By Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal
We hadn’t even left the airport in Belize City when the birds started showing up.
More than a dozen Forked-tailed Flycatchers clung to the airport fence, their long tails scissoring in the win. A Great Kiskadee perched on a railing, calling its name. Northern Jacanas picked their way through the grass near the runway.
Tropical kingbirds, seedeaters, egrets, herons, doves and even a hawk appeared despite the roar of jet engines and traffic on the edge of Belize’s biggest city.
We were headed into the Belize interior for a week long birding trip. But from the very start, we found birds everywhere we went across this tiny country that straddles the Caribbean and Central America and draws species from both.
At one point, while speeding through a desolate stretch of highway, our guide and host, Eric Tut, suddenly swerved off the road and jumped out onto the shoulder as cars whizzed by a few feet away. A Jabiru Stork — one of Belize’s most prized species and the tallest flying bird in the Americas — stood in a nearby marsh, slowly stretching its enormous wings.
Moments like that happened all week long.
Record species count per square mile
Latin America boasts the greatest diversity of birds on Earth, with roughly a third of the globe’s 11,000 species. The biggest totals come from giant countries such as Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Ecuador.
And yet Belize — often overlooked as a birding destination — outdoes them all in the number of bird species per square mile.
Part of the reason is that Belize is small. You can drive across the country in a couple of hours. The bigger reason is its broad range of habitats. Within a short distance you can move from mangrove-lined barrier islands and coastal lagoons to lowland tropical forests, wetlands, rivers and the foothills of the Maya Mountains.
Altogether, Belize hosts about 610 bird species, including toucans, parrots, motmots, macaws, curassows, tanagers, flycatchers, raptors and hummingbirds.
“There are so many different habitats that are easy to reach,’’ said Tut, one of the country’s top guides whose family runs the Chrystal Paradise birding lodge in San Ignacio. “The beauty of Belize is you can bird in the Mayan ruins. You can go to the coastline. People find they can see so many species in a week. The other day we had 100 species in 24 hours.”
Raptors everywhere we went
Some of our most memorable moments came during a night outing when we found a Northern Potoo. The ghostlike bird sat motionless on a roadside post, invisible against the wood were it not for its outsized yellow eyes.
Another highlight was taking a boat through the pristine wetlands of Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary, where herons, storks, raptors and kingfishers waited around every bend.
And then there was a glimpse of the Orange-breasted Falcon, among the country’s most endangered raptor that nests on remote cliffs deep in the Maya Mountains.
What I loved the most was the sheer number of hawks, eagles and kites, my favorite species. Every day we encountered a raptor we had never seen before — including the stately Black-breasted Hawk at Crooked Tree and the pale, long-legged Laughing Falcon perched just outside one of the lodges where we stayed.
A crossroads in the hemisphere
Some of Belize’s birding magic comes down to geography. Tucked into the southeast corner of the Yucatán Peninsula, the country sits at the intersection of three bird worlds.
Hundreds of migrants from the United States and Canada arrive each winter. Tropical forest birds reach their northern limits here from deeper in Central and South America. And species from Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula as well as the Caribbean spill across the border. Few places in the Americas pack so many biogeographic influences into such a small area.
Belize has also protected much of what makes this diversity possible. Roughly 40 percent of the country’s land is under some form of protection, a high share compared with many countries.
“Belize has been trying very hard not to have too much deforestation,’’ said Corrina Young, another guide we met during our travels. “There’s still development — that’s inevitable. But for the most part, there’s a lot of forest left.”
We came home convinced Belize deserves far more attention as a birding destination, especially for U.S. visitors, since this is an English-speaking country reachable in a two-hour flight from Miami, Houston or New Orleans, for instance.
We also came home with thousands of photos that I’m still sorting through. A good number you’re seeing sprinkled through this post. Stay tuned for upcoming posts on Belize hawks and a surprising collection of noctural birds.
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