Tag Archives: Mexico

Chasing Morelet’s Seedeaters—or Why You Shouldn’t Depend on Map Apps Near the Mexican Border (Texas 2025, Final Installment)

My success finding Black-capped Vireos and Golden-cheeked Warblers (see our last post) left me a welcome gift: an extra day to pursue another bird that keenly interested me. It was a bird Braden and I had unsuccessfully tried for on our 2018 trip to the Lower Rio Grande Valley: Morelet’s Seedeater. Though not rare in its core year-round range of Central America and eastern Mexico, this adorable “finchy” songbird just barely creeps over into the US along the Rio Grande Valley.

Catching sights such as this setting moon is one of the benefits of being an “early birder.”

Sunday morning, I rose at four a.m. and headed south from Uvalde. As they had on the previous morning, both a spectacular sunrise and unforgettable setting full moon rewarded me. As light crept over this flat country, caracaras flew along the road and Scissor-tailed Flycatchers perched on telephone wires. I even got a glimpse of a flock of quail leaping over a fence. Scaled Quail? I could only guess! After ninety minutes, my little highway joined Interstate 35.

And that’s where the trouble began.

I-35 is a main artery for trade between Mexico, the US, and Canada. As I sped south, I kept seeing signs for Mexico, but my map app directions assured me that I should keep going and turn off at an exit called Riverbank Drive. As I kept driving, however, I saw no signs for that—or any other—exit, and I realized that the only other traffic around me consisted of huge 18-wheelers. Finally, a thought occurred to me: Uh-oh.

Soon I found myself at a dead stop, surrounded by big rigs, with no way to turn around. There are moments in life where you know you are in a fix, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. This was one of those. Still, hope springs eternal and I climbed out of the car and walked to a big rig next to me. The kind Mexican driver, undoubtedly flummoxed by what I was doing there, rolled down his window, and we had the following conversation:

Me: Uh, I think I made a mistake. I’m trying to go to Laredo.

Driver: Laredo, Mexico?

Me: Uh, no. Laredo, Texas.

Driver (looking worried for me): You’ll have to turn around.

Me: Where?
Driver (after conferring with his partner): I don’t know.

These Big Rigs kept me company as I contemplated life as a Mexican citizen.

It was then that I began pondering the frightening ramifications of entering Mexico without a passport. I mean, could I have picked a worse time in history for this to happen??? The only good thing was that a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher perched nearby, blissfully unconcerned by my human drama. A few minutes later, the border opened and I eased in front of my new trucker friend. For ten minutes I and the big rigs inched forward until we reached a wide No Man’s Land of pavement and there I spotted an actual border worker. I pulled up next to him and explained my mistake. Looking vaguely amused and overly patient, he said, “See my buddy back there? Turn around and he’ll keep the trucks stopped while you exit at that road on the side.” I proceeded as instructed, gratefully waving to the “buddy.” I could have burst into tears at this point, but instead, I laughed all the way to the next exit—the real exit—which led to my original destination, Father McNaboe Park.

The Rio Grande River, aka the Mexican Border, complete with Border Patrol agents and lots of Carrizo cane, where Morelet’s Seedeaters like to hang out.

By the time I reached the park, I had experienced a week’s worth of drama, but remember, I still had some serious birding on the agenda. In 2018, Braden and I had visited the Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV) and even spent a night in Laredo, but had somehow failed to find McNaboe Park. I don’t know how, as the park consisted of a wide, long swath of trails, playing fields, and other amenities right on the Rio Grande River. Today, the park was jammed with people and I felt at ease as I walked toward the river. Before I even got there, I spotted my first great birds of the day—a pair of Hooded Orioles, a species I hadn’t seen since visiting Southern California seven years before. Not long afterward, I saw another oriole, a Bullock’s Oriole—perhaps on its way to Montana?

Over the phone the night before, Braden had told me to look for the Morelet’s Seedeaters in the “cane grass,” a tall invasive species known in Texas as Carrizo cane. Apparently, this plant can be found all along the 1,255-mile reach of the Rio Grande, and it didn’t take me long to find thick stands of it. I began walking along them looking for little black and brown birds. I covered a couple of hundred yards without seeing any and then walked down to a little sandbar right at river level. No seedeaters.

Then, I happened to glance up a side channel at another thick stand of cane. There, perched on one of the stalks was an erect little bird with a finchy bill. I didn’t get my binoculars up in time to get a good look, but I immediately knew: I had found my bird!

I was just about to get a great photo of this Morelet’s Seedeater when a loud car rumbled up next to me. I accidentally managed this flight shot, though, which is kind of fun.

Of course, that didn’t keep me from wanting better looks, and for the next hour or so, I walked various paths and channels. I got to know the bird’s song and it wasn’t long before I was hearing and seeing more of these cute little guys. They were pretty shy, but I managed good looks—and saw some other great birds as well. These included a pair of Black-necked Stilts, a Spotted Sandpiper, a Green Heron, and even a lone Mexican Duck in the middle of the river. Not including the seedeaters, the show stoppers, as usual, were a pair of Vermillion Flycatchers.

Do Vermillion Flycatchers get way more attention than they deserve? Probably. Does anyone ever get tired of looking at them? I doubt it!

After a late breakfast at the French restaurant McDaniels, I decided to hit one more park in Laredo—North Central Park. Remarkably, I had failed to find a Golden-fronted Woodpecker so far on the trip, and though the heat was comin’ on fast, the park had abundant sightings of them. It took only five minutes to hear and then see one of these handsome birds and, walking a couple of miles or so, I also added Great Kiskadees and Bell’s Vireo to my trip list. Then, before I inadvertently wandered toward Mexico again, I turned tail and headed back up I-35 for San Antonio.

Link to my Texas Trip Report: https://ebird.org/tripreport/351263

Total Number of Species for the Trip: 144

My Top 6 Trip Birds:

Least Bittern (see post “Anahuac Lifer Attack”)

Yellow-throated Warbler (see Texas Hill Country post)

Black-capped Vireo (see Texas Hill Country post)

Golden-cheeked Warbler (see Texas Hill Country post)

Morelet’s Seedeater (this post)

Yellow-throated Vireo (see Peveto Woods post)

A pair of Black-necked Stilts flying downstream over the Rio Grande.

Birding in Oaxaca, Mexico (report by Braden Collard)

As our final post for February, we feature a glimpse of Braden’s amazing winter break trip to Oaxaca (pronounced “wah-HA-kah”), Mexico with our friend, and now birding guide, Nick Ramsey. If you like tropical birds, we’ve got more treats coming your way—but we won’t spill the bird seed just yet. Meanwhile, if you’d like to support FatherSonBirding, please consider buying some of Sneed’s books—or supporting a bird conservation group of your choice (see our post “Saving Birds. It’s Time.”).

No words can capture the feelings of shock and disbelief that Nick Ramsey, Garrett Rhyne, Eugene Huryn and I felt when an adult male Red Warbler materialized in a bush in front of us. We’d originally pulled over to admire the view of Oaxaca City from several thousand feet up and, no surprise, had begun to notice birds the instant we got out of our rental car. Nick, who had been birding and traveling around northern Central America and Mexico for the last few weeks, pointed out the distinct high-pitched call of a Mexican Violetear, hidden somewhere in the foliage below us. Downslope, a large mixed flock of warblers was passing through, and we started to pick out species as they foraged on the ends of conifer branches—Hermit Warblers, Townsend’s Warblers, Olive Warblers, a Mexican Chickadee—species that birders could find in the western United States. Then the Red Warbler appeared, and we all lost our minds as we scrambled to take pictures of it against its light green backdrop.

One look at a Red Warbler and you know why we lost our minds seeing it!

Camino la Cumbre, the road we’d turned onto ten minutes earlier, is one of Oaxaca’s more famous birding locations, and for good reason. As we continued driving up the road, which featured tall pine trees growing alongside ten-foot tall century plants, we stopped any time we heard or saw birds, which was often. Collared Towhees, White-eared Hummingbirds, Brown-backed Solitaires and more species we had on our target lists made appearances alongside the road, in habitat not all that different from what you might see in the middle elevations of California’s Sierra Nevada. Besides the Red Warblers, though, our biggest targets were a pair of species known for traveling together—one of the world’s largest wrens and one of the world’s smallest jays. The Gray-barred Wrens didn’t take long to find, and we bumped into several flocks of them, not skulking close to the ground like many US wrens do, but fifteen feet up in oak trees, picking through epiphytes in search of insects.

One of our biggest first-day targets, Gray-barred Wrens, proved easy to find. One of the world’s largest wrens, they are surprisingly visible at mid-tree level.

As we wound higher and higher up the road, the birds improved—as did the view of Oaxaca City below us. We’d flown in the previous day, and spent that evening and the following morning stalking through the scrubby, lowland habitat in search of other specialty birds, endemic only to dry valleys in south-central Mexico: Dwarf Vireo, Ocellated Thrasher, Bridled Sparrow. We’d been planning the six-day trip, which fell perfectly into my winter break, for several months, but only at the Dallas Fort-Worth Airport had I met Garrett and Eugene for the first time. Nick knew them from his time at LSU, and had brought us all together to see a small portion of the birds Mexico had to offer. And boy, did Mexico have a lot of birds to offer.

Bridled Sparrows remind one of the Five-striped and Black-throated Sparrows many US birders eagerly chase through Arizona.

The Mexican state of Oaxaca is positioned so that it includes both the dry tropical forest of the Pacific and the rainforests of the Caribbean. More importantly, it is home to a variety of mountain ranges and dry valleys, each far enough apart so that different bird species can be found in each area. This diverse array of habitats means that Oaxaca is one of the most diverse areas in Mexico, and we planned to see the full extent of this diversity on our intense six-day itinerary.

We at FatherSonBirding always feel gratified that so many birds are named after us, including this Collard, I mean, Collared Towhee.

Camino la Cumbre was a major target area, and after an hour or so, we rounded a particularly foggy bend in the road, got out of the car, and laid eyes on our other major target: Dwarf Jays. Dwarf Jays are only known from the pine-oak woodland in the mountains north of Oaxaca, and thus the species was quite high on our target list. These tiny blue corvids were in the company of several Gray-barred Wrens as well as a Chestnut-sided Shrike-Vireo, a vireo that has evolved incredibly similar plumage to a Chestnut-sided Warbler, and we watched the mixed flock forage for a while, in awe of these birds we’d only seen in books before. We snagged a few more pine-oak species, including a beautiful male Bumblebee Hummingbird and a pair of particularly skulky Golden-browed Warblers, then continued north to our next birding location. In the following days, we would be driving down and then up the side of another mountain range into the cloud forest, then down into the rainforests of the Caribbean slope.

I unfortunately did not get a photo of a Dwarf Jay, so this Unicolor Jay will have to do!

Almost as exciting as the number of life birds all four of us were getting were the huge quantities of North American birds we saw at every stop! When I’d been in Costa Rica (see Braden’s post on El Copal and his other Costa Rica posts), the common neotropical migrants were eastern birds like Chestnut-sided Warbler and Wood Thrush, species that I’d gotten to know the summer before in Pennsylvania. But in southern and western Oaxaca? Half the birds were Montana species! In several locations we came across triple-digit numbers of Violet-green Swallows, as well as roving mixed flocks of orioles and Western Tanagers.  Our first morning of birding yielded a group of more than a hundred Cassin’s Kingbirds, and we found MacGillivray’s, Wilson’s, and Orange-crowned Warblers foraging low in bushes while Townsend’s and Hermit Warblers hunted higher up, near the tops of pine trees.

A Brown-backed Solitaire.

These species reminded us that Mexico is, after all, a part of North America, even though American birders and citizens seem to forget that frequently. The birds and habitats in parts of Oaxaca mirror what you might encounter on a warm February day in southeastern Arizona. Plus, ABA birders spend hundreds and thousands of dollars driving and flying across the country to see rarities like Slate-throated Redstart or southern Texas specialties like Altamira Oriole . . . and yet, for a similar amount of money, they can fly just a little bit farther to where these birds are not only common but joined by hundreds of other spectacular tropical species. If there’s one thing I was sure of, even on Day One of our Oaxaca trip, it’s that I would be coming back to Mexico.

Our Oaxacan Birding Crew (left to right: Eugene, Garrett, Nick, and Braden) on Camino la Cumbre.

This post is written, photographed, and edited by human beings!

Birding the Mexican Border

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Listen to our interview with Sarah Aronson on Montana NPR’s “The Write Question” which aired Thursday, March 7!

Last week, Braden and I had the opportunity to attend the San Diego Bird Festival and do some of the most intense—and fun—birding of our lives. The festival will undoubtedly fill several posts, but before it began, we wanted to do something we’d been thinking about for at least a year—bird the California/Mexico border.

The border couldn’t have provided a greater contrast between the open wetlands and scrub on the U.S. side and the bustling city of Tijuana right across “la frontera.”

Because of a missed connection, we didn’t reach San Diego until 1 p.m., but we picked up our rental car and made a beeline down I-5 toward Tijuana. Our destination was the actual spot where the border meets the Pacific Ocean, and we weren’t sure how close we could drive. We ended up in a parking lot about a mile east and north of our destination and began trekking along a dirt road heading toward the ocean. It was a surreal experience as helicopters circled overhead—Navy fliers, evidently, training for duty—and the city of Tijuana pulsed just beyond the formidable border wall a mile to the south. Around us, though, stretched intertidal wetlands and fields, where we picked up Savannah Sparrows and meadowlarks and collected a number of duck species and a lone Eared Grebe.

This group of 500 Surf Scoters delighted us—especially when Braden identified a Black Scoter among them! Note Mexico’s Coronado Islands in the background—an important nesting site for Scripps’s Murrelets.

After hitting the beach, we headed south, the border fence looming in the distance. Almost immediately, we got a great surprise—a group of 500 or so Surf Scoters floating just offshore. For we Montana boys, this was a true delight—made even more so when Braden discovered a Black Scoter in one of his photos! We were hoping to go all the way to the fence and talk to some folks on the Mexico side, but a stoic Border Patrol agent shooed us back.

The two Heermann’s Gulls on top of these dolphins were vaunted additions to our Mexico list!

Undaunted, Braden said, “Let’s start a Mexico list,” so we spent half an hour watching birds perching on the border fence and flying between nations—without passports! President Trump would have been furious. In all, we tallied seven Mexico species: Rock Pigeon, Willet, Heermann’s Gull, Western Gull, Ring-billed Gull, European Starling, and a lone Willet sitting on the fence. Oh yeah, and a group of twenty Surf Scoters who had drifted across the border without a care in the world!

Next Up: San Diego Big Day #1!

These Willets weren’t the only birds who totally ignored our artificial geopolitical boundary. Go Willets!