 Yeah, thank you, Bill. I'm going to dive right into this because I have way too many slides for this talk. If anyone's heard me do a program before, especially our like the birding basic series I gave a main Audubon. I'm not great at sticking to my allotted time. I just remember being in freshman up a humane or no taking this public speaking course and they told us that a good way to time yourself is like one minute per slide. That'll like set the pace. I have 139 slides. So, let's, we'll keep the pace going here. As Bill mentioned, so this was a trip that we did with field guides may not upon has been doing a number of these tours with them partnering to give us opportunities to do more work kind of outside of the state field guide says amazing tours all over the world. I would highly recommend it recommend working with them. I think they're absolutely exceptional at what they do. So the quick plug. We've done a number of these. I think I've done some of these talks here in the past. We're hoping to get some lined up for but this winter and into next year. Stay tuned on that field guides is having a scheduling one of their one of the best guides you could you could ever ask for Tom Johnson unfortunately passed away unexpectedly. And now there's it's taking a lot of people a lot of work to help kind of cover and otherwise and otherwise full time guide schedule so we'll sneak in some as we can but I did just want to show look at all the happy faces winner in Costa Rica. Thank you for being our respondent capsule. Look at the face faces as the yellow rail flew by that's that little blur off the right hand side. The most elusive rail, really in North America flying right in front of our faces. One of my favorite birds, because of its beauty the great silky fly catcher was a great highlight on our hockey tour. And we've even done some of this. This was our south to store. So, whatever I can do to motivate you, we get to go like we'll places seeing amazing birds and so tonight I just want to focus on this this trip we did to Guatemala. And it was back in March of this year to help orient ourselves. I think Guatemala is one of those countries that I think a lot of people like generally know but if you're asked to like put a dot on a map. You don't miss it. It helps to know it's kind of nicely situated essentially between like just south of Mexico you pass the the isthmus. The Yucatan Peninsula refer to a lot because there's a lot of birds that are Yucatan endemics and they just get into the northern part of Guatemala believes kind of sits off to the right side along the coast. But I'd call it a straight line it's fun at this scale this the line actually has to curve, but it's just over 2300 miles. If you're going to go straight line from Portland to Guatemala city so really not not terribly far. And fun thing to see, you know quickly on this map is that we're definitely into, we call this NCA, Northern Central America so you get a lot of those Central American birds there's a lot of Mexican birds and then as I won't talk about a ton because there's just too much to talk about tonight. A lot of our birds, our birds the birds that we think about spending the summers here breeding, lots of our warblers, canagers here as you name it, are wintering here. I'll make a little plug for Magnolia warbler towards the end they were pretty much one of the most abundant songbirds I think we saw there was Magnolia warbler. Let me just think about the scale. That is Guatemala might be a little hard to see on that but the, the background map there is actually main you can maybe you can see New Hampshire poking out a little bit better below it but Guatemala is roughly the same size as Maine which is kind of a fun way to think about it. Maybe the key difference is the amount of people that we're packing into these areas so man's population around 1.3 million. Guatemala is 17 million. So a little topography in a second but the other fun thing to think about is in Maine our highest elevation Katahdin just over 5200 feet. The tallest mountain in Guatemala is just shy of 14,000 so they've got quite the elevation going on there and we'll see how that impacts some of the birds that you get to see. Again, on Guatemala here sorry on this scale we do lose some boundaries but what all these little dots are showing. This is from Ebert if you haven't seen the cool feature that Ebert had you can generate trip reports. Ebert was the citizen science project we were using to submit all of the checklist of all the locations we went does a wonderful job kind of generate these reports so you can nicely see where we went the birds you saw include all your photos and everything. So that's what I just pulled. So each one of these little pins shows one of the locations that we went to. And there's this nice divide here where we're kind of north in this region called the Petton. And then as we went down south kind of south of Guatemala City and then working west that got us on to the Pacific slope. What I was hoping would show up a little bit better here you can kind of see the topography, but that's quite the mountain range it's actually like the continental divide that we're on in those southern, those southern pins so there's a lot of birds as you get down here and there's quite a divide between what's on the more kind of tropical Caribbean slope and what we find on the Pacific slope. So that was kind of how we were, you know, approaching this trip trying to divide it up. We won't go into this too much this is just, I thought kind of an interesting way to kind of look at the different bio regions of Guatemala, especially I think this does a good job showing that that northern region is really this is as it identifies here tropical humid forest, so it is going to be more lowland for us it's going to be tropical humid. Quite the contrast to some of the higher elevation, we would get into things like coniferous forest, conifer and broadleaf. The sad thing to maybe point out here, along the southern coast there what what it's basically identifying as the human savanna. There's something like 1% or less of that habitat remaining. That's where it's really good for growing things like sugar cane cotton, and it has all been. Maybe deforested isn't the right word de savanna. That was kind of a sad thing to see that there's truly a lot of habitat destruction has has gone on here we drove through it kind of briefly I'll show some photos but basically this is kind of a fun thing to think about in terms of the habitats that we were able to get into you. Also fun to think about this habitat. Here we are beginning of March, this is flying out of the Portland. We will not see any snow like this. The 10 days we were there. This is one of the few times I've flown out in the afternoon. I cut the photos but I've got great shots all along the coast of the funnel landmarks pointing out, but what I wanted to point out here why we've got the time stamps this early in the afternoon leaving Portland had one layover in DC for about an hour, and then it was just before 10 o'clock central times we are an hour off. Then we finally got into Guatemala city. This is a very easy flight. It's pretty quick that one stop over in DC. I like going places that are easy to get to and so always interesting to look at some some locations that you have like three or four stops in or out. And for some reason a bunch of these videos like that. So this should play correctly. Yeah, what I wanted to show is there Guatemala city there are a ton of really nice high end hotels is a fun thing I just want to make the plug if you're ever thinking of going there. A lot of these hotels are there to host. Traveling for business. There's a lot of like conventions and things that go on in Guatemala city. So these hotels are pretty packed full throughout the week. And I would say are not the least expensive option until the weekend when there's no people traveling for business. They're dead empty and they're super cheap. Yeah, if you want to go birding in Guatemala maybe stay in the city in the weekend. I could talk for an entire hour just about the food in Guatemala. I'll make a few more plugs but oh my God it was so good, especially make some more references the coffee down there's really the best it cannot be beat. So here we all are here we all are gathering you might recognize some people in this in this video. I'm going over the math here this is Jesse Fagan our guide from field guide so the way the kind of partnership works is an Audubon we bring the people field guides will give us a guide who has been there knows the area Jesse lived in Guatemala for a number of years and then we'll we also work with local guides and all the areas we went so first night. We made sure everyone got in got there on time and then we kind of we're just going over them here going over our plan. It was early to bed that first night because it was early to rise we try not to get up too early if the time stamp on here this was 350 we're loading up the bus. These are the vehicles that we would be getting around throughout the country, always tiring a local driver. You do not want me driving around in Guatemala. We were pretty comfortable very spacious the reason that we needed to leave so early was to find this awesome plane. So we flew in Guatemala city and as you may remember earlier map of all the pins of where we were hurting needed to get up to the pretend up into the northern part of the country it's a very long drive it's a very short flight. Again, think of it as we're going you know, if you're to fly from, you know, quite Bangor but like a little, little further from from there. Absolutely stunning, especially watching the geography change. You know we have the beautiful sunrise flying over these mountains. And this is kind of getting us out of that. You know, montagne habitat we're going to get down into this more kind of Caribbean low lands. It's kind of fun to see fast forward towards the end of the flight. This is looking out my window and how the habitat just starts to get like really flat me you know little hills and things but it was pretty amazing to get up there and just you know, flying over the habitat and watching a change as we went was really cool. So by seven o'clock we're getting into the airport. Always fun traveling with birders because we had, we're just trying to get through security or whatever and everyone's whipping up binoculars we've. There are things like metal arcs. At least killed the air. There were birds to be seen we had martins flying overhead. So we had a vehicle that they're waiting for us one of our local guides that picked us up. We had a bit of a drive to go to get up to our first stop the first place we would be staying so a lot of we would find good habitat, you know Jesse knew some of these spots along the way. I didn't take out my camera yet so bear with me for some of these poorly digit scope like trust me that's a pinnaded bitter, a really good bird down there. But just doing some like roadside birding. Now there are some funny hazards of roadside birding down here when all of a sudden you have to say everyone on the bus on the bus sorry, we are getting on the bus. And we had pretty good timing. Because these are apparently got out of where they were supposed to be. We'll see a local ranch I think comes by in a second. If not all jumped to this clip. They decided to hang out notice where they're going off into the left. So this March that we were just hurting and counting on you know all the dozens of whistling ducks. This guy was yelling. I don't know what he was saying but he was unhappy. And all these cows are just going like out into the marsh now you know, wonderful area for them to be grazing in their minds so that was fun not a thing we usually deal with birding in Maine. So we're driving north trying to get up to this biological station we'd be staying at we did pass through some areas. I think it's important I like this. Where they were doing some essentially some slash and burn agriculture, the soil there is really low quality it's really hard to grow anything in this area so there's a lot of this slash and burn or they're going to, you know, everything burn it you get, it takes a couple years but that puts all this nutrients in the soil, then they can grow things on it for a couple years, and then they completely depleted it. And unfortunately, you know, then you're kind of left with your left with nothing, and it'll take many years for that to grow back at least we're kind of in the tropics stuff does tend to grow a little fast. But it's one of those I think sad realities where you know the, the people who are living down there need to find ways to survive off that land. And unfortunately, this is the way they have to do it. Lots of roadside birding I always enjoy. This is just like a little puddle on the side of the road and like the really fun thing about this to density of birds like you could just pull over anywhere and get 2034 species of birds. We had some real targets and things we'd be looking for. Remember, we're going north, we're getting up into this pretend region we're finally getting into where it's some of the UK tan endemic. So species that you can only find around the UK tan, whether it's Mexico whether it's coming into Guatemala here. One of them here the UK tan woodpecker appropriately named. Folks might recognize this looks like a bird similar to our backyards. It even has a red belly probably more than our red belly woodpecker does. And this is a fun one to see. So that genius melanopsis are all these woodpeckers that kind of look and sound like this and, and it's kind of fun to see like, oh the one that evolved in the UK tan looks like this. So looking around have things like Swainsons hawks flying over they'd be, you know, they'll be migrating through there and absolutely huge numbers. Eventually getting us to the Rio and Pedro, this large river. With all the audio out of this because I knew it'd be terrible that's Jesse waving by to our luggage on the shore. We were brought over in the boat. A little bit later but we had, it was just under an hour I took about 40 minutes traveling by boat. So we put these riddle didn't you tomorrow. See that building poking out right there and here's some more that starts to become evident. This was a biological station that was started just for researchers to be studying. See this is a block, Las Guacameas biological station there's actually been a lot of studies that have been done there, but they realized was that when research wasn't being done, they heard kind of keep this place a float. I was there by hosting tourists and there's people that would want to go bird in there, or whatever you might be interested in. I was one afternoon and I got so into some of the dragon flies along the river. I haven't been able to identify like any of them yet, but I have hundreds of photos. Like, you know, the quick mention like again, the food in these places is absolutely incredible soup was such a like staple like appetizer for almost every meal, and then any way that you could turn a fruit to a drink. They figured out how to do it. Even fruit they use. I have never even heard of. So just birding the grounds. You know, this this was a long day for us, you know, we've been up super early flew up there to Sloan Drive, another boat to get there. So a few of us just birding the grounds and this is kind of the wonderful thing that even when, even if you have downtime, you can be looking up at things like black cowled Orioles. You know, just working the, you know, shrubs think of like, you know, same way you might find a coop we were really skulky bird around here. Looking straight up we have white hawk circling for a minute. King vulture was on the property here. Tough when these birds like fly by and you know the typical fly by a bird you've got 10 seconds to shout out about it but that was just during our downtime. There are new activity. The last birding we decided to get back on the river. This is just a better perspective of the boat. This is pretty common explain in central America a lot of birding by boat, I hate birding by boat in pain. Maybe I'm biased after working at the Scarborough Marsh for six summers pointing out birds and boats. It's incredible because here, you know, you have things like we need woodpeckers so this is, you know, same size it's like a pillied woodpecker. That's just got a lot more color and pattern to it. You can see some of these, these, you know, same niches, you know, the pilliated versus eliminated. This might remind you a lot of our tree swallow mangrove swallow has that little white eyebrow and then some white on the rump. And then our big target, if I could, if I could go back and record all the news and Oz this is American pygmy kingfisher which putting it up on a projector like this. We don't put much service because it's, it's this big. It lives up to the name me kingfisher it is absolutely tiny, remarkable. We could even, you know, spot bird like this. The nice thing is that they tend to be super tame, you know, we're getting into these, these areas that are like so seldomly seldom seldomly visited. You know, we literally just back to the boat like right up to this bird. Didn't mind us at all. One of our big targets which as we're you know prison the river pretty high speed. Just scanning always trying to spot something. I believe credit fully goes to Jesse for this. This is Gummy Heron, which imagine traveling at high speed. And can you see right just above center looking for that red eyeball I know you can see the blue reflection in the water, but like this is looking back. This is overexposed because it's in this dark shadowy area this this gummy hair and just has this incredibly long bill this rusty color and blue on the wings. Scenario for for photographing it but it did catch a fish, trust me a lot easier to see through binoculars. I did feel like I have to do this credit and show, you know, that's what you know if it were to come out. That's an absolutely incredible bird. So nice to check off that that was definitely one of our biggest targets that bill is insane. You know, that must be like the smallest skull for the largest bill. Oh, let's see this was the one there with me. The audio is not loud enough. If you can hear from my computer that howl monkeys so the sun starting to go down we were sitting on the river you're hoping and hoping for some owls I think we had was it modeled I think started calling that evening, but as we're just waiting this like low growling, the howler monkeys that were out there was absolutely incredible. We did. Sorry my one second. Sorry, this slide deck has a lot of videos in it and my 10 year old computer doesn't like playing lots of videos so. Anyways, absolutely stunning sunset, kind of incredible to me to think that we had started, you know, we set a 3am alarm and he still had people out. And even past sunset that night, and even past sunset because you get back to your rooms and we're walking around with flashlights that reflect UV light, and you get to find things like these fun little scorpions. They're really there because they really look kind of drier more arid habitat there's still for you. The fun thing so they reflect this UV light so it's very easy to find them. We need to have a light on because here's what it looks like with our flashlight turned on. Luckily, it seemed like we're all staying outside. Anyways, fun first day at this large, Las Focumias. They did have a little room that we could have meals in but why would you do that when you could just kind of eat outside so this was our setup for breakfast you can actually see the river kind of right behind us there is a hummingbird feeder setup. Actually, you see Dave just kind of right behind him. There are things like these white bellied emeralds. And a few of these species, especially. This is not endemic but for a few of the endemics. You'll see these range kind of shrinking down but to have breakfast with things like white bellied emerald, white tailed silver wing, green breasted mango, a white neck to coven, literally just like buzzing around your heads. That's a nice way to start the day. And then went up a little further upriver to a place they called Peru. I think it was the guy who like first set up the trail there was from Peru so it kind of got the name from him. But this is where we would spend most of the day birding. I just want to show a couple clips like this is what kind of birding in this habitat looks like some areas where it's really dense, and it's all about kind of working holes and angles. You know, there are these secretive birds that we're trying to lure in burning in the tropics often requires a little bit of playback because it's so dense you're not going to see these birds, otherwise, especially in an area where you know it's so frequently visited. You did find some more open places here. There's this one, which was a collared forest falcon that was just like, if I had the audio on it's just this loud constant and this bird would just not come in so some birds are cooperative some aren't. You can get things like this chestnut collared, excuse me chestnut colored woodpecker you can actually see the green laser pointer that we're using to point it out. A lot of these videos are actually just my phone mounted to a spot and so nice to have real cooperative birds like this. One of my biggest targets for this area wish I could get slightly you know of course there's always that branch that gets in the way. This is great throw to chat this is a NCA endemic or practically you can tan endemic you can see that at range map. A tough one to get this this bird we worked for a while and we're going to tough one to see some bigger bird I always love a big big bird that's easy to see Preston Gwan. Maybe you know, think of as like a slender turkey but always kind of funny when you see the bird that size up in a tree. A little diversity of you know families that we don't even get to think about here in Maine white whispered puff bird. Rufus tell Jack Amar this is, you know it looks like someone crossed a hummingbird and a kingfisher. Now the the big target the bird we were looking for on this hike. The name of this reserve is lost guacamias guacamias translates to the car. So we're they're looking for these scarlet macaws. This is a species that most people get to meet for the first time like in a friend's house or a pet store, which is really kind of sad and pressing to think about because the pet trade is really wiped out. A lot of macaws, a lot of parrots. So to be able to go on a hike like this get out to this area where I think we saw six total out in this area where they need these really large mature trees because they're cavity masters. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of old growth trees like that, still around as we could see that that's slush and burn agriculture that's that's really kind of moves there. So we're very lucky to have kind of these these areas that are being preserved, especially when it's, you know, such an amazing charismatic species and to get to see, you know, bears doing courtship behaviors like this was really something. It's funny, I joked about the the pygmy kingfisher being so small being so small in relation to the size on the screen but this actually this feels a little more accurate for size is actually massive birds. After this, you know, long hike. This was one of our longer types, at least in terms of like taking the boat out from way down this trail coming back. We did go back for lunch. One of my favorite things about birding in the tropics is that you know you get the early morning activity. And it's going to get so hot that generally will take a little break in the afternoon. Everyone gets a siesta, and then we go back out birding again. Unless it's the second day of your your birding in Guatemala and no one wants to sleep. So here we all are birding through the heat of the day. It's a little hard to see on the screen if I can get my cursor right there, right over our lunch table is a garter trogan. Wonderful when they, when they just come right to us. After our siesta, we did go for an evening hike. So here's just see kind of explain and we were looking for a few of our targets here. Here's our sleet detail trogan. This is one of the larger ones. The audio says what and you can't hear that it's this wonderful little I'll give them a second to turn. It's this big honking bill on that big red iron and sleet detail trogan actually has his bright red chest, some bellies. So you can see a little bit of that red and a few things through. There's some bird names down there that are a little frustrating says ivory build would prefer. We'd all love to read and discover the ivory build woodpecker but fun to see those white next pop bird would be a nice one that showed up for us and then one of our biggest targets for for this type of bird, tody mott mott. Mott mott is really cool family, most of them alone for kind of the long tails that they do this, almost like pendulum twitch. Tody mott mott you can see the range here they're kind of all throughout Central America, but very localized within those areas so there's definitely, you know, maybe a big range like the birders kind of know exactly where to go to find some of these so this was going to be a big target for us. End of the day back to our rooms. This is where I want to, you know, not looking for sympathy or anything but the biological station there usually doesn't host large groups it's usually just like a couple of birders go at a time. Our group with whatever you were a dozen people. We have all the guest rooms, and then Jesse and I had to go stay kind of up in the bunk houses that are a little more rustic. It's just saying our doors didn't go all the way down to the ground. So when I got back to my room this night behind my bed. I was this little guy is looking for a big hug. So anyways, if I go to someplace like this make sure you get the room that the door goes down to the floor. So after a couple days there and I'm going to pick, hopefully pick up the cadence here because we got a lot to do but we decided we're leaving Los Guacameas. We're still staying in the northern part of the country but going towards Tikal towards the National Park there. Absolutely stunning day, great for travel. We met up with our next guide, this is Miguel I'll share a bit more about him in a second but wanted to just show this is our lunch stop where we're basically the tree setup here which you can't quite see off the left side as they had a pulley system. And they along the pulley system they had think of hair clips you know that have like the teeth that do this. Those are apparently perfect if you peel a banana and put it in the hair clip and those are on the little pulley system and you wheel that out to that first tree. Then I zoom in a second. Then you can get things like Baltimore Orioles yellowing tannins and great tailed crackles. So pretty distracting when you're trying to eat lunch and like there's light birds coming in. Right out there. You can see a lot especially in this area of the saber tree. This is a sacred tree of the Mayan people it's also the Guatemalan national tree. As the the lore I'll say it goes. It represents the Axis Mundi it's a vertical line that connects the underworld earth in the heavens so they see it as this very kind of important symbol these are absolutely massive trees. And you'll see them kind of like prominently. I'm not sure if they did this right where but I'm touched I guess is the nice thing to see with these so there are lots of very old save the trees around. So a bit of a dive. But again, the National Park where to call is was our destination. I think I missed this slide but one of my favorite things to see the entrance fee here. It's very low for for residents are people of Guatemala, but it was some it was either five or 10 times the price for tourists, which like, we felt good paying that I guess. This is an absolutely amazing spot we stayed practically right in in to call it's called the jungle lodge. This is the Mayan biosphere reserve that part of to call. The lodge has these nice little dwelling these units that that we were kind of broken up into a fun thing I always love seeing some of the jobs called the cultural changes is that they had these hours of electricity so times during the day that they would actually have the power either on or off just to kind of help conserve up there which we can probably learn something from. Now getting to call, you know, as birders we tend to have this these lists of like target birds things we really want to see, and definitely like one of the poster child, the one that is like any bird or who's ever been here or up into the Yucatan. Every Thanksgiving they're going to post the same picture of an oscillated Turkey, you know this incredible beautiful Turkey. And I just think that you know this this galenicious bird that lives in the jungle and like wouldn't it just be great to like catch a glimpse. International Park with thousands of visitors. They've become pretty habituated and tame. So you can walk right through the parking lots and see some. And then you stand at the you know other angles so that you get the more wild looking background but these are really cool, really cool species to get to see again through things like hunting. They are just a really hard species to find kind of away from an area like this where they are otherwise habituated. We did see one as we were leaving the park of the last day there. And I'm like walking on the side of the road and was like there's a wild one. You know, these are still wild but just very used to, to people. Really cool looking bird. That amazing iridescence and there's that very limited range this is a Yucatan and then I I hope tova doesn't mind me telling this story this is tova on the right. One of my favorite things of these trips is just getting to you know share these experiences with people and when a bird is literally like going to bring someone to tears. That is I just think such a wonderful experience. Kids was very much like, you know, I want you to go go on this trip and see a toucan. And so when we finally a couple days into the trip got this kill bill kill build to can that pop right up showed off. That was definitely one of those, one of those moments that, yes, we'll bring bring tears to your eyes. I'm going to try to open this one. If not, well, maybe I should actually. I don't think there's any swears there with us. I'm going to call that some very in monkey. So American spider monkey. In the truth. Breaking branches and checking them out. So we decided to get to the other side of the road a little further away, because they're also further. There we are looking back to them. They like to do things like keep on you throw pieces at you. There you can actually see them they're doing a little like chat. They're not too thrilled, not like I predicted as the church keys were. These many hazards for an area. Our next day as we were back would finally go into the park itself. Here's everyone helping point out one of the oscillated turkeys. Here's Miguel I mentioned we had picked him up on our on our way and he would be our local guide. So he's a wonderful guy to have because of his history with the park when she calls basically like first found and they were, or I should say first doing this ever to unearth a lot of these huge ruins that as you'll see in a second are there. So we did some of that original team. One of his jobs was to get the little micro flora so he would literally just pull by hand. Little plants that were growing on so that then they could start removing the soil, they're so worried about, you know, certainly not going to bring in back hose or anything to try and unearth these. So we started with a job like that literally just fucking little micro flora. And then as more and more researchers came in. And it was an archaeologist who like knew the birds that started teaching the birds to him, so that now many years later, he can literally tell you anything you wanted to know about this park and is one of the best birders in the area. So lucky to have him. So it's over. birding through to cause a little tough, you can kind of, you know, the habitat that we're going through the fun thing in this video. Generally, it was just like our group on ourselves, you know, you're going through this, this kind of amazing Boris. So dense there it's almost scary how dense it is. What was funny was these as we were getting this trail all of a sudden more and more people started coming together. And we realized it was because we got to end of the first goal temple for one of the more famous sites there. I was quickly trying to get my scope set up because there's one bird that is kind of famous for sitting up on temple or, and that's orange breasted Falcon. This is arguably one of the hardest Falcons in the world to see. They do have this pretty extensive range but I was talking about before like the mama. So these are hyper localized. Much like a falcon, you know they love nesting on like tall cliff and things so what's better than having you know, a giant temple as built there. We're in T call, we're looking at a thousand. If you know anything about some pop culture references like this one. So of course we had to pose for the same shot. Very fun to see Falcons in that place. Looking back at that simple one and two. Super fun to take a childhood dream. This is where I have to say, you know, there's so much to talk about here that I, I shouldn't be the one to talk about. Because it would take more than an hour and of itself. There's too much here I will strongly encourage like, go home watching YouTube video or something. The mind and people and these incredible tools they built and how they laid out to be able to essentially use the position of the sun. You know, to be the most oversimplified way that if you're standing on temple for, and you look back towards the one the day that the sun sets and is perfectly lined up through the top of that tower is the day that you need to harvest your crops. Months later when it's, you know, setting and it is directly through the top of temple three. That's when you need to, you know, plant next year's like it is insane. The layout the scale of this place the size of these temples, and they are all basically use as these aides towards their agriculture, using things like the sun. I encourage someone who knows what they're talking about explain it and it will blow your mind so much more than that. Because I still have a ton of slides to get through. Also really fun for us because so Jesse Fagan our guide wrote the field guide to the birds of northern Central America, and the temple on the cover of his book was this one right here. Go to self if you are ever traveling with the author of a field guide and you're standing at the location. Have him sign the book and then there at the time because when you say later, and you come back to Maine and you look at your field guy that hasn't been signed. I'm a little bitter about that one. This would be towards the end of our time. This region so targeting a few the last few endemics that we look for horrible photo because it's getting late in the day. This is one of the my darkest fly catchers so think about like great crested flycatcher. That's what they look like but this is the Yucatan flycatcher. The reason it was getting late in the day because this was one of our other targets the Yucatan core will fun to get a flashlight on that. And it also walks back to this, this kind of wet area, filled heron. One of the most appropriately named birds looks a lot like a, you know, black found night heron. Yeah, yeah, it's not those massive eyes this is a nocturnal bird. Yeah, look at the size of that bill. Very fun. Very cool. There are a bunch of tiles going to hang in this little wet area. Now it's time to go out for done with our trip to the patent. We'd fly back to Guatemala city, hop and bus and go down to Antigua. This old city was absolutely beautiful stunning. And especially after some of our, you know, I like to think that we stay at some really nice places on these trips but the north is a little like hot, humid. And I think that in the, looking at the bio regions so to be able to come and like, you know, this is like the courtyard is one of six courtyards at this hotel. This was nice. We did all right so this afternoon, we would go on a walking tour of Antigua this is another one of those things that I'm going to gloss over so quickly, because there's just absolutely insane history here in 1979. Antigua was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, because of the had to look up this word baroque influenced architecture, the layout of it is incredible basically a giant chessboard. And then the churches the ruins. It's absolutely an incredible city. I highly recommend it. We got to do a jade tour, while we were there. Again, another thing that we just kind of have to gloss over but this is Guatemala is the source of so much of the jade that we see kind of around the world and was very important to my own people so it's really fun to kind of get these these cultural clients it's what I really like about these tours that we're able to make them not just 100% about the birds. But also handed over to the people that can explain it better than I can. We were there. We're getting into the second week of March. We got to be there for the, the holy week for sessions. So very strong Catholic influence we got to visit some of the go into some of these churches. What you see on the left here. Lots of food fruits and vegetables kind of laid out around that, but in the center is actually died sawdust. They would make these, they would call them sawdust carpets. This is just an example of one but all throughout the, the roads throughout the city, they would lay out these, you know, essentially these offerings these carpets like this for the precision that would come around. People in turn, carrying this absolutely massive display here coming under the art. These carpets are just kind of lined with the sawdust carpets. Again, absolutely wonderful cultural experience. But it's eight o'clock birds. Excuse me, think of is a farm so this was think of El Pilar. This would get us up to some really high elevation close to 7000 feet of elevation. You get there first thing in the morning this wonderful kind of still looking on, and especially seeing some of the volcanoes in this area was really impressive there's three you could see from here. There's the third. Yeah. I think that's Agua on the right and then where they go was actually every now and then you hear like this rumble. And it was every so often when you start throwing off a little smoke which was kept things interesting. So we're getting into the elevation and getting some of these broadly in conifer forests and there's some real special birds that that we'd be looking for in this entirely new habitat so we're going to start to see you know some of these more maps just showing how endemic these birds are Rufus collard robin bushy Crest and Jay is the best photo I could get one this diving out of the way. There's one below another endemic. These birds seem to be getting further and further away but a fun one to look at was of the sharp chin hawks that are there. Excuse me. There's a subspecies of these ones that are entirely white breasted. There's something like 16 species of subspecies of sharp tail sharp shinned hawk across their range. These ones are very distinctive occurring in a very distinct region. There's a lot of gene flow so this is one that like in the future this will probably get split into its own species. So nice to have that one kind of in the books for us. One of our big targets that we, you know, talk about working angles and holes, how we spotted this bird, Daniel was one of our young bird or local guide that we had hired this day and his ability to get a scope just pointed perfectly at these branches with that caveat. Here's the best photo I could get. So blue-throated mott mott would be a big target for us. This is, again, you can see endemic to that area. That's what it looks like. If you were to paint a beautiful picture but nice to be able to track down that bird. You can see that little black behind the eye in my shot. Anyways, as we would travel from here we wanted to get a little further west and get up into the mountains to get there was when we had to go a little bit south and this is where it's a little hard to see. There are some, you know, some pretty impressive mountains and things but all across the landscape here we're basically looking at sugarcane. And you would just see truck after truck go by with transporting it, which is too bad. Los Terrales was the farm that we would end at. It's been the last couple days there. It's an amazing farm. I wish if I could, if I could have gone up to 170 slides, I would have shown just next time you're at like Home Depot and you walk by the little section. You're like, wow, look at all these like spider plants and like it probably came from here. He actually like sells a lot of the ornamental plants that like we have in our gardens. They had acres and acres and acres that just went on and on of this. The bird you can see in the photo there is Horned Gwan. That is the unicorn bird. They are only a super high elevation. That's a bird that like most people will take a specific trip just to go see that bird. The marked from hell I've heard it described as so we decided to not go for that. We would take it a little bit easier. It's just a fun shot. Los Terrales say also grow and roast their own coffee. So that's actually unroasted coffee you can see up to the right, some through the process on the left. This was taken in the morning and by the time we got back in the afternoon, like all that had been cleared out already. I still have one bag. I know I should drink it when it's fresh, but it's just so good. Anyways, rather than taking that horrible hike. We use the vehicles of some of the property there. I got to sit in the back of one of the jeeps and didn't quite have a seat but it made for great view recording the vehicle coming back behind this. Oh no, this isn't the one of the clips I have you can see the the vehicle bottom out on the way across but we're climbing we're trying to get up into elevation. And it was a lot easier to do it by vehicle though in Los Terrales, we're trying to get up to it's called a lot Eastlaw so it's this island up in this kind of high elevation. And you can really you know you can see those like super steep cliffs this was an amazing kind of trail system. Again all sorts of agriculture going on through here but it was wonderful to see it wasn't just like these monocultures of what they were growing. We would see you know coffee that was planted, but still surrounded by native plants and this is one of the really important things that we need to think about when we're buying coffee is kind of where it's coming from if it's shade grown, etc etc. We actually got a wonderful lesson and didn't coffee while they're there. coffee plants. One of our big targets at this spot. We thought we could hear them kind of down in this ravine but they wouldn't respond to playback or anything was Azure Rump tanninger. Nice to have a reason to go back. We didn't get them but it's very funny and central South America some some species of tanningers, you know you put out a banana and they're there you can take all the photos you want. Some are completely, you know just shy of handouts like that so that's when that got away. But there were some absolutely spectacular birds their slate throated red star was really fun to see especially if you know if this is a bird you've seen kind of anywhere it's their range. You can see them further north in Mexico they have this really kind of deep red belly. The ones in Guatemala, middle range starts turning orange. And then if you were to see them down in like Costa Rica, they have yellow. And so it's fun to see because they not alone we've now done the hockey tour where we saw the red ones we did the Costa Rica tour we saw the ones and we just filled in the gradient. This is one of the endemics this was a more recently split species used to be called paltry tyranulate, which was kind of had this, this big range all throughout Central America. And then, much like most fly catchers tyranium tyranulins are a type of fly catcher, you know they don't. But people realize that they have a unique noise kind of had this isolated population so paltry tyranulate was split into four species and now and this is the Guatemalan tyranulate fun to get to see it in Guatemala. Blue tailed hummingbird another NCA endemic. I should have gotten a better photo showing its blue tail but it was fun to see like that little little roof is in the wing is actually a better field mark. Just birding around the grounds here as I mentioned like some birds love coming out to the the handouts. Blackheaded salt tater these kind of large aggressive birds and absolutely just beautiful colors. We don't get enough yellows like that up here. Things like cinnamon hummingbird. These were wonderful grounds for we had a couple, especially afternoon said it was like, you want to hang out by the feeders you can you can walk around but they've done such a nice job kind of with putting out feeders with having lots of plants. There was so much bird life just right around the grounds. Another one of our endemics we were looking for folks may know like plain Chalaca is a widespread Chalaca species. When you get down into NCA. There is this one kind of more Pacific coast, the white belly Chalaca that just has that really narrow range so fun to see this pair kind of sitting up together. As we get leaving there why not take one more boat ride this was more just I would say kind of a leisure cruise. When you need to get from one end of a lake to another, you can either sit on the bus and take a long way around, or you can take a boat and let the bus driver meet you across. I wanted to take a quick tour of Lake Atitlán. This is the largest lake with these absolutely beautiful views of the volcanoes. It's most famous for the Atitlán greed, or giant greed is sometimes called looks a lot like pie build greed but this thing was much larger. After bass were introduced to the lake the bass started eating the chicks. That started a pretty steep decline of their population. Interestingly, by 1976 there was an earthquake that actually like fractured the bed of the lake and caused the water level drop so significantly. And these are birds that are nesting, you know, on aquatic vegetation so all of a sudden if you have a huge drop in the water level. They couldn't nest so by 1983 there were 32 individuals left and actually huge problem for them. As we mentioned they look a lot like pie build grieves, they started hybridizing with pie build grieves. So, of those 32 that were left many of them, like they weren't. The gene pool is getting muddy the ones that were left for hybridizing with pie build grieves so that by 1989. They were too seen, and that would be the last time they'd ever be seen. Which is super sad. Birds do go extinct. This is, we got dropped off the boat took us across and I was going to leave this up but they dropped us off at the wrong spot. We all of a sudden found ourselves in this like very nice resort. And Jesse had to be like, guys, but except we are all you know in khaki binoculars. This is like pretty early in the morning we're walking, you know, people having breakfast. So we did get out of there the funny thing was as we're trying to catch up with our bands we need to get to our last birding spot. We had some phenomenal birds. And it's really, it's really tough as a guide to be like, yes, I know, I know that's a life bird for you but like let's keep going but so things blue and blue and white mockingbird that we had actually we had gotten glimpses of them before are all of sudden just like a parking lot bird here. Down Sparrow. Same thing we're literally like flagging down the van and all of a sudden we hear these these chip notes of these very cool. These are like sparrows. Really cool look to them very restricted range. But the whole point of us kind of trying to get on this van and get going was to get to this place. And I can say this right. Chicha Chichak was was that in town so here's Daniel was one option before he was birding with us when we were near Intigua, then when we went further west. We sent Daniel to go do a little scouting because we basically have this one afternoon to go for our big target bird to Daniel a visit a bunch of spots found the range of this one bird we're looking for. And here he is just introducing this is the land owner kind of telling the story, because one of the cool pieces here. The places that that we were birding. And it was a essentially a Christmas tree farm. Now this Christmas tree doesn't quite look like the ones that we have here but it is a nice conifer that grows down there. And it's actually been so over harvested that there's very little of it left and there's some birds like this this is a yellow eyed junk. But the guava on race is actually like really specific, and someday might probably show its own species. It's fun to get to go to a farm where they're actually like sustainably growing these, you know, quote unquote trip Christmas trees, which have otherwise been like so over harvested so that was a fun target to see but really nice when you have someone like Daniel who's scouted the location can just say come over there gets us on the spot because the bird that we had you know on the cover of the program. What I was thinking of the bird of the trip goes by the nickname frosty headed, or the pink headed warbler. That was absolutely, I would say one of the best ways to kind of end this trip. So get these, you know, what is this it looks like a strawberry that's been like dipped in something. And it's a little warbler. That was amazing. That was such a kind of great kind of end to the trip because from there we did have a nice barbecue afterwards but that was such a nice bird to essentially end on with my last couple slides. I want to make a quick as I mentioned Magnolia warbler one of our most abundant songbirds that we would see down there. Let me play this. Hopefully you've seen these maps before here's just an animated where these birds are, and we think of them as breeding up here, we're in fall migration right now. Look at how you know range restricted they are in that non breeding season like especially around the Yucatan, northern part of Guatemala. They need more area to breed make sense. A couple quick plugs, things we need to think about for you my cursor back. Oh my God, Guatemala and coffee is so good. It's even better when it's grown in a way that's protecting the habitat for these birds so probably seen it in our newsletter is the York County Audubon newsletter but this is what we're talking about when we talk about shade ground coffee it's really easy to destroy habitat plant coffee, it grows faster, it tastes more bitter, and it's cheaper. But when you can preserve the bird's habitat by having you kind of grow in these more sustainable ways. There is a company called Finkus Singap just from Guatemala and you can buy it on Amazon and it is shade grown Guatemala. Awesome. I want to quickly mention windows and things that birds fly into. I hope you're paying attention with workmen and Audubons doing special my colleague Nick Lyon with a bird safe project. The number of birds that they're finding and are hitting buildings in windows, the buildings in Portland is so sad there's a lot of work going forward to make like future development need to have treated glass, etc etc. We need to just be talking about it more be more aware of it a lot of birds die from confining the structures could kind of tie this back into that that need, but we're in a biological crisis right now. We've lost 30% of all birds since 1970. It's an acceptable bottom of the food chain let's plant native plants in our backyards for the love of God, keep your cats indoors. The number one answer more for it or anthropogenic cause of bird mortalities somewhere over. Close to two billion birds per year in the US alone are from cats. In closing, the other plug I wanted to make like if you are thinking about going to a place like Guatemala. Yeah, it's super easy to use a bird and buying these spots and like nowhere to go but hiring local guys like so important, especially learning some of the cultural aspects like here is Miguel talking about. So proud of his mind background and how like, literally, what is it the short minds pointer fingers are their thumbs like can't bend as far back and these are just things like that we're connecting on and such an interesting. Also, he's the best bird are there. He's going to do a lot better than like Merlin just playing on your phone. Trust me, we need to support these support these people. Yeah, in closing here is just our trip report we ended with around 327 species, which is pretty incredible. Again, it's that kind of southern influence a lot of our wintering birds. 227 species 15 of those were NCAs North. Excuse me, Northern Central American and Demex. We ended up with something like eight species of mammals. I do want to thank everyone who came and Dave's here. This was a super group I feel so lucky to get through. These tours get to show people some of these really important places around them that have both amazing birds. Sometimes our birds amazing kind of cultural tie ins as well. And I hope this is where I would have put the slide up of where our next tour is going. We're shooting for Machu Picchu 2024. Well, stay tuned. I know we're getting a little late so thank you all so much for hanging in there with me taking this quick trip to Guatemala. I'm happy to hang out and take questions but I know people got to get done. Any questions. An hour and 20 minutes. Yeah. Yeah.