Brushfinch Aplopetes pileatus 3-4; Yellow-eyed Junco Junco phaeonotus 5.

*: Standard advice is to be careful when taking street taxis in Mexico. Always check that the driver has a clearly displayed licence and a meter before getting in. Always make sure that the driver understands and knows where you want to go before getting in. So far I’ve not had any problems at all - and my Spanish is very limited.
Incidentally, I was charged 120 pesos (about 4 GBP/6 USD) from the city to the park. The hotel taxi-service wanted 400 pesos. A taxi connected to the hotel but not employed by them wanted 250 pesos. The bus back into the city from Desierto cost 5 pesos, but required another taxi to the hotel from the drop-off point and was very uncomfortable - not normally a problem but after a long hard day at 3000m it wasn’t ideal…

All photos © Charlie Moores