Guatemala Day 7

It was another beautiful morning in Antigua, Guatemala, and our B&B doesn’t serve breakfast until 8am, so I had 1.5 glorious hours from sunrise till breakfast to look for critters on the grounds.

My first find this morning was this elusive blue-and-white mockingbird (Melanotis hypoleucus).

This little cutie is a young or female Wilson’s warbler, whom we might hope to spot in Estabrook in just a few weeks.

Back to the locals, this stunner let me have just one shot, and I couldn’t believe my luck when I looked at what I got. Anyway, it’s a rose-throated becard (Pachyramphus aglaiae), and it mostly sticks to Central America.

Here’s another Estabrook Park regular, a blue-headed vireo, who I first spotted there last spring in mid-April.

This next handsome devil is a cinnamon-bellied saltator (Saltator grandis), and it keeps strictly to Central America.

This bird threw me for a loop. I could tell it was a New World warbler, but not one I recognized. Well, that’s because it’s my first ever Townsend’s warbler (Setophaga townsendi). No one has reported spotting one in Estabrook yet, and the last time someone spotted one in all of Milwaukee County was back in 2006, so they might not make it there very often.

This face I recognized right away, and it helped that it posed just as boldly as the azure-crowned hummingbird did just last Friday.

Finally, yet one more bird, a female rose-breasted grossbeak, whom we can expect to see in Estabrook in just a couple of months.

And that was all before breakfast, but we fly home tomorrow, so I’ll tell you about the rest of the day then.