| A Different Kind of Rooster... |
-- Larry Abrams--
When I first came down to Zihuatanejo 8 years ago there was a big flock of birds in the evening, sitting on the telephone wires, by the movie theater. Four years ago when I became interested in the birds of the area, I looked for more information on these birds and this is my story of the Mexican rooster that most people are not aware of….
These birds are grey-breasted martins and live together in large groups just as our purple martins in the States do. In the evening after the sun goes behind the mountain but while there is still a lot of light up in the sky, they begin to swarm together very high up for their last minute, insect meal, of the day. You usually see just a few little black dots in the sky flying in great lazy circles. As you watch, more appear and they gradually drop down lower and lower and add to their numbers until there are, depending on how many fledged each year, between 50 to 200 birds. They will occasionally rise up again to be little black dots and then drop down quicker that they originally did. Just before it gets so dark that it’s hard to distinguish colors, they will all swarm together in a tight formation and swoop in to land on the wires to roost all together in 5 to 10 seconds. Then there will be a little time for jockeying around for the best position before they go to sleep. Sometimes they will all take off for another swing around the block to re-settle in a better spot on the wire so you’ll get a second look at their landing.
The best spot to view their roost is diagonally across the street from the movie theater on the street where all the silver dealers are…however there is a caveat to all this as follows…
I wrote about these birds, to be in a 2001 issue of Another Day in Paradise, in the summer of 2000. When we arrived in Zihuatanejo January 2001, I found that the birds were no longer by the movie; they had flown the coop so to speak. Evidently the neighbors were fed up with the problems caused by the bird droppings, and that somehow, they had chased them away. After asking some of the local people, I was directed to the main bus station in town. So the next evening I went to the bus station and there they were, flying overhead along with maybe 8 or 10 other “families”, each one waiting their turn to land. After they all flew in and I started to leave, I noticed smoke coming out of the roof. The people in charge of the station didn’t like the birds any more than the people that lived by the theater did and they had a smoke generator to make them move. But it appeared that the birds had come to terms with the smoke and after a little extra flying around they settled down to sleep. Now I found the birds and I could write an article about them for next year…the roosting continues…
Just before I went home for the season at the end of March, I went to check on them once more so my article for this year would be accurate as to their location. When I got back to the bus station, I found that because the smoke did not work, someone had put up netting around the roof openings so the birds could not get in at all. And there were no birds! Well, I thought I’d go back to the original wires by the movie theater and low and behold, there they were just like old times…
Now just because they were back then does not mean that they will still be there this year. So I asked a fellow birder, Jane Bardin, who was down this December in Zihuatanejo if the birds are still in town. The word is that they are really back on the wires by the movie theater and that they have brought along many of their new friends that they made while living in the bus station...The show should be better than ever.
Larry, La Ropa’s amateur bird watcher, is a regular visitor to Zihuatanejo from Tucson. When he’s here you can find him at Paty’s Mar y Mar eating his daily shrimp cocktail.\
January 2002
Contents | Previous | Next |
|
|
|
