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| El Cielo
Birding Festival Tamaulipas Mexico February 2006
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 Boat-billed Heron. |
El Cielo Biosphere Reserve Tamaulipas, Mexico
A few hours drive south of the Texas border is the northernmost edge of the true tropics. Here in this dry country there are tropical thorn forests and tall gallery forests along the rivers and streams. Almost a half million acres of tropical, cloud, and highland forest is preserved in the El Cielo Biosphere Reserve on the forested slopes of the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains. This area was designated by the United Nations as one of the 40 or so such areas worldwide, which justify worldwide recognition and protection, due to their high biodiversity.
l Cielo Biosphere Park El Cielo is 356,440-acre reserve that ranges from a few hundred feet above sea level to over 7,000 at the peak of the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains. It is the northernmost cloud forest in North America. On the eastern slopes, the mountains catch the water-laden winds from the Gulf of Mexico and change it to rain which flows through porous rock formations to rivers and back to the Gulf of Mexico.
Birding and Butterfly Festival
While there are many ways for the birder to explore these areas on their own or with professional groups, the annual El Cielo Birding and Butterfly festival in February provides a safe, easy and relatively inexpensive introduction to tropical birding.
Reasonable cost and safety are not the only reasons to combine your next trip to the valley with a Tamaulipas Birding Festival. The area supports a large number of birds. El Cielo alone has more than 500 species and a boat trip produced both Sungrebe and Boat-billed Heron. . Almost any of the birds you see in Tamulipus could show up in the valley as the next rarity and this is an opportunity to learn their identification before they become a hotline bird worth flying all the way to Texas to see. By far, the most important reason to attend these festivals is to show the people of Mexico the economic value of ecotourism and to encourage them to protect the birds and their habitat. (Map goes here )
Getting There
Chartered air-conditioned intercity buses pick up the participants in the valley cities of McAllen, Weslaco, Harlingen and Brownsville. The Harlingen meeting point at a motel is most convenient for out of town participants. Cars can be left at all points at your own risk. The city of Victoria is 202 miles from the border along a highway that has both four lane and two lane stretches. Mante is another 50 miles south of Victoria. There was a lunch and birding stop on the way down.
Cost and Accommodations
Cost of the El Cielo Festival was $435 per person or $535 single occupancy and included transportation, food, hotel, and all trips. There was an addition charge of $25 to take an afternoon boat trip and $5 to attend a lecture on the bird calls of El Cielo.
The hotel in Mante was a comfortable three-story building with air conditioning and a pool. Breakfast and dinner were served at the hotel. We either had box lunches or ate lunch in a local restaurant.
Field Trips and Leaders
At both festivals, buses were used to transport the group to the birding area. We either walked or used smaller vans or trucks to reach the actual site. Only rarely did we bird from the bus. While group size was somewhat larger than that expected on private tours there were 4-5 guides with each group.
The guides are both bird guides from the states and local guides that have been trained in birding techniques including birdcalls. An extensive program has trained train local guides to find and identify birds. They have received help from the U.S. from the Birders Exchange and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The guides have good binoculars and uniforms. They don't use tape recorders but rather practice birdcalls.
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Their fathers and grandfathers were loggers. Now local guides Eduardo Padron and Francisco Marin with co-author Roy Rodriguez (arm on scope) help participants in the 2006 El Cielo Festival find and identify birds. The local guides both assist the U.S. leaders and learn from them and vice versa. |
El Cielo Nature Festival This festival is very focused on birds and butterflies. All participants receive a beautiful checklist ranking birds by importance, abundance, and listing sites where they may be seen. Non-birding festival activities included folk dancing, a few speeches and an art exhibit at the welcome session. There was an evening presentation on the project to encourage ecotourism in the biosphere. The local guides did a presentation on birdcalls on the final evening.
The festival participants were divided into two groups for the field trips the first two days switching off between the highland trip and the lowland trip.
Highland Birding Trip to Alta Cima
The first leg of this trip was on our familiar bus on a flat road bordered on both sides with farm fields and grasses and up to the small town of Gomez Farias on a ridge at the edge of the biosphere We stopped only briefly on the way to see the Bat Falcon pair which roosts in a high power-post hole since we would return the next day to work the lowlands. The town is full of Melodious Blackbirds. At the end of the paved road we climbed into the bed of open pickup trucks for the 12.8 km climb to Alta Cima. (picture of trucks to Alta Cima ) Travel guides warn the road to Alta Cima calls for high clearance vehicle, but there is little traffic and the birding is good. We both walked and rode the 12.8 km.
The drivers seen in foreground of the picture above did not speak English, but responded to "alto", Spanish for "stop".: Of the first birds seen the Masked Tityra , Crimson Collared Grosbeak and Blue Mockingbird have already been Rio Grand Valley rarities. Green Jay, Clay-colored Robin, Ferruginous Pygmy-owl are permanent residents of the valley. Migratory species such as Black-throated Green Warbler, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher and Wilson's Warbler are winter visitors. There are plenty of species not usually seen in the U.S. such as White-winged Tanager, Squirrel Cuckoo, Scott's Oriole, Yellow-throated, Scrub and Elegant Euphonia, Spot-breasted Wren, Olivaceous Woodcreeper, Mountain Trogan, Rufous-capped Warbler, Wedge-tailed Sabrewing, Canivet's Emerald.
At the village of Alta Cima, we visited the local store where the local people sell handmade goods and t-shirts. The women of the village have a restaurant called Le Fe which serves authentic Mexican food and we enjoyed lunch in the open pavilion. There is also an exhibit of caged birds that are part of a restoration/education project. Prior to the declaration of the biosphere, logging was the basis of the economy. The store, restaurant and small hotels help replace the income lost when logging was banned. Another way the local people earn cash is through the cultivation and harvest of palms or "palmilla." This is an endemic palm whose fronds are harvested and then imported to the U.S. for use in flower arrangements.
After lunch the morning mist cleared, leaving the mountain and canyons in full view. It was a great day for raptors, tanagers, flycatchers and we saw the Mountain Trogan.. While exploring small trails around the huge pasture, we all had to watch for the stinging Mala Mujer plant. The Ornate Hawk-Eagle nests near the village of Alta Cima (elevation 5,500'), but was not in residence in February. The other half of our group which did the highland trip on the second day got very lucky and had a Solitary Eagle not usually expected in this area. It is also possible to see the endemic Tamaulipas Pygmy-Owl.
 The trip up the road to Alta Cima used open pickup trucks with local drivers. The fog did not lift until we reached the village. We rode a bit and then walked . |
The bus took us to the park La Florita where we spent most of the morning walking along the stream and around playground equipment and picnic tables. It was a weekday and we were virtually the only people in the park. Both Lineated and Pale-billed Woodpeckers were seen here. Other birds here included: Ivory-billed Woodcreeper, Muscovy Duck,Rose-throated and Gray-colared Becard, Golden-crowned Warbler (also a valley visitor), Blue-crowned Motmot, Aztec Parakeet, Black-headed Saltator, Blue Ground-Dove, White-throated Robin , Louisiana Waterthrush, Elegant Trogan, Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl.
Later we went to Bocatoma along the Rio Frio where we easily found the Kingfishers: Amazon, Green, and Ringed. There was also a good look at Groved-billed Ani. This was the departure point for the optional boat trip on the slow moving Rio Frio which was a beautiful experience. As we moved quietly along the stream, all three Kingfishers flew across and in front of the boat. On a side channel we briefly saw a pair of Sungrebe before they quietly melted into the vegetation. Not a grebe at all, this small aquatic bird belongs to the family of Finfoots or Heliornithidae. It does not dive and prefers to swim into cover when disturbed. . And finally tucked into the thick vegetation several feet from the water was the Boat-billed Heron, a night feeding neotropical Heron with an ungainly looking bill.
 There is no need to worry about sea sickness on the boat trip on the Rio Frio. |
The third and final day was a half day of birding at Naranjo along a river with spectacular water falls. Part of the group saw a Violaceous Trogan here. A walk up a busy road produced Flame-colored Tanager, White-colared Swift, Red-billed Pigeon, Red-lored Parrot, Masked Tityra, Tropical Parula, Roadside Hawk. Just before we got back in the bus at the final stop a new birder spotted a Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl looking just like a clump of moss. We made the long trip back to our starting points arriving in the early evening.
Over the course of 3 days our group saw a total of 187 species, 62 or which are not in the U.S. For a complete list of the trip birds see the El Cielo web site.
Field Guide
Field Guide to the Birds A Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America ; Steve N.G. Howell and Sophi Webb Oxford University Press Oxford, New York, Tokyo
More Information
El Cielo Nature Festival Web Site www.elcielofestival.com
E-mail to Sonia Ortz sortiz@teledinamica.com.mx