I finally saw my first wild parrot. This has to be a Great Moment in the life of any temperate-zone birder. I have seen parrots all my life–locked in cages, shut up in houses. I have known budgerigars that were taught to drink martinis and tended to run into the wall whenever they tried to fly. I have heard cockatoos cuss like marines and seen macaws roll over and play dead.
I finally got the look I needed on an early morning walk along the beach at Playa del Carmen. With the sun climbing out of the Caribbean behind me, I stood and watched and waited for about 20 minutes while two birds moved around in the tops of the scrubby trees just in back of the beach. Were they yellow-lored or white-fronted? After several good looks, I could say white-fronted for certain, and I had my first parrot.
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I want to see patterns. I want to walk over and over again through seemingly identical scrubby woods and find out what I see every time I go and what I see at least half the times and what I see only once. I want to see what disappears when the first building gets erected in the woods and what comes in with the second building.
South America was isolated through most of its history, and a long and complex evolution occurred in its bird life. When the shifting of the continents united North and South America at Panama, South American families began to move north, hence our orioles, wood warblers, flycatchers, and wrens.
