March 1-8, 2025 with Chris Benesh & Marcelo Barreiros & Alex Sundvall
A great week in Oaxaca is an easy way to describe this tour. We birded through different habitats, looking for special birds, such as Lesser Roadrunner, Pileated Flycatcher, and Red Warbler. The region between the valleys has a great combination of desert in the lower land and an amazing pine forest up in the mountains, like La Cumbre where we birded a few times. We started going to Teotitlán Del Valle with a nice stop along the way to see things like Boucard's Wren, White-throated Towhee and Curve-billed Thrasher, and a little later, moving up, we stopped by the reservoir Presa Piedra Azul with a lot of good birds like Ring-necked and Ruddy ducks, Berylline Hummingbird, a pair of the endemic Gray-breasted Woodpecker, Bewick's Wren, a great look at Golden Vireo, Northern-beardless Tyrannulet and about a hundred Violet-green Swallows.
The next morning, we spent time in the La Cumbre mountains, starting with a nice stop along Carretera 175 to see the rare Blue Mockingbird, Orange-billed Nightingale-Thrush, Audubon's Oriole, and Rufous-capped Warbler. The rest of the morning was spent along the trails and roads through the pine forest, where we saw some great birds like Red Crossbill, the gorgeous Red Warbler, Gray-barred Wren, Brown-backed Solitaire, Blue-throated Mountain-gem, White-earded Hummingbird, Rose-throated Becard, Crescent-chested Warbler a couple of times, Spot-crowned Woodcreeper and the largest species of woodcreeper in the area, Strong-billed Woodcreeper. Later on the tour, we went back up to La Cumbre for more pine forest birds like the beautiful Chestnut-sided Shrike-Vireo, Gray-breasted Wood-Wren, Slate-throated Redstart, Mountain Trogon, Collared Towhee, and the rare ones like Dwarf Jay, Pine Flycatcher, and a nice surprise, a single Colima Warbler seen foraging quietly for a few minutes.
We had a lot of fun exploring nice habitats and great Zapotec temples around Oaxaca in the beautiful Mexican desert. Among all the great birds we saw, some must be cited, like the rarely seen Lesser Roadrunner, a pair of noisy West-Mexican Chachalacas, male and female Red-headed Tanager, the endemic subspecies of Squirrel Cuckoo (West Mexican), Russet-crowned Motmot, White-throated Magpie-Jay. The beautiful Ocellated Thrasher gave us a hard time at first but we managed to find it it with great looks later. A few sparrows were also seen, like the Bridled and Lincoln's sparrows and the elusive Oaxaca Sparrow, which preferred to stay hidden in the bushes while we were looking for it.
You can see my complete trip report on eBird at this link: https://ebird.org/tripreport/346515
You can download a combined PDF of this page and the eBird report at this link: https://fieldguides.com/triplists/oax25aTRIPLIST.pdf
-- Chris Benesh, Marcelo Barreiros & Alex Sundvall