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Long ago I promised an extensive gallery of Boat-billed Herons (Cochlearius cochlearius) but I never got around to it.  Now that the summer doldrums have arrived I felt like it was necessary to fulfill my promise and dig up some shots for posting.  All of these pictures were taken during my visit to Cuero y [...]

It has been four months since I returned from Honduras and I just realized that I stopped blogging about the trip rather abruptly.  Consider this a coda on what I like to believe was a fine series of posts about my trip to Honduras for the Mesoamerican Birding Festival.  Below you will find links to [...]

Once we returned from our amazing trip to the mangroves at Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge (the tale is told in two parts here and here) we only had a couple of hours in which to pack our bags, eat lunch, and cram a bit more birding in before we had to head off to [...]

It is not every day that one gets to see a pair of Green Iguanas sunning themselves on a bush from close range.  But, as I have already shown in one of my two posts about visiting Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge, that is exactly what the boat load of birders I was with got [...]

When we left our intrepid explorers everyone was in a boat in the midst of a mangrove estuary in the Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge and monkeys had been sighted and  photographed…but there was still so much more to see!  One of the next marvelous sights was a bird that I had seen for the [...]

After our trip to the Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge was rained out on our first morning at The Lodge at Pico Bonito we rescheduled our visit for our second and last morning at the lodge.  Everyone wanted to get out into the mangroves (especially me seeing as I had never even seen a mangrove) [...]

I can still remember the delicious taste of dinner on our first night at The Lodge at Pico Bonito way back at the beginning of March.  I ordered the cacao-and-coffee-encrusted steak medallions and the combination of flavors was divine, though that dinner, like most of the meals I ate on my trip to Honduras, disappeared [...]

Well, I’m finally getting towards the end of the Honduras trip, with only about three more days worth of birding to go!  I never thought it would take me so long to write up ten days worth of neotropical birding, but I guess a first visit to the neotropics tends to make birders a bit [...]

While on the familiarity trip in Honduras I was fortunate enough to meet Fito Steiner, (photo left, copyright Robert Hyman) a conservationist and the Volunteer Director for the Honduran Emerald Reserve.  We actually met over dinner during the one night the participants of the familiarity trip stayed in Olanchito, but I was feeling rather lousy [...]

When I was growing up, before I consciously chose to become an atheist, I attended, with my family, a stone church built in 1732 in my hometown of Saugerties in the Hudson Valley of New York State.  I was always impressed by the fact that people over two hundred years earlier had managed to build [...]

Seeing ancient Mayan ruins is a mind-bending experience, especially for someone, like me, who has not seen the Pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, or other similarly old and impressive architectural marvels.  I was fascinated by the combination of lush, organic elements like trees and vines with the solid and inorganic stone.  Standing [...]

A word of warning: this is going to be a rather long post so go grab a snack and make yourself comfortable before you start reading.  Normally, the birding I did on the morning of February 28, 2009, would be enough to fill up a week’s worth of posts but seeing as I’ve been back [...]

High on a hill over the town of Copan Ruinas sits the Hacienda San Lucas, a small hotel with a great restaurant that serves authentic (and delicious) Mayan food.  The entire birding group was there to eat dinner on our first night in Copan Ruinas, and it was one heck of an amazing meal!  But [...]

The man who did more than anyone else to put together both the first ever Mesoamerican Birding Festival and the familiarity trip after the birding festival, Robert Gallardo, does more than organize and lead birding tours (though that is certainly a full-time job in and of itself).  He also runs, with his lovely wife, Irma, [...]

Before arriving in the town of Copan Ruinas, Honduras, on February 27, 2009, I had only ever heard Inca Doves.  Their melancholy “no hope, no hope” had reached my ears previously only in the town of Brawley at the south end of the Salton Sea in southern California.  So when I realized that the pasture [...]

The long bus ride to Copan awaited us intrepid birders as we bade farewell to Lago de Yojoa.  Well, actually, three different buses awaited us: one for those who were going to San Pedro Sula’s airport to return home, one that was filled by those who had added the Copan extension to the Mesoamerican Birding [...]

My original plan was to put up a blog post today about the trip to Copan from the Lago de Yojoa region of Honduras but as I started looking through the pictures I hadn’t used yet from the first part of the Honduras trip I realized that I had quite a few shots of Pied-billed [...]

The last morning at the simple and birdy Hotel Las Glorias finally and unfortunately arrived: The first ever Mesoamerican Birding Festival was at its end.  The buses were scheduled to leave at 9 AM so after breakfast there was time (for those who thought to pack the night before) for some last minute birding and [...]

When I was preparing for my trip to Honduras I studied field guides so I would be ready for whatever birds I would see.  Sadly, I was still mostly unable to identify new birds on the first try, and some species would stump me even after I had already seen one.  So it went with [...]

On the fourth and final day of field trips for the Mesoamerican Birding Festival I was seriously psyched: I was going to a cloud forest!  The cloud forest in Santa Barbara National Park, to be precise, and I had visions of Resplendent Quetzals dancing in my head.  And what birder wouldn’t have visions of a [...]