Birding

Lovely by the Lake

January 19, 2023 by Paul Lewis No Comments

The fall of 2022 turned out to be a good time for birding and me. But I didn’t do a very good job with the follow-up tasks: processing my photos, completing my reports, and writing about them in this site. Which is why, upon reviewing my photos from my first post-Old World outing, I realized two things:

  1. I hadn’t attached a single photo to my eBird list.
  2. There were a lot of nice shots in there.

Because of point number two, I will avoid my usual wordy exposition, and go straight to the photos. These are all from Lake Cuitzeo, to which I went to see the migratory waterfowl and shorebirds that had arrived while we were in Spain and the Middle East.

I’ll start with this Cinnamon Teal. Occasionally a bird photo is more about the habitat than the bird itself.

The same could be said about this shot of a Northern Shoveler.

There seem to be an unusually large number of American Wigeons on the lake this winter. Which is fine… I like American Wigeons.

I’m also a big fan of birds lining up in pairs for purpose of comparison. These two are a Cinnamon Teal and a Blue-winged Teal.

You can always count on Northern Pintails being present at the lake in winter.

Ring-billed Gulls are the most common gulls at the lake. But they rarely fly by me at such a close distance.

Unfortunately, Ruddy Ducks can’t always have bright blue bills. But they keep their tails stiff anyway.

And then I came across an American Avocet, who gave me a class in the strange art of Avocet feeding.

Avocets sometimes line up in a sort of sweeping, avian feeding chorus line. Several photos from this day suggest that Lesser Yellowlegs prefer the synchronized doubles event.

For some reason, when I see two Red-tailed Hawks flying together down here, one always seems to be a light morph, and the other a dark morph. I appreciate the diversity.

As I continued on to the north shore of the lake, a Loggerhead Shrike let me get an unusually close look.

After that, it was all about the shorebirds. Some Western Sandpipers gave me a rather poetic look at them.

A Semipalmated Plover gave me a look that pierced my soul.

A Willet flew by, leaving no doubt that it was, in fact, a Willet. This was a bit of a privilege, since Willets usually head straight to the coast in the winter.

But one of the favorite sightings I may have at the lake in winter is of Wilson’s Snipes. A few birds seem to exist to help us laugh.

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.