Marsh Birds of Guyana

Guyana is a wet, wet place. The coast lies 7 feet below sea level, and it's marshy and springy. People fish in the ditches right in town. We saw some large edible-looking fish roiling around where this man was fishing along the main highway.

So the common birds in Georgetown include marsh birds as well as garden birds. This is Donacobius, a black-capped mocking thrush, an odd thrashery yakky bird of tall reeds and somewhat uncertain taxonomic affiliations.
I was thrilled to see greater anis along with the more common smooth-billed kind. Greater anis are beautifully greenish-blue, with a pale eye and a beak like Hekyll and Jeckyll. They live and breed in colonies and blunder around with a weak, floppy flight.
I'd never seen a red-capped cardinal in the wild, but they are absolutely everywhere in Guyana, as common as our northern cardinal is in Ohio. They like rivers and marshes, and fly around in big flocks which include lots of brown-headed immature birds.

Black-crowned night heron peeks from a low limb.When I was a kid in Virginia, the National Audubon Society aired an ad, constantly, it seemed, about preserving Everglade wetlands for birds like the limpkin. Its rattling call rang regularly through our living room, and I built a childhood mythology around the limpkin, imagining it the rarest and most endangered of species. It is rare in North America (because its primary prey, the apple snail, has a limited North American distribution), but it's tolerably common in Guyana. When this limpkin uttered its resonant call, I was teleported instantly back to the gray couch with Early American eagles all over it in our Virginia living room, with Mom rattling and clanking around in the kitchen.
It flew as if it wasn't sure it would be able to land.
It takes a little while to get accustomed to the fact that the wattled jacana is one of the most abundant birds in Guyana. Every little puddle seems to have them. Still, they are birds of paradise to me, odd and strikingly beautiful. I don't know another bird that has chartreuse wings.

Here, a jacana raises those magnificent wings to reveal little orange bony spurs on its wrists, like candy corns. Used in fighting? Dunno. Mystery.An adult streaked by, with two dependent chicks in tow. I love that the young jacanas look like a completely different and perfectly good species. And it's hard to streak by with six-inch toes. It must be like running in bunny slippers.

Those toes come in very handy when balancing on lotus and lily leaves, spreading the bird's weight like a snowshoe. "Lilytrotter" is a common name for the jacana. I crouched and tried and tried to get a picture of it lifting those fantastic feet so I could show you its toes, but it was in Shuffle mode. If you look closely you can see two of its toetips toward the front of the lotus leaf. Like I said, very long toes.

After that, I tried very hard to get a photo of a jacana in flight, because we are not often given to see birds with chartreuse wings in this life. I finally got an image that makes my heart sing. Tim, Shila, this one's for you, wings, toes and all.

Lotus: Purity and Decay

I've spent the last two days, from well before sunrise to well after bedtime, editing and sorting photos from the Guyana trip. My neck is in a permanent vulturine hook from staring at the screen; my fingers stiff from doodling around with the mouse. I have gobs upon loads of photos and I want to share them all. So these posts will be heavy on images and somewhat light on prose. There is just too much to show you!

Georgetown has a fine botanic garden that is a Mecca for birds and birdwatchers. It is almost ridiculously full of and dripping with birds, most of them chowing down on the many sorts of fruit borne by the garden's trees. Better than that, there's all kinds of water, with a lazy stream flowing through, widening out into marshes and ponds, so there are kingfishers and waders in addition to orioles, parrots, pigeons and raptors. Tropical diversity hits you in the face in Guyana.
First, some plants. These are the flowers of a cannonball tree, Couroupita guianensis. From what I can find out, it's native to Guyana, though it's revered in India and grown in tropical zones throughout the world. By all accounts, the large cannonball sized fruits are nasty and inedible, though they may kill you by dropping without warning on your head. The flower stems grow directly from the lower trunk of the tree, as do the fruits, so the tree looks like it's wearing a skirt of gorgeous flowers and later brown cannonballs. It waves its main canopy of leaves high above all that mess. If I had to guess, I'd think that the fruits were meant to be eaten and dispersed by dinosaurs, being offered in the fashion known as sauropody (fruiting directly from the trunk). When you see a great big fruit offered right off the trunk, you just have to visualize an Iguanodon walking up to it and biting it off the stem, don't you? Bizarrely beautiful.
This gorgeous tree looks like a ceiba to me, one of the grandest of rainforest trees and always an emergent when it is allowed to get old enough. All along the garden, lotuses grow in shallow ditches. What an amazing plant, one I always wish I had room to grow.Lotus blossoms have a purity that astounds. And yet they always seem to grow amidst a bit of corruption, whether it be their own rotting leaves or the squelchy muck beneath. It's the contrast that's so alluring.

The bud, a perfect tulip.
The seedhead is a rattlebox, a Chinese checkerboard of wood, perforated by round holes, inside each of which a large round seed dwells.Here, my trip roommate and friend Erica peeks into a flower.
I always think of my friend Shila when I look into lotus blossoms, with that wonderful surprise of a proto-shower head inside. Thought of her when I took the last photo, too. It's the kind of thing her photographer's eye would pick up on immediately.
Lotus: Purity and beauty; death and decay, oversized--the essence of the tropics.
I know, we're in Guyana, but I've been briefly home to ingest some turkey and am now back to fluttering around in airports as usual. For those in the Birmingham, Alabama area, I'll entertain at Birmingham Audubon Society's annual Christmas Banquet at 6:30 pm Tuesday, December 2 at Vestavia Country Club. The meeting is open to the public, and you can find more information here. You'd make my day if you came up and blurted, "BLOG!"