We had another attempt at night birds early in the morning, driving the Camino San Felipe in the hope that there would be birds lingering on the warm tarmac. This was pretty successful except that everything we found that we could get a scope on was a Common Pauraque. A number of birds flew up and over into the vegetation and I can only hope they were also Common Pauraques!
As the sun rose we were back at the Ejido San Salvador. Largely we found the same birds as before, but of note were Ferruginous Pygmy Owl, Mangrove Cuckoo and a Turquoise-browed Motmot which we saw well enough to be able to distinguish it from the very similar Lesson's Motmot - the tail streamers have a much longer bare section (see photo). All of these birds were in or around the obvious clearing that forms a "triangle" with the main road. Also here were a small flock of jumping Blue-black Grassquit, and a female Painted Bunting and Indigo Bunting, and close to the bridge on the main road up to Los Coloradas a Wood Stork flew over.
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| Turquoise-browed Motmot |
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| Tropical Mockingbird |
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| Ferruginous Pygmy Owl |
We returned to the hotel for breakfast and to plan the rest of the day. The first thing we needed to do was get down to the main east-west road below the coast at Valladolid. From there our options opened up, and there seemed to be some good birding near Xocen so that became the plan. With the early afternoon sorted we got on with another excellent breakfast and birded on the terrace again. Birds were much as the previous day, but two Terns on the breakwater stood out as different and I hurried to get the scope. Gull-billed Tern!
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| Gull-billed Tern |
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| San Felipe |
We bade the owner farewell and headed out. San Felipe and Rio Lagartos had been excellent and the hotel a really good find. Long may it stay open! A quick stop at the dump on the way to the main road netted another Mexican Sheartail and another Cinnamon Hummingbird, and further towards Tizimin at a wetland area we made another quick stop. We had stopped here on the way up and had been having doubts about whether we had seen American Moorhen or Purple Gallinule. This sounds daft and probably was but actually both were present so we had both been correct! There were also a pair of Fulvous Whistling-Duck along with the more commonly encountered Black-bellied Whistling Duck.
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| The church at Temozon |
In the town of Xocen we found a Bat Falcon perched on top of a transmitter mast, and once in the forest beyond headed for the Xocen Birding Trail, and eBird hotspot on the east side of town. This was closed! Instead we took the rough track that ran alongside it and this was a more than worthy substitute. Woodpeckers had been largely absent from our list up until this point and in short order we found Golden-fronted Woodpecker and Golden-olive Woodpecker as well as Yucatan Woodpecker. We just hadn't really spend enough time in the right habitat and so we added quite a lot more besides. Green Jay, Groove-billed Ani, Olivaceous and Ivory-billed Woodcreepers, Spot-breasted Wren, Green-breasted Mango, Buff-bellied Hummingbird, White-bellied Emerald, Rufous-browed Peppershrike and Red-throated Ant-Tanager. An adult male Hooded Warbler was a huge bonus. We spent two hours on this track before retracing our steps to the car and relocating a short distance to a very similar track on the north side. Here we found a pair of enormous Lineated Woodpecker, Northern Tropical Pewee, Yucatan Flycatcher and finally a Canivet's Emerald, a Hummingbird that we had thought would be common but that we had not been able to find anywhere.
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| Bat Falcon |
After an hour or so on this track it began to rain, a weather phenomenon we hadn't really encountered on this trip before. We made it back to the car before it got really bad and considered our options. It turned out there were not a great many places to stay around Xocen, and rather than head back to Valladolid we opted to head to the coast at Tulum where we knew there were lots of places to stay as well as lots of places to go birding. This took about an hour and a half and we arrived in time for dinner, over which we hatched plans for the following day.
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