10,000 Birds

MAY 3, 2024

According to my list, which somehow ended up being the official group list, we saw 41 species in about four hours. Two other species also warmed my California-boy heart. In theory they can be found in central Mexico, but I’ve only seen a couple there.) Finally, a birder up front cried out, “A Pileated Woodpecker !”,

San Francisco 174

San Francisco California Woodpeckers Experience 174

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 24, 2018

Not so with our visit to Bosque de Apache NWR in southern New Mexico. The second half of the week was spent near the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Right in our camp, we found Ladder-backed Woodpeckers. The Little Big Year numbers up to this point are as follows: Little Big Year species – 908.

New Mexico 113

New Mexico Mexico Tucson Arizona 113

10,000 Birds

JULY 8, 2020

One of the ways I could describe the unique mix of birds I can see here in southwestern Mexico, would be to divide our species into five categories. The invasive species are few, but, unfortunately, very numerous. But there is a final group of species here, about which I have not written very much.

Mexico 192

Mexico Birds Honduras United States 192

10,000 Birds

MAY 24, 2020

North America is home to many amazing bird species, including several which require a special effort to see and appreciate. New Mexico Nature & Culture. These colorful songbirds occur in two populations, a western one which winters in Mexico and Central America and an eastern one which winters in South Florida and Cuba.

America 262

America Arizona North America Texas 262

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 17, 2021

Still, the outing did not produce any new species for the year, or enough good photos for a post here. Instead, I have chosen to write about an idea I’ve had percolating for a while: to tell you what the most common species are down here. I’ll take the most common native species in taxonomic order.

Woodpeckers 326

Woodpeckers Mexico Cattle Species 326

10,000 Birds

APRIL 10, 2011

On a recent trip down memory lane in the form of searching through old photos from my trip to Honduras I serendipitously stumbled upon a series of shots of a woodpecker feeding from flower blossoms in a tree. What the heck? Could I have completely misremembered the bird that I saw two years ago?

Woodpeckers 154

Woodpeckers Honduras Groups Mexico 154

10,000 Birds

JANUARY 6, 2024

Work brings me regularly to Monterrey in Nuevo Leon, northern Mexico. Acorn Woodpecker and Black-crested Titmouse were plentiful and confiding. We also scored with Blue Grosbeak, Yellow-faced Grassquit, Golden-fronted Woodpecker and Ladder-backed Woodpecker. Monterrey is a big industrial city, with industrious people.

Parrots 157

Parrots Woodpeckers Industry Fast Food 157

10,000 Birds

JULY 6, 2022

And if you must return to the same old, same old, it’s not bad if that same old can be central Mexico. I managed to see 38 species that day, a pretty average number for a summer outing in my area. You can add Golden-fronted Woodpeckers to the very long list of birds with names that highlight one of their less notable features.

Mexico 147

Mexico California Squirrels Woodpeckers 147

10,000 Birds

APRIL 8, 2020

The first part of this trail, although it takes you into dense pine forest, overlooks a visually spectacular and precipitous drop into Mexico’s Tierra Caliente , the Hot Country. Ladder-backed Woodpeckers move freely between the two habitat zones. So now, down this same hill I went.

Mexico 215

Mexico Woodpeckers Zebras Sparrows 215

10,000 Birds

JANUARY 15, 2020

Plus a few truly difficult species. Sure, it is an introduced species in Germany. Iberian Green Woodpecker, Madrid, Spain. Mexico has a good number of greenish or rusty Woodpeckers. All my Woodpeckers have been among the black and white jobs with small patches of red, orange, or yellow. I live in Mexico!

Austria 146

Austria Spain 2019 Birds 146

10,000 Birds

JANUARY 20, 2022

Working man that I still am, I can not yet spend every day of January trying to build my year list of species. But in winter, one of its major species is a migrant with a wonderfully quirky name: the Lucifer Hummingbird. As far as I can tell, Swainson never visited Mexico. So I pick each outing for maximum effect.

Woodpeckers 159

Woodpeckers Mexico Species Family 159

10,000 Birds

MARCH 5, 2024

In fact, the overwhelming majority of federal land is in just 11 western states (Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming). BLM land is particularly important for conservation of the Greater Sage-Grouse and other sageland species.

Virgin Islands 208

Virgin Islands Alaska United States Endangered Species 208

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 10, 2021

I am in communication with birders all over Mexico, and almost everywhere, they have been reporting groups of Cedar Waxwings. Although they were a yearly sight during my youth in California, I had only seen them once in all my years birding in Mexico. Surprisingly, both were FOY (first-of-year) species.

Woodpeckers 189

Woodpeckers Nashville Mexico ALA 189

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 23, 2022

Most of our readers are not likely to be able to ID this bird, because it only occurs in Mexico and Guatemala. But it wasn’t the day’s first FOY species. As it turned out, these were not the only bad photos to help me flesh out my 2022 year list that day (species 201-211, on February 12th). What could I do?

Mexico 181

Mexico Guatemala South America United States 181

10,000 Birds

JANUARY 11, 2024

One always wants to see as many species as possible in a single day, whether on an ocean island with few species, or in Suffolk, England. It was in this latter region that he reports seeing 60 species on his first outing of this year. But how many species can one see over a few hours in the highlands of central Mexico?

Mexico 211

Mexico Birds Woodpeckers Sparrows 211

10,000 Birds

MAY 21, 2019

But for the past 25 years, I have lived in Mexico’s state of Michoacán. The Tierra Caliente, or as biologists prefer to call it, the Río Balsas Basin, is a biological island that shares its very large number of endemic species with the more southern Oaxaca Valley. I don’t have to tell you which sparrow is which!

Mexico 114

Mexico Birds Nevada Sparrows 114

10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 17, 2022

We might have limited space but we make up for it with a massive amount of biodiversity including well over 900 bird species on the official Costa Rica bird list. It was something that truly caught me by surprise, a bird usually heard or seen in Mexico or certain, out of the way gulches in Arizona.

Costa Rica 213

Costa Rica Latvia Albatross Netherlands 213

10,000 Birds

JUNE 16, 2021

A life bird for me, and another species for my Audubon Florida Birdathon checklist. Don’t get me wrong – we had a blast comparing the birds in our yards, and it was a great reminder of all the species we can see right from our backdoors, but in 2021 I looked forward to a Birdathon that was a bit more mobile.

Florida 153

Florida 2020 Mexico Raised 153

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 26, 2020

Those photos were from a trip to Paso Ancho, my nearest site fully within Mexico’s Tierra Caliente (“Hot Country”). This species is rare, hardly ever observed, and severely understudied. One more species to add to my list of Birds That Look Like Muppets. This visit, for the first time, I saw a pair.

Owls 154

Owls Woodpeckers Mexico Falcons 154

10,000 Birds

JULY 28, 2021

But he is a biologist whose specialty is botany, and he requested my help rounding out the list of 80 bird species he had already seen along the river. We saw 50 species in around five hours, which is a solid number for a summer outing. Species totals can climb by about 50% in the winter, when we receive many migratory birds.).

Protection 256

Protection Guatemala Mexico Woodpeckers 256

10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 2, 2020

If you are like me, it is likely that you usually have a target species or two for each of your outings. Baird’sSandpipers can only be seen here in August and September, as they stop on their way from the Arctic Circle to southern South America; they do not normally visit central Mexico on its way back north.

South America 223

South America Ducks 2020 Mexico 223

10,000 Birds

JUNE 19, 2019

it is in Michoacán , in the southwest of Mexico. Lamb, who surveyed the birds of western Mexico from 1932-1955, and whose lists have been posted on eBird in recent years. I also presented this site and species in my first two posts on 10,000 Birds.) 1st Hudsonian Godwits in central Mexico. But my home is not in the U.S.

Mexico 128

Mexico Birds 2013 Lamb 128

10,000 Birds

JANUARY 29, 2020

Most of this travel was in Mexico, but I also visited different regions of the U.S., These goods, purchased with Mexican silver, would then be transported overland through Mexico City, and shipped from Veracruz to Spain. The 29 species I added to my January list say so as well.) Ditto for this handsome Amazon Kingfisher.

Birds 160

Birds 2006 Mexico Morocco 160

10,000 Birds

APRIL 20, 2016

Exploring the country side around our new (for now) home, La Paz, Mexico has been an interesting treat. We are at 2000 feet altitude, in dry chaparral, desert scrub, and the feature on this sign was the Acorn Woodpecker. We are so far from any kind of habitat or plant life that would possibly support the Acorn Woodpeckers.

Woodpeckers 100

Woodpeckers 2000 Mexico Research 100

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

The tipping point was the morning of February 10th, when I saw 20 species during two hours simply by looking out my back window as I had breakfast and read the news online. (My It included a question about how many species one has seen in one’s yard, total, with the options being 0-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-20, or 20+.

Nashville 245

Nashville Sparrows Sweden Mexico 245

10,000 Birds

JUNE 21, 2013

After nearly a week of traveling through Arizona’s very dry southeastern corner, I decided to make a detour to Flagstaff for a change of pace, a change of scenery, and a chance at seeing an assortment of birds more typical of the Great Basin than the Sierra Madre of Mexico. Lewis’s Woodpecker, flycatcher or woodpecker?

Arizona 140

Arizona Woodpeckers Phoenix Birds 140

10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 4, 2021

My birding list for November totals 15 species. Thank goodness that the rest of the beats have been busily birding,that’s what they like to do… 9 of them submitted 114 checklists via eBird and amassed 525 species from 7 (China, Australia, Mexico, Costa Rica, UK, Serbia and USA) countries during November.

Sparrows 202

Sparrows Woodpeckers Parrots Costa Rica 202

10,000 Birds

JANUARY 2, 2021

December’s beats found 609 birds after submitting 116 checklists from 8 countries (USA, UK, Costa Rica, China, Mexico, Serbia and Australia). The year list ends on a provisional 1803 species from 1608 checklists submitted by 12 beats from 16 countries. Most species-prolific was Patrick in Costa Rica, followed by Paul from Mexico.

2020 221

2020 Sparrows Woodpeckers Parrots 221

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 6, 2021

9 beats submitted 140 checklists from 7 countries (USA, UK, Costa Rica, Serbia, Australia, Mexico and Trinidad and Tobago) during October to account for 585 species. 240 Lewis’s Woodpecker – Melanerpes lewis. 241 Red-headed Woodpecker – Melanerpes erythrocephalus. 6 Brant – Branta bernicla.

Woodpeckers 233

Woodpeckers Sparrows Blackbirds Ducks 233

10,000 Birds

JUNE 7, 2017

Members of the genus Pachycereus , there are a couple of species which are quite prevalent here on the southern Baja. Once the fruit is ripe, it becomes a primary source for many species. The Gila Woodpecker is the first to break the fruit open, gets it fill and moves on. First the Gila Woodpecker.

Elephants 106

Elephants Woodpeckers Squirrels Shelters 106

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 5, 2019

62 species have been added to our combined life list, breaking through the next hundred which has been proving very stubborn. However ticks from Argentina, Brazil, China and Mexico have pushed it to 3836. Even 916 for September is a bit heavy, so for this month only, the list will feature just the new, red-letter species.

2019 118

2019 China Italy Argentina 118

10,000 Birds

JANUARY 1, 2022

8 of them sent 153 lists, noting 645 species of bird across 7 countries (Mexico, UK, USA, Serbia, Australia, Costa Rica, Colombia). It has not resulted in extraordinary numbers of sightings personally, but the beats have been busy on their respective patches and have sent me their lists to collate. The year list finishes at 1628.

Sparrows 230

Sparrows Woodpeckers Parrots Owls 230

10,000 Birds

MARCH 6, 2019

I have lived most of my life in a desert of some form, be it the high desert areas of Oregon, to the more arid Southern Baja of Mexico, so I am truly amazed at the birding opportunities this area provides! My Pima County list for those same 60 days is at 186 different species, and over 40 of those came from the Madera Canyon area.

Arizona 136

Arizona Tucson Florida 2018 136

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 4, 2017

Several weeks of travel have wrapped up with our visit to Guadalajara, Mexico. Up to this point, I have been drawn to Bosque De Coloma, mostly due to its location, ease of access, and some very nice diversity of terrain that supports a very large number of bird species. There were a few other woodpeckers to found in the area as well.

Woodpeckers 106

Woodpeckers Rights Mexico Research 106

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 12, 2022

Also, I had found my first viable acorns for 2022 on a previous outing, and hoped to find acorns from other species in this particular oak-rich forest. (I An Acorn Woodpecker , looking elsewhere. I love this species’ comical look, so I’ll indulge myself with several photos. And now it is minding mine.

Sparrows 147

Sparrows California Woodpeckers Species 147

10,000 Birds

MAY 5, 2020

A Field Guide to the Birds: Giving Field Marks of All Species Found in Eastern North America was published in 1934 by Houghton Mifflin (note–Peterson was 26 years old), after being rejected by four publishers. Adding the 76 new species in the Hawaii section, this makes coverage of approximately 884 species.

North America 207

North America America Hawaii Birds 207

10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 8, 2021

The arrival of those migratory species was my motivation for spending a Monday around our church last week. Mexicans call this very common winter bird the Gorrión Arlequín , which could be translated “Clownish (Harlequin) Sparrow” They use the same word, Arlequín , in their common name for the similarly clownish Acorn Woodpecker.

Sparrows 202

Sparrows Falcons Woodpeckers Species 202