No sooner had we thus commented, the birds were back in range as if they had heard my complaint. Detecting and watching birds is an activity, which requires patience, focus and Sitzfleisch. But taking a decent picture of these birdly creatures is the true challenge because they have no Sitzfleisch at all! They’re always bouncing, flapping, leaping and flying hither and thither. When they do sit still for a few seconds, you can bet, there is going to be vegetation in the way, diverting your autofocus from the main object of interest, namely the hyperkinetic bird. You have no choice but to manually focus, by which time the compulsive hoppers have moved three twigs over and up … oh, well. Fortunately, the human eye is a vastly superior tracking device, which allows us to easily follow birds’ antics for never-ending enjoyment! 

Toucan croaking ebbs and swells all around us, especially early in the morning, but it’s been difficult to catch more than a fleeting glance of a distant bird in flight. Recently though, I have seen them close up more often since I moved operations from a corner of the dining table to our newly expanded casita (‘little house’, our detached guest room). I now have a private office and photo editing studio with a covered terrace, fronted in a westerly direction by a stand of guarumo trees and a bare, possibly dead, tabebuia. Birds like the guarumo trees, Cecropia sp., for their fruit & the arthropods living in it. I imagine, the woodpecker pair that comes every afternoon likes to pick off the Azteca ants, which live in the guarumos in peaceful mutualism.

The guarumo trees are a bird pulpería, a convenience store for a quick pit stop on the way into or out of the canyon behind our house, giving me a great opportunity to watch different species of birds, like the ani, I saw the other day.