Corey and the Trogon

 I told you all that I was a real snapshot artist on this trip. Because I am easily nauseated when conveyed in diesel buses on winding mountain roads while fighting dysentery, I usually score a front seat. The cost of not giving me a front seat on a diesel bus on a winding mountain road is steep.

So I amuse myself and try to take my mind off my periodically rising gorge by shooting snapshots out the windshield. It's also a good place to spot birds. On this morning we were headed to Cerro Azul Meambar National park, a fabulous montane forest habitat just full of great birds. First, though, we had to negotiate an extremely steep road that was in the process of being paved. They only pave two tracks, where your tires go. I'm not sure what the advantage is--using less cement? It seems like having to make four forms would cancel that out, but what do I know? These dogs figured we weren't going to make it for awhile, so they were free to rest on the track.

Of course, we got stuck and everybody had to get out and help push the bus. Corey Finger and I had already gotten out to walk up, since we were more interested in birding than sitting on a stuck bus.

I was pleased to see that Homo sapiens var. Bubba  is distributed not only through the American South but all the way to Honduras. Bubbas are attracted to car trouble, and there is a lot of that in Honduras, hence a lot of Bubbas.  Floridacracker, this one's for you. Because it makes me laugh every time I look at it.

The one thing that struck me most about Honduras was that everyone walks. No matter where you are, how far out in the middle of nowhere, there are people gamely walking to destinations unknown. They can't afford cars. The lucky ones might have a horse or donkey, or grab a ride in an overstuffed pickup bed. There are very few cars per capita in Honduras. You'll see commercial vehicles like this truck, but very few personal cars.

There would have to be a street fair going on in the US for a road to be this deserted, peopled only by...people. It is amazing, and I never really got used to being whisked by people patiently walking in the hot sun. I wanted to give them all a ride in our bus.

Especially this man, who was carrying a chainsaw on his shoulder.  Up a mountain. Ye gods. We are sooo soft in America. So soft. Note that he also has a bumbershoot, because he can virtually plan on getting rained on before he gets to wherever he's going. He doesn't even have a pad between the metal and his flesh.

We passed plantations of tropical houseplants, like these red variegated dracaenas.

Children played in the yards, and I wondered where or even whether they attended school.  I'm telling you, Honduras is a whole different scene. It is well worth seeing--it will blow your mind.

Finally we reached Cerro Azul Meambar, having thoroughly enjoyed the sights along the way. The first bird to greet us in the parking lot was a collared trogon! Corey Finger did almost lose his mind. It was his first trogon on his first Neotropical birding trip, and he may be forgiven for jibbering. The collared trogon is a jibberworthy bird.

I caught him pole-dancing with his tripod, trying to get a good digiscoped shot. Oh my.

 Like I said, the sights along the way were worth the trip alone. 

 Less lambada, more trogons and hummingbirds anon.

To Honduras!

This has been very interesting, being without my computer for a week. I have two computers to work on, but they are old and range from rather to extremely slow, and the stuff they have on them is my stuff, but it is more than two years old. And in today's fast-flowing information world two-year-old stuff is like prehistory.

So when my laptop took an unexpected bath and went black, it took all my photos and blog files with it. And only Wednesday afternoon was I able to send it to Apple, and here it is Thursday and you are hoping for a post.

I had two major articles to produce this week, and one of them was about birding and travel in Honduras. So with great trepidation I hooked up my external hard drive to my old desk computer and began to drag more than 2,000 photos around where I could see them. It took three hours for the thumbnails to load so I could see what I had, then about ten to twenty seconds for each one I selected to open. Two days later, I had my best photos selected for the article. All the while I was waiting to see my stuff (which I could have seen instantly on my laptop, had it not been dead as a donut), I was writing the article and sidebar.

And I thought, well, maybe this is a sign from the cosmos that I should do some long-overdue blogging about that trip to Honduras in February 2009. (I can hear Tim Ryan squeeing from here). It's going to be interesting, blogging about a trip that happened that long ago. Maybe the mists of time will refine my observations, cook them down like fine brandy. Maybe I won't remember squat. The browser on this machine is so old that it doesn't support "Compose" mode, so I can't even see my photos before they post. So I'll have to put them in in html code, one at a time. And that is awesome.

The man in olive drab in the foreground talking to peerless Yucatanense guide David Bacab in yellow is the energetic, talented and thoroughly delightful Corey Finger of 10,000 Birds blog. What a gas to be with him on his first foray to the Neotropics! I am all about enthusiasm, and Corey bubbles over with it. He nearly hurts himself trying to see everything all at once. We're all standing around on the balcony of Hotel Las Glorias on beautiful Lake Yojoa in east-central Honduras, having made our way from all over the world to be here. It's POURING. So we're subjecting our laptops to extreme humidity, something I seem to be bound to do over and over again in my super-saturated life. And hoping it lets up enough to let us see a frickin' oriole already. Well, eventually it did.

I have to warn you that I was in extreme turista mode the whole trip, taking pictures of every little thing that amused me. Like this peeing sombrero-totin' plaster putti (or maybe the singular is putto?) at Hotel Las Glorias. I'm sorry, but in America, we would describe this sculpture as "icky." But we're not in America.

Eventually it cleared enough for me to be outside my room, which looked pretty awesome from the outside, but was tres basique inside. That's OK. The only time I spent there in my twin bed under the single naked 40-watt light bulb was when I was dead to the world. There was so much to discover!

The food was good at Hotel Las Glorious, though I must admit this dish, a whole deep-fried tilapia, was a little off-putting even to a carnivore like me. I kept thinking of Shila, who won't eat "anything with a face." Well. When in Honduras...

After the hard, snowy winter of 2008-2009, the colors in Honduras literally stung my eyes. Good Lord!

I couldn't get enough of the view of Lake Yojoa. And in the reeds along the edge were wattled jacanas, green herons, little blue and tri-colored herons, blue-winged teal, hidden rails, common moorhens...it was just seething with life. I saw an otter, too!

One of the very cool things about this familiarization trip was the inclusion of one Robert Ridgely, author of Birds of Panama, a book I practically memorized as a college student, and now author of the multi-volume Birds of South America. Lord. He's a lovely man, on top of all that encyclopedic knowledge of birds of Latin America, and he was trying hard to lure some kinda crake (Ruddy?) out of the reeds for me, but all I baggged was a nice conversation and this shot of him, albeit a little cock-eyed. I'd straighten it, but I can't on this computer...blaaa, whatever. Onward.It was very cool to finally be able to tell Bob what his work has meant to me.

Bob Ridgely in paradise. How do you like them bougainvilleas? Sight for tired eyes, no? I can foresee a day when I might snap and suddenly need to live somewhere I can grow a 15' high bougainvillea in my yard. As the cold, rainy 40-degree weather drags on here in Ohio for yet another week, it's nice to make a little escape to Honduras. Why not?