Kay and I spent a week on the Yucatan peninsula from Dec 10-17th. We rented a car an got around without difficulty and after getting in in late afternoon drove to Puerto Morellos and stayed in Amar Inn, a very pleasant B&B small hotel a half block from the beach. I chose this town at the recommendation of Marcus Roenig, and love the town. In the morning we got up to go to a local birding hot spot called ___ and were disappointed to be turned away because the reserve was closed for the day. No good reason I could tell, but the guard simply would not let us even park and walk around. We did walk the town streets a bit, went to the beach and saw a few species, but decided to leave by midday and go to Cozumel.
We took the ferry to Cozumel and after a nearly bird-less ferry ride across rented a car and drove to our hotel there. We stayed downtown at a very nice hotel for a great price called ___. Overall we found Cozumel crowded, not especially friendly, and the shore on the inside near town was really filthy. We did get out early the next morning birding to the abandoned housing development noted in Howell’s 20-year old guide, and it was interesting. A few homes have been built with friendly locals living there. The birding was fairly slow and we had a hard time finding much in the trees. We did find Cozumel emerald, a beautiful long-fork-tailed hummingbird, a Cozumel vireo, and a few other birds. I saw my first adult Northern Jacanas near the highway on the drive in. We next went to the ruins at El Cedral, where we looked around nearing midday with not much luck.
The only ugly-Mexican experience of the trip was returning our rental car, really a junker anyway, no window cranks, had to open the doors with the outside handles as the inside ones were ripped out, they insisted I drive back to put more gas in than we had started with. Shook it off and headed back to the mainland.
Got our car there and went to the Tres Rios Residence place we had on points from another time-share. It was very nice, though we spent relatively little time there. We arrived on Saturday evening, and spent Sunday relaxing, I watched the Seahawks crush Baltimore, and Monday early we headed for Rios Lagartos. We took a wrong turn and instead of Hwy 180D, a major toll road, took Hwy 180, a slower route through many small towns. We arrived at Ek Balam, a ruins later than expected, but found it quite birdy for midday. We had less than an hour there but saw Plain Chachalaca, Social flycatchers, Painted bunting male, and Ruddy and Common Ground Doves.
We dashed for Rios Lagartos and were greeted by our anticipated guide Diego Nunez. He seemed a bit subdued and we discovered why when he told us he had just been released from the hospital with kidney stones. A substitute guide, Francisco, did a fine job of taking us out to the flamingos and around the biosphere reserve. It is an incredible place, and we got close up looks at hundreds of American Flamingos, good numbers of all the expected herons-egrets-shorebirds and Wood Stork. We had nice looks at Common and Great Black Hawks, beautiful looks at the Mangrove race of Yellow warbler, an lots of northern waterthrush. The jelly fish were spectacular, and we got to see tropical downpours up close as a couple blew through on the trip, and an unusually big one hit just as we landed. We dashed to the restaurant and had dinner while it ran its course. Diego insisted on picking up up to drive to his place where we had a room. We found out when he drove through flooded streets on the short drive.
The next morning William took us out for some land birding and we got great looks at the Black-faced bobwhite, a Zone-tailed hawk soared with the TV’s and we saw a pretty good variety of both local birds and neo-tropic wintering migrants.