Birding in Belize

Fork-tailed flycatcher

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As a writer who birds—not a birder who writes—I rely on the expertise of others. When I emerge from the forest I chat with Rick, a young Mayan guide sweeping the road clear of cecropia leaves. I've taken meticulous notes of the birds I've seen, and he quickly identifies them: bat falcon, a female great curassow, olivaceous woodcreeper, rufous-tailed hummingbird, parrot, pale-billed woodpecker, a pair of red-capped manikins, American redstart, summer tanager. Those I'm unsure of I look up in the excellent Lodge library.

In the afternoon I watch a flock of red-lored parrots squabbling in a tall sapodilla where they congregate every day around four, shaking the branches and dropping fruits like jungle projectiles. It's not safe to walk under the tree, but the steep slope of the Mayan temple facing it is a great vantage point. According to Josie Harding, the sapodilla fruits at least three times a year, and is therefore a magnet for these birds. At the base of the tree four or five ocellated turkeys peck at the short grass. One wanders close to the trunk, then with a squawk jumps a vertical three feet in the air as a basilisk lizard, diminutive but as prehistoric-looking as anything in Jurassic Park, darts between its legs. I burst out laughing and the turkey gives me an offended glance. Wandering down to sit on the grass, the turkeys are briefly agitated, but soon forget about me. A brilliant male pecks at a bunch of green bananas, easily piercing the thick skin and feasting on the soft pulp.

The afternoon is spent canoeing around Lac Seca ("dry lake," though it never is), where cichlids in breeding colors of red, blue and gold guard their shallow nests on the bottom of the lake. Apart from egrets and swallows there is little bird life apparent in the middle of the day, but the broad snow-white form of a white hawk wheeling above is awesome. When we spot first a slaty-tailed trogon and then, in a quam wood tree, the national bird of Belize—the keel-billed toucan—on the drive back, I'm more than satisfied.

In the evening, though Tom Harding has called the area around Chan Chich a "user-friendly rain forest", I'm too nervous to head out at night—though I know no one has ever been attacked here, I still find it hard to believe the brochure, which calls the jaguar "harmless to humans." I wander around the plaza grounds, and am not disappointed. Gulf Coast toads and marine toads freeze in the flashlight's beam, and at the path's edge a furry shape freezes, a tarantula, six inches across, with black legs and a reddish body.