September 30th – October 8th, 2016

HMANA returned to Veracruz, Mexico, this past October with a tour group to witness the spectacle of the world-famous River of Raptors. And what a tour it was! A total of 238 bird species, among them 25 species of raptors, were seen or heard by the group of 11 participants plus guides during the seven-day tour. Being an HMANA tour, raptors were undoubtedly the center of attention! During the days the group spent between the two hawk watch sites in Cardel and Chichicaxtle, 579,155 individual migrant raptors were tallied! Compare that with the 591,397 raptors added from 103 hawk watch sites during 2016’s International Hawk Migration Week.

We watched hawks from every place we could: the two official hawk watches in Cardel (a rooftop of the Hotel Bienvenido where we stayed) and a two-tiered circular platform and visitor center of Pronatura Veracruz in Chichicaxtle, next to a soccer field in a more rural neighborhood; we saw tens of thousands of raptors from other places, too, including the ancient archaeological site of Quiahuiztlan, and many places in between. The migration each day seemed better than the day before, and the spectacle left us grasping for words to describe the magnitude and magnificence of it all.

A clear highlight included seeing hundreds of thousands of Broad-winged Hawks, tens of thousands of Turkey Vultures and Swainson’s Hawks, and hundreds of Mississippi Kites in migration. These four species are the most notable raptor migrants over Veracruz, which sees over 90% of their entire world populations pass through each fall. Other raptors got our attention, too. Exotic to many of us were the several Zone-tailed Hawks that gave through daily, trying to blend in with the slightly larger vultures, as well as more southern species including Gray Hawk, Short-tailed Hawk, and Hook-billed Kites, which were only ‘discovered’ to be migrant species here in Veracruz two decades ago. Resident raptors of Veracruz included Roadside Hawk, Aplomado Falcon, Laughing Falcon, Crested Caracara, White-tailed Kite, Lesser Yellow-headed, and Black Vultures, and both Common and Great Black-Hawks. All this, plus smaller numbers of migrant American Kestrel, Merlin, Peregrine Falcon, Northern Harrier, and Red-tailed Hawk.

But it wasn’t just hawks. Sharing the sky with the raptors were hundreds of Anhingas, Ibis, American White Pelicans, Wood Storks, and more. Somehow, there was time to focus on 200+ other species of birds, including many species endemic to Mexico and Central America. Some of the stars were warblers – 28 species highlighted by the coveted Red Warbler, as well as Olive and Golden-browed Warblers. Not to mention all of the neotropical migrants that had recently returned from breeding areas of the US and Canada. And there were other beautiful songbirds – both Fork-tailed and Scissor-tailed Flycatchers in impressive numbers, the endemic Blue Mockingbird, many hummingbirds of several species, motmots, trogons, and a fan favorite, Montezuma’s Oropendola. The diversity of birds corresponded nicely with the wide range of habitat types we visited – there were birds of the tropical lowland rainforests, montane forests, dry scrub forests, grasslands, wetlands, sandbar, open ocean, and open ocean sky, canyon, and urban landscape.