Birding

If You Go to Guadalajara, Mexico

February 5, 2025 by Paul Lewis 1 Comment

I spent much of last week in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city. This was an intense four days of work. Even so, I managed to escape one morning from the event, with a fellow missionary who also enjoys birding. We only had long enough to visit parts of two urban parks, but a good time was still had. (And our fifty species made a pretty good count for a morning of urban birding.)

It turned out that we weren’t the only ones far from home. The first park, Parque Agua Azul, houses a raucous population of Lilac-crowned Amazons. These are exactly the same parrots that I had seen in the Michoacán town of Tzitzio the previous week. However, in Guadalajara these birds are certainly escapees (or the progeny of escapees), and eBird marked them as such on our list. In Tzitzio, more tropical and closer to their normal range along the coast, eBird only marked this endangered species as “sensitive”.

Either way, these parrots are definitely doing well in their new urban home. We counted eleven of them. Their population was enough to even attract the attention of a Cooper’s Hawk, although I’m happy to say we didn’t see any serious hunting occur. (Happy for the parrots, not so much for the hawk… But hey, let him eat House Sparrows.)

At four hours due west of my home in Morelia, Guadalajara mostly offers species that I can see without travel. But some species show that this larger city skews a bit towards birds from Mexico’s northwest, as opposed to Morelia’s southwest/central Mexican mix. We could still see endemic Rufous-backed Robins and Black-vented Orioles. But the park was crawling with White-winged Doves, a rarety in Michoacán. And my one lifer for the day was a northwestern specialty, the cute Gila Woodpecker. These can be seen all the way up to the U.S. state of Arizona, but never in Michoacán.

And that’s why they call them White-winged.

Gila Woodpeckers are slightly smaller and darker than their more widespread relatives, the Golden-fronted Woodpecker.

From there we headed back to breakfast at our hotel, and then made a quick stop at the larger Parque Metropolitano de Guadalajara. Considering we were only there for 90 minutes, our total of 42 species was very satisfactory. Standout species included several Broad-billed and Violet-crowned Hummingbirds, a pair of Least Grebes, one more Gila Woodpecker, a lovely Painted Redstart, and a cooperative Western Flycatcher. My previous experience would not have taught me to expect to see that last bird in the middle of a megacity. The same can certainly be said for a Russet-crowned Motmot that patiently perched in deep shade.

While it is a widespread and fairly abundant species, I won’t soon forget our encounter with a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. It is not a bird for which I would expect to have to shorten my lens so it would fit in the frame. A good thing about urban birding is that most of the birds are quite habituated to the presence of humans.

The Parque Metropolitano de Guadalajara is apparently also a great place for viewing turtles. Lots and lots of turtles.

Having recently attempted urban birding in Mexico’s northern city of Torreón, I can affirm that the options for urban birding in Guadalajara are much more exciting.

Written by Paul Lewis
Paul Lewis moved from California to Mexico in 1983. He lived first in Mexicali, and now lives in the historic city of Morelia (about halfway between Guadalajara and Mexico City), where he and his wife pastor a small church. He is the author of an internationally distributed book in Spanish about family finances and has recorded four albums in Spanish of his own songs. But every Monday, he explores the wonderful habitats and birds found within an hour of his house, in sites which go from 3,000 to 10,000 feet of altitude. These habitats include freshwater wetlands, savannah grasslands, and pine, oak, pine/oak, pine/fir, cloud, and tropical scrub forests.