Shade Coffee Birds

On the moderate-elevation slopes and terraces of Los Tarrales, coffee grows in the shade of a largely intact forest. Trees of many different species provide the shade, and birds move between the canopy and the coffee shrubs unimpeded and apparently undisturbed. It's a beautiful conjunction of agriculture and useful habitat, foreign to those of us who associate agriculture with endless monocultures of corn, wheat, or soybeans, which are almost useless to native wildlife. This is a much happier land-use marriage.

I loved seeing birds that would soon be in my own yard, engaged in tropical doings. Here, a Baltimore oriole gorges on the strange fruits of a cecropia plant. They don't look juicy or tasty, but orioles and honeycreepers, euphonias and jays love to take bits of the strange, wormlike fruits.One of the things that strikes me hard in Guatemala is the difference in scale between temperate and tropical leaves. This oriole is dwarfed, lost but for his coal-bright orange.


Swainson's thrushes were everywhere in this disturbed, mid-elevation habitat. They looked strange to me against the odd forms of leguminous pods, but they felt perfectly at home.
A female ruby-throated hummingbird fed at the flowers of a tree-sized composite plant, perhaps a Senecio. Its perfume made me swoon.
Hurry home and see us, Mrs. Hummingbird. On second thought, wait a bit. The weather's still iffy. Wherever we went, black-and-white warblers combed the tree trunks, huge and small, for insectile delicacies. I'll see you in April, my dear, as you scour the oak limbs for sleeping spiders back home.
One of my favorite pictures of the trip is this little yellow-bellied flycatcher in the understory of a fishtail palm plantation at Los Tarrales, impatiens glowing in the background. I'll be listening for his plaintive chu-wee? in my backyard in May.
Enough on those Neotropical migrants, Ms. Zickefoose. Move on to the tropical residents. Start with me, the barred antshrike.
You are a fine birdie indeed, even though you and your mate skulk in the shadows. We'll talk about tropical residents next. Ah, sun, ah, exotica.

Tropical Interlude

Sick and tired of winter? Me, too. As ready as I was for warm weather and sun, it would have been a shock to be plunged right into the close heat and humidity of lowland Peten, Guatemala. Because Bill and I had to cut our Guatemala trip short to run back to a pre-existing festival commitment in Nebraska, we planned to start the trip with a few days at Los Tarrales, not far from Lake Atitlan, in the higher elevations.

Perfect. That's all I can say. Weather, upper 80's. Sun. Humid breeze. The inside of my nose, which had become a single large scab thanks to the winter furnace heat, was healed by the next day. Here I was in a T-shirt, the warm breeze playing over my bare skin. Oh, it was heaven. Everywhere, green and pink and red and magenta and yellow and orange, flowers in profusion, and the hummingbirds to go with them. Birds everywhere.Los Tarrales (The Bamboos) is a multi-puprose property, which combines ecotourism, banana and shade coffee plantations, floriculture and houseplant production in one alluring bundle. Here's the coffee processing plant, which gives forth mysterious whooshing sounds in the evening. Coffee beans are spread out in a single layer on the large courts in the foreground, and raked until they're sun-dried. Tourists are sometimes found drying here, too.

Here's the flower of a coffee plant. It has the light fragrance of citrus, combined with the scent of fresh mimeo paper. Ahhhhh. I couldn't stop burying my nose in coffee flowers.
Speaking of flowers, how's this for a flower? Behold the banana flower, bigger than any showerhead and twice as weird. The baby bananas are forming on the stalk already.Just a few yards beneath the blossom, a small yellowish dot resolved into a bird. (The lowest, tattered leaf is pointing right at it).

It was a yellow-bellied flycatcher, a boreal bird which nests in the stunted black spruces of Canadian bogs. I bet her nose was crusty inside when she arrived, too.

The tropical sun reached deep into her feathers, and she slowly succumbed to its charms.
I had been doing exactly the same thing since arriving the night before. Ahhh, ahh, ahh.
Oh, it's so good to be a bit overheated, to feel the Vitamin D., so good to cheat winter of a few days. Soon enough, she'd head back to the muskeg, and I'd head back to my breeding habitat, too.

But for now, we were sunning. Here, I'm exulting in one of the world's tallest orchids, the bamboo orchid, Arundina graminifolia, native to southeast Asia, but growing quite happily, rooted in the ground at Los Tarrales. Though only a couple of hundred plants survive in its native Singapore, elsewhere I've read that it can be a real pest, self-seeding like crazy. It's used as cattle fodder in Hawaii, where it's firmly established (read: a thug, if an orchid can be a thug.) Still, I was thrilled to be dwarfed by an orchid! So's Liz!

I am making a customarily potent fashion statement, with my flattering, crap-laden photo vest, but at least the pants go down to the shoes. Life is Good T's are all I packed, on purpose.


Delicate, cattleya-like flowers nodded at the tips of the tall stems. I'll be back tomorrow, with more tropical fun and basking at Los Tarrales.