birding-aus

Mexico field guide

To: David Adams <>
Subject: Mexico field guide
From: Eric Jeffrey via Birding-Aus <>
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2016 20:10:50 +0000
I would second all of this as to which I have knowledge. Howell & Webb remains 
by far the best field guide for the area, but it is massive and has quirks.

Second, you will want a guide for "North American" birds, even though Mexico is 
geographically within North America. The two preferred guides are Sibley and 
National Geographic. Either should do for your purpose.

I believe there is also a site-finding guide by Howell, but that may just be a 
figment of my aging gray matter.

It obviously does pay to do advance study, especially of types not found in 
Australia, such as hummingbirds.

Eric Jeffrey
Falls Church, VA
USA

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jun 7, 2016, at 3:52 PM, David Adams <> wrote:
>
> I may be a bit out of date, but below are some thoughts and links for
> Mexico. First off, it's an amazing country for birds and more and wildly
> diverse. Birds, habitats, landscapes, languages, cultural details and food
> all change a great deal around the country. I haven't looked, but I
> wouldn't be surprised to see that the birds of the Baja states are as
> different to the birds of the Maya states as those of Australia are to
> those of Bali. So, what you see will depend very much on where you go. (I'm
> not sure where in Western Mexico you're going and I've only been to the
> Baja states which have pretty abbreviated - if interesting - bird lists.)
> When matters too for Mexico since migration is such an enormous factor in
> Central and North America. If you're going to Jalisco, I'm jealous! Send a
> trip report.
>
> As you probably already know, a good place to look for info on foreign
> places is the trip report catalog at CloudBirders:
>
> http://www.cloudbirders.com/tripreport
>
> If you don't speak Spanish, English is okay in a lot of places -
> particularly where there are tourists. If you speak Spanish badly, it's
> better than you might think. In Maya areas, plenty of locals use Spanish as
> a second language which makes it *much* easier to communicate than with
> first-language speakers. (Not that you'll be around Maya in Western Mexico.)
>
> Great book: "A Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America".
> It was an instant classic that filled a huge hole and I don't believe
> anything else has overtaken it. A few caveats about this book:
>
> * It's massive, just massive.
>
> * It leaves out coverage of most North American species. For birds, North
> America is often treated as anywhere north of the Rio Grande and the
> Neotropics are everything to the south. Translation: You need a North
> American field guide. (If I remember right, the initial audience for this
> book was US and Canadian birders and as a means of promoting and expanding
> birding in Mexico.) Given that Mexico is on the narrow part of the
> migration funnel, it makes sense to have an all-region guide like Sibley
> rather than Sibley East and West. Sibley is also huge...
>
> * Unless I'm mistaken (I'm away from home and my copy of Webb), the book
> uses the old-fashioned format of color plates in the middle, species
> descriptions keyed by species numbers and range maps in the back.
>
> * I tried an Edwards guide but it felt like all of the birds were
> illustrated with round heads.
>
> * I'm not a fan of the Peterson's guides and don't remember loving the
> Mexico on.
>
> * I'd take paper guides, even if there are apps like Sibley, unless you're
> already really comfortable with the birds and families of the region. I
> find it really, really, really hard to get to grips with new families using
> apps.
>
> I'm not sure how far north you're going, but the border regions with the
> USA sound just horrific now, sadly. Drugs flow north and guns flow south.
>
> As far as other resources go, I don't believe that there is any app for
> Mexico. However, the Sibley App for North America is excellent and so is
> iBird.
>
> Cornell University has the biggest/most active Neotropical bird research
> program on earth, going back many decades. Their sound libraries, etc. are
> impressive. Their Web site also gets better all of the time:
>
> http://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/portal/home
>
> Cornell is the group behind eBird, for those that don't know
>
> http://ebird.org/content/ebird/
>
> Cornell has also done an amazing site on the Birds of Paradise:
>
> http://www.birdsofparadiseproject.org/
>
> ...and they're the mob responsible for the sound collections in some
> commercial bird apps and their free app Merlin:
>
> http://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
>
> If you aren't familiar with the region, it's *well* worth studying the
> birds as much as you can in advance. Using rough numbers, here's how the
> native species of birds in Australia and Mexico compare:
>
>  Australia  Mexico  Shared
> Species  770 1045  45
> Genera  336  464  93
> Families      96 93  42
>
> Australia is about four times larger than Mexico which makes Mexico's
> numbers even more impressive. Finding such huge differences between
> Australia and Mexico isn't that big a shock since Australia is arguably the
> most taxonomically divergent place on earth for birds. Still, the number of
> shared species is really low and so is the number of families. (To be fair,
> the New World has a high degree of families that aren't found elsewhere, or
> at least not found in numbers.)
>
> About six months ago I started spending time with a data visualization
> library I really like and have been doing various experiments. One of these
> has been a system to compare two different areas based on species lists and
> a shared taxonomy. I've posted a fragment comparing Australia and Mexico.
>
> http://www.island-data.com/aves/comparisons/australia/mexico/index.html
>
> Scroll to the bottom of the page to see a list of all of the families that
> occur in either region. From there you can see how many species from each
> family are in Australia, shared, and in Mexico. Hover for counts, click for
> species names. Pay particular attention to the families that are well
> represented in Mexico that are missing from (or scarce) in Australia.
> Woodpeckers (and all of their wonderful cousins), Antbirds, Hummingbirds,
> Tyrant Flycatchers, Trogons, and so on. This page is part of a bunch of
> on-going sketches, so forgive any glitches. For example, the 'world
> distribution map' link you may see at the bottom of the page won't lead to
> a page.
>
> Have a fantastic trip!
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