As we headed into the park, I quickly found a bird moving on the ground. Instead of one of the hoped for local birds, it was an Ovenbird. This trend continued as we found quite a few species of warblers throughout the morning. Just a little ways down the path, we found one of our highlights of the whole day. A group of spider monkeys was in the tree right above us! We were able to watch them for more than 5 minutes as the played in the trees and one even came down to get a drink from a tub of water!
We continued around much of the property finding very few birds other than ones that would fly away from us and remain unidentified. A flock of parrots flew over but I was unable to get my binoculars on them, so they remained unidentified as well. About halfway around the loop trail, we came upon a lot more movement. Most of the birds got away before I was able to identify them, but a Black Catbird was spotted. I was feeling a little disappointed as we got close to the end of the loop when suddenly there were birds everywhere! The first bird I identified was a Yucatan Vireo, and shortly after that we saw a Yucatan Jay. Two endemics in a row!
We spent the next 45 minutes working to identify all the birds that we could that were congregated around an ant swarm. One ant bite and 5 lifers later, I was very happy with the outing. I think we might have gotten more species had I been more careful and not gotten biten by one of the ants!
We headed back to the taxi with no new birds but lots of iguanas and a couple of really cool butterflies including the one below.
-Rob
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