As you may know, I use WordPress to format these posts and email them to you. Also, WordPress only provides 3gb of image storage, which I quickly burned through, so I have been hosting the images on Flickr and embedding them in my posts. This works mostly fine.

The problem is that some of you have told me that the aspect ratio of the images is off in the posts you receive by email. Since that didn’t happen for everyone, I assumed the issue was with how your particular email client handled embedded images from WordPress, and that there was nothing I could do about it.

Well, I recently learned that there might actually be something I can do on my end to help your email client render the images properly. So, this is a test. I have inserted the same image twice via two different methods, and I have done this for an image in portrait orientation and one in landscape. That makes four images altogether.

If you have been seeing incorrectly rendered images on your end, please let me know if either method improves things for you.

Here’s a white-whiskered puffbird embedded with WordPress’s “Flickr embed” block.

Here’s the same white-whiskered puffbird embedded via WordPress’s “custom HTML” block.

Here’s a least grebe embedded with WordPress’s “Flickr embed” block.

Here’s the same least grebe embedded via WordPress’s “custom HTML” block.

If this helps, great and sorry it took me so long to sort out. If not, it didn’t hurt too much to try, and maybe it will provide a clue to a solution that does work.

Anne and I arrived home safe, sound, and on time last evening, which is always nice. In Estabrook Park this morning it was cool, but not cold, windy, and sunny, which is also nice for a November day in southeastern Wisconsin. The critters seemed miffed, however, perhaps because I was away for so long, and I struggled to see many, let alone get pictures. The pond appeared empty of waterfowl, but I heard that folks saw a bald eagle soaring overhead, which I completely missed. Dang.

Anyway, this female belted kingfisher over the river was one of the few who not only showed up but also let me sneak a picture. “Thanks, Sweetie!”

Given the air temperature, I was giving the insects a pass today, so I was quite pleasantly surprised to spot this dragonfly, another autumn meadowhawk, of which we’ve seen a few this fall.

And that, sadly, was all I was able to manage this morning. The silver lining is that it leaves a lot of space for more trip pictures, so here they are.

The bare-throated tiger heron at Crooked Tree Lodge must have been unimpressed of the picture I took of its cousin beside the road in Guatemala, because it really put on a show Wednesday after lunch, although it looks less than please with the chore.

We saw plenty of yellow-crowned night herons on Caye Caulker, but I hadn’t seen a black-crowned night heron all trip. That was until the boat ride at Crooked Tree. There was a youngster, like the ones we see from time to time at the pond in Estabrook, but it’s hard to beat the dashing look of a mature adult.

There was no shortage of insects at Crooked Tree, believe you me, and this little beauty, a spot-tailed dasher (Micrathyria aequalis), may be the smallest dragonfly I’ve ever seen.

Finally, another bug on the smaller side and just as pretty was the Hermes satyr (Hermeuptychia hermes), of which there were quite a few.

Lastly, back in Estabrook, the work crew has completely hauled away the pile of broken limestone that they excavated from the river bottom, and now they appear to be wrapping up relandscaping their work area.

The forecast for tomorrow is a little cooler, a little less wind, and a lot less sun, so enjoy the blue sky while you can.

As promised, Anne and I head home today, but I had time before breakfast for one more walk around the Crooked Tree Lodge, and I am sure glad I did.

This little cutie is a green kingfisher (Chloroceryle americana), who I also first saw in Brazil, but had failed to capture on film until today. Compared to the enormous ringed kingfishers I’ve seen here and even the belted we have in Estabrook, this one is quite a miniature in size, but certainly not in attitude.

Before supper last evening, I got to go on a little boat ride down the lagoon and back. I got to see a bunch of herons, including my first black-crowned night herons of the trip, but the big surprise was this enormous green iguana (Iguana iguana) casually chewing the shrubbery along the shore. I’d bet it is at least five feet long, if you include the tail.

Finally, after several false alarms, I did find what appears to be a true monarch butterfly. I read that they do migrate, but just between the highlands and the lowlands around here, not the crazy trip the ones we see in Estabrook get to make.

There’s no time for editing, so sorry about all the typos, but it’s time to get on the road to the airport.

Anne and I arrived at the Crooked Tree Lodge mid-afternoon yesterday, and the sights have been fantastic. If you read this blog, and I hope you do, then you know that Anne has taken me to some wonderful places, and I have had the good fortune to see plenty of amazing creatures, but I have not yet seen anything quite like this.

I can’t remember if it was Anne or I who first spotted a large-ish black bird near the top of a big, but not too tall, tree, but once I knew it was there, I got right to work trying to capture an image. The foliage on the tree was pretty thick, however, so I was not having much luck. Worse, the bird finally tired of me and bolted. My heart sank, but not for long. The bird only flew across the driveway and settled onto the bare branch of a fallen tree barely above eye level. Perfect!

Then things got really crazy. It turns out that the first tree was full of these birds, and they all followed the first. Even better, they appear to really like perching together unlike any wild bird I have ever seen. Even pigeons on the Port Washington Road bridge in the middle of winter don’t bunch up this tightly.

It turns out that these precious creatures are groove-billed anis (Crotophaga sulcirostris), and I saw their cousins, the greater ani and the smooth-billed ani, in Brazil, but they sure didn’t act like this. What a treat!

One surprise on this trip, among many, is that I have seen few, if any, sparrows and finches. Not even house sparrows. Thus, I was very excited to see this next bird, a Morelet’s seedeater (Sporophila morelleti). It turns out that there is an entire genus of these so-called “seedeaters”, and it “contains 41 species.” Wow!

I first saw this next species of bird back in 2017, but I’ve never managed to capture an image until now. Say “hello” to my very first roadside hawk (Rupornis magnirostris), and “yes,” that is its official common name.

Similarly, I first glimpsed a vermilion flycatcher (Pyrocephalus rubinus) in Big Bend National Park, but they have eluded my camera until today. This little beauty not only relented this morning, but it posed magnificently. What a stunner, eh?

Not all the miracles came in feathers today, and here’s a brown basilisk (Basiliscus vittatus), which is nicknamed the “Jesus Christ lizard” for its ability to run across the surface of water. I had the good fortune to see that feat today.

Finally, the place is just hopping with butterflies, and here’s a darling little (Juditha caucana), who may have the common name “Caucana metalmark”.

Tomorrow, we say our final goodbyes to Belize and Guatemala and start our journey home. See you soon.

Anne and I took the ferry back to the mainland this morning, but before we left, I had one more outing to look for wildlife on Caye Cauker, and what an outing it was.

We’ve seen blue herons, and white egrets, and even a blue heron that is white for its first year, but what if we had a blue and white heron? All you would have to do then is add a little purple to its back, and you’d have a tricolored heron (Egretta tricolor).

That’s quite the long, straight beak, but if you prefer a long, decurved beak, then this Hudsonian whimbrel (Numenius hudsonicus) may be just the ticket.

If that’s a tad too long or too decurved, you could dial both back a bit with this short-billed dowitcher (Limnodromus griseus). It seems that they have every sort of shore or wading bird here that you could imagine.

If passerines are more your speed, get a load of these characters. This first one is a bananaquit (Coereba flaveola), which I first glimpsed in Brazil, back in 2023, but never managed to capture on film. Even this one wouldn’t let me move to my left enough to get that darn piece of straw out from in front of its face. “Well, hello there, you evasive little stinker.”

Next, we have a hooded oriole (Icterus cucullatus), which I did not know even existed until I spotted this amazing creature.

I had heard that there are iguanas on the island, but it took my last outing to finally spot this magnificent black spiny-tailed iguana (Ctenosaura similis).

Lastly, after the ferry dropped us off in Belize City, we got a ride back inland to the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary, where the birds are great, and I’ll show you some tomorrow, but let me wrap this up with a gorgeous white peacock butterfly (Anartia jatrophae).

It was another day in paradise, out here on Caye Caulker, and we got an early start exploring the south end of the island.

There were a lot of wonderful things to see, but a highlight has got to be my very first adult yellow-crowned night heron. Long time readers will surely recognize the name because we had a juvenile hang out on the pond in Estabrook a couple of times for a while, but I have never seen the full majesty of an adult until this morning.

Another adult we saw for the first time this morning is this little blue heron, although we didn’t have to wait nearly as long for this sighting.

I can’t assert that this next bird, my very first willet (Tringa semipalmata), is a youngster or an adult, but it is for sure not in breeding plumage.

As Anne and I strolled along the edge of the island, often between walls of mangrove, I spied at least a couple of gray catbirds, but there was also a glossy black bird of about the same size. Well, I didn’t get a good luck until we ventured out again this afternoon to investigate the north end of the island, and it turns out that there is such a bird as a black catbird (Melanoptila glabrirostris), and this is what it looks like. Ha!

I was thrilled to see an osprey this morning, and things only got better on our hike back to our hotel when I spotted it with a fish. Thus, you can imagine my joy when we went out again this afternoon and spotted this one in its nest with a nearly grown-looking youngster. Hot diggity dog! They’re making more!

After all the warning signs at Tikal about crocodiles, we were all a bit disappointed that we didn’t get to see one. Well, Anne and I are the lucky ones, because here is our first American crocodile (Crocodylus acutus). “Sorry, Deb!” Even better, as luck would have it, I was able to capture a pretty nice image, without losing any limbs, and if you click on it so you can zoom in, you can even see the vertical-slit pupil in the eye on the left.

Finally, there were a few butterflies around, and I especially enjoyed spotting this one, because I thought it was a monarch, but it didn’t look quite right with those white-ish blotches on the hind wing and a slightly darker reddish color elsewhere. Well, that’s because it’s a soldier (Danaus eresimus), not a monarch (Danaus plexippus), and it doesn’t venture farther north than Florida and Texas.

Tomorrow, we ship out again, but we’re not done with Belize yet, so stay tuned for who we find next.

Anne and I spent most of the morning traveling, but we arrived on Caye Cauker, off the coast of Belize, in time for a late lunch. It was a bit of a challenge for me to focus on food, however, because the place was alive with wild and wonderful new birds.

I’ve had the good fortune to see magnificent frigatebirds (Fregata magnificens) years ago, long before we started this operation, but it was great to see them again, and now I can share them with you.

We’ve seen several pelicans before, including American white at Kohler Andrae and great white in Jordan, but this is our first brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis). They are the smallest pelicans, and Anne noticed right away that they were significantly smaller than the huge great white that forced us off the trail in Azraq.

Another newbie for us is this royal tern (Thalasseus maximus), which is “only slightly smaller than [the] Caspian[s],” that we see in Milwaukee.

If we’re on the water, we should expect to see gulls, and the ones here all appear to be laughing gulls (Leucophaeus atricilla), but I didn’t hear a peep out of them.

I only saw ruddy turnstones for the first time this summer in Milwaukee, and here they are again, seemingly asking “what took you so long to get here?”

Last and least, size-wise that is, was this darling little American redstart hopping around the beach, of all places.

Finally, not all the amazing sights were avian, as usual, and here’s a Caribbean whiptail stingray (Styracura schmardae) that has learned to come to shore so tourists can feed it fish.

Tomorrow we’re going to try visiting the forest on the south end of the island, and if we find anything interesting, I’ll be sure let you know.

Things went as spectacularly as I could have hoped this morning, and we had beautiful weather for exploring the forest outside of the Tikal archeological site. We even waited until after breakfast before heading out, and that felt luxurious.

We had been hearing parrots, noisily “vocalizing”, as I’ve been taught to say, in the treetops since we arrived, and we have caught glimpses of some, but they usually stay mostly out of sight. This morning, however, a group of red-lored Amazons (Amazona autumnalis) must have been especially bold or hungry, because I finally have a picture to show you. In case you didn’t know, as I sure has heck did not, “Amazons” are a genus of parrots, and “lore” is the space between the eye and nostril.

After dinner last evening, we must have felt that we had not yet fed enough mosquitoes because we headed back into the site to check out one more monument. On the way, we spotted a couple of new birds, but it was way too dark for pictures. Happily, this little cutie, a white-whiskered puffbird (Malacoptila panamensis), gave me another chance today, and yes, that is its real name.

At the same time as I was trying to redeem myself with a decent puffbird picture, another little darling, this bright-rumped attila (Attila spadiceus), was busily hopping around on the ground gobbling up bugs and daring me to get a picture of it, too.

Then things settle down for a bit, and we continued down an unmarked dirt road into the forest and past signs warning us to turn back because of the danger of getting lost or meeting crocodiles. Neither Anne nor Deb were deterred, and the road eventually led to a small pond, not even half the size of the pond in Estabrook, and things quickly got exciting again. We could hear a large bird or birds squawking on the other side of some trees on a little peninsula, and then they started flying across the water to the other side.

Once I saw one in flight, I was immediately reminded of black-crowned night herons that I’ve seen fly across Juneau Lagoon, so I began frantically searching for them over the far shore. The first few hid pretty well, but this one finally relented, and if you glance at the picture below, you can imagine my surprise. What on earth is that? Thankfully the merlin app had an answer: that is a boat-billed heron (Cochlearius cochlearius). Wow, just wow! Right?

But that’s not all. On the same tiny pond, with more crocodile warnings, this little bird was busily diving for its breakfast. If those fuzzy feathers look familiar, that’s because this is yet another grebe, in fact, a least grebe (achybaptus dominicus), which is different from the little grebe we just saw in Jordan.

Then it was time to start heading back to the hotel so we could check out and head back to Flores, but on the way, we found one more trogon, this beautiful black-headed trogon (Trogon melanocephalus).

Finally, as we headed out for lunch after checking into our hotel in Flores, Deb spotted this stunning butterfly, a split-banded owl-butterfly (Opsiphanes cassina), near the ceiling of a passage way.

Tomorrow, we all get up early, and Deb will fly down to Guatemala City to join up with her volunteer veterinarian organization to work for a week in Antigua. Meanwhile, Anne and I will travel back to Belize for the next leg of our adventure.

Today we visited the Tikal archeological site, and it was truly a wonder, of the same order of magnitude as Petra in Jordan. But we wanted to have breakfast before we went, which didn’t start till 7 am, and the sun came up around 6, so we strolled around the grounds to see who might be up early.

Deb spotted a heron flying over, but it was behind trees already before we could get our binoculars on it for an ID. We were ready for the next one, which I could clearly see was a great egret. The third one, however, was also white but noticeably smaller, and as we tried to detect the clues that would enable us to distinguish a cattle egret from a snowy egret, the little rascal landed in a tree nearly overhead.

As I was taking pictures, in hopes of getting one that would be presentable, I was thinking to myself, “that’s not the black beak of a snowy, nor is it the yellow beak of a cattle, so who the heck is this, now?” Thankfully, one of the pictures was good enough for the Merlin app to detect that it was a young, i.e. first-year, little blue heron (Egretta caerulea), whose blue feathers probably won’t arrive until next summer. Ha!

After breakfast, we did hike over to the archeological site, and just as we were getting into the thick of the monuments, Anne spotted this beauty in a nearby tree. If it looks familiar, that’s because it’s another trogon, cousin to the one I showed you just yesterday, but this one is a slaty-tailed trogon (Trogon massena).

After a snack break, Deb and I climbed to the top of The Great Pyramid, in the Lost World complex, to take in the view. There, Deb noticed some vultures circling high overhead, but one did not look like the others. Well, that’s because it was a king vulture (Sarcoramphus papa) and not one of the black or turkey vultures we’ve been seeing.

When we finally took a break for some “lunch” mid-afternoon, there was a water feature by the restaurant, and look who was preening right at the shoreline: this pretty russet-naped wood-rail (Aramides albiventris)

On top of all the amazing birds, there were monkeys! We saw several troops of spider monkeys and one small group of howler monkeys, which took us forever to find. The latter were a little shy, which was surprising, considering the racket they make, and that could have something to do with why they were so hard for us to spot, but some of the Central American spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) appeared to be quite the show-offs, and here’s one.

After Deb and I climbed down from the great pyramid to rejoin Anne, she pointed out a tiny lizard on the ground. It was barely two inches long, cute as a button, probably a least gecko (Sphaerodactylus glaucus), and it gave Anne a bit of a scare when it started to run up her leg. Luckily, we quickly separated the two, and they are both expected to recover fully.

Finally, there was a smattering of wildflowers growing on the side of the pyramid, just below the summit, and they were attracting a nice collection of butterflies, one of whom was this stunner, a blue metalmark (Lasaia sula).

Tomorrow, we head back to Flores, but we’re not in a hurry, so I’m looking forward to one more chance to see a bit more of the amazing wildlife that lives around here. I’ll keep you posted.

Holy Moly! What a day we had. Before breakfast, Anne, my sister, Deb, and I all strolled around the island city of Flores, and we found a swallow that none of us had ever heard of, let alone seen before, this darling mangrove swallow (Tachycineta albilinea).

After breakfast, we piled into a rental car and Deb drove us up to Tikal, and we had barely checked into our hotel before Anne spotted this stunner on a branch right over the parking area. Its name, gartered violaceous trogon (Trogon caligatus), is almost as amazing as its appearance. Raise your hand if you already knew that “violaceous” was a real word.

And the astounding sights just kept coming. Here’s a pale-billed woodpecker (Campephilus guatemalensis) we found in the same area.

Anne spotted this bird, which doesn’t even look real, high above our bungalow. Its name, Montezuma oropendola (Psarocolius montezuma), sounds equally made up. The fine folks at ebird.org describe its call as a “memorable gurgling song [which] sounds like water poured from a bottle.” The bird is mid-call in this image.

Speaking of imaginary creatures, this walking collage of brilliant colors and three of its compatriots strolled out of the forest while we were eating lunch and proceeded to forage all around the grounds. It’s an ocellated turkey (Meleagris ocellata), and at one point, one of them even leaped up on the hood of the car Deb had rented, and she rushed over to shoo it away.

Finally, not all the fantastical critters we saw today were feathered, but it took me at least three tries to capture this little cutie on film. It’s a Central American agouti (Dasyprocta punctata), and it appears that the hotel grounds are in its regular circuit.

Lastly, it’s late, and everyone is asleep, including my editor, so all the errors in the text above are my very own creations. Tomorrow we go to the actual archeological site to see what the Maya left for us.