Week 7: Introducing Birding to Las Coloradas

(See photos of Las Coloradas here, and nature photos here)

If you are someone concerned about not just environmental but also social issues such as government corruption, injustice, failing education systems, paltry job opportunities, drug violence, and struggling youth; then Mexico is a fascinating and frustrating place to work. Even if you are a strict environmentalist, you will realize that none of your goals can be accomplished without also figuring out a way to alleviate the social issues here. Although your greatest love may be the perfection and intricacy of undisturbed, nonhuman ecosystems, you can’t help but notice the social problems everywhere you go. At times you even seriously consider that industrialization and development might actually be what’s best for the overall well-being of Mexico’s life. Then you come to a place like Las Coloradas and you’re completely at a loss.

On the outside, Las Coloradas (LC) looked just like all the other coastal villages I had seen so far; dusty roads lined with square cement houses and simple convenience stores (tiendas). But there is a business here that makes LC very different from the rest: salt production. LC owes its entire existence to a sole salt company (called a salinera) that extracts white mountains of salt from the coastal wetlands of Ría Lagartos Biosphere Reserve. Essentially, LC is nothing more than a developed encampment for the salinera’s workers and their families. In this village of about 1,150 people, there are only two main professions: saltworker and fisherman, with a heavy bias towards the former. One result of this is that kids here generally have no desire to study beyond middle school. Even if a youth does have a desire to do something more than shovel salt or catch fish for the rest of his life, other opportunities are scarce in Yucatán and practically nonexistent in LC. I was also startled to learn of the unchecked domination that the salinera has over LC. Not only do they rule the job market, but they also own all the land in LC and determine who gets to use it and how. In other villages, if a man wants to build a house to start a family, he goes to the police station and they allot him a plot of land. In LC, one must ask the salinera for permission. One resident commented to me that LC is more like Cuba than Mexico. In a strange twist, capitalism has provoked socialism. The salinera has also used its power to prevent all forms of tourism, probably fearing that it may draw workers away from its currently unlimited supply. As a result, LC is considerably less aesthetic than its neighbors Rio Lagartos, San Felipe, and El Cuyo, all of which host relatively rich Mexican tourists from the cities during the summer weekends. Additionally, LC doesn’t benefit at all from the thousands of beautiful flamingos that can be seen practically from town. Instead, guides from nearby Rio Lagartos bring tourists and take back their money to their homes. Never before have I seen a community in such a stranglehold by a single company.

American Flamingos near Las Coloradas

This isn’t to say that the people of LC are wallowing in impoverished misery. There is a saying that some use to describe themselves, “Jodido pero contento.” Broke but content. Many have accepted their basic possessions and are content to live simply in peace. From an outsider’s perspective, the best way I can summarize it is that it’s possible to be content here if you don’t have great ambitions. People here are poor, but no one is starving. There’s little to do, but there’s little you’re expected to do. However, if someone had a passion for something other than salt, fish, or housekeeping, I would recommend they take the next bus out of LC.

So going back to birding, when I came into LC I wasn’t just thinking about how to teach the kids about birds, I was also trying to figure out what birding could do for them. Tourism is suppressed, so future careers as bird guides would be unlikely (although it’s not impossible for them to move). It seemed even more unlikely that their parents would send them to a university to study biology should they become impassioned to do so. At first, it seemed like there wasn’t much point in teaching them about birding, but then I asked myself, why do the rest of us bird? Because its fun. Because it’s fulfilling. And for me, observing nature gives me an outside perspective on life that helps me find and focus on what’s really important in the world. I can’t point to statistics that will suggest that birding can help these kids, but I can tell you that a fun, meaningful activity is sorely needed in a place where kids spend the majority of their time watching TV and grow up to be low-paid and often alcoholic saltworkers.

From July 20-23 I stayed on my own in LC to help start a bird club after the workshop Niños y Crías had just given. In addition to teaching kids, I also spent time with Wilma, the young woman in LC who organized the kids for the workshop, to help her lead a bird club after I leave. Let me now recount an average day in LC, quirks and all…

A typical day for me would start with being awoken around 5:15am by the roosters next door, an experience which I found to be as obnoxious as it was rustic. An hour or so later I would get up, have my breakfast of bread and a juicebox, get dressed, put on sunscreen and bugspray (let the greasiness begin) and don my binoculars and camera. I head out into the rapidly disappearing cool air.

Birding outside Las Coloradas

Outside I wait for the kids to come meet me for a bird walk, usually arriving 15 minutes late, or 15 minutes early Mexican time. We have no form of transportation other than our feet, but luckily there is a large expanse of good coastal scrub habitat and salt ponds just half a sunburn down the road. Here we usually find Tropical Mockingbirds, Tropical Kingbirds, Mexican Sheartails, and American Flamingos quietly grunting and feeding in the salt ponds. As the sun slowly starts to bake us, I help the kids work through identifying their newly discovered neighbors: “Ok so if it has a gray body, black wings, and a long black tail, then which species is it?” (I must have said this a hundred times now). The kids are somewhat quiet and reserved the first day, but continue to open up as time goes on.

Learning to use a field guide

After the walk I return to my cabin to read, edit photos, and rest for a couple of hours. Around noon I walk down the dirt road to Wilma’s grandmother’s house, or rather, cluttered area enclosed by cement blocks. I spend a while chatting with Wilma and her relatives and then get to work helping Wilma in some way prepare for starting a kid birding club. One day we went over identification of the common species in LC, on another we drafted a request for 10 binoculars and a guide to the birds of Mexico from the American Birding Association’s Birders’ Exchange. Afterwards, I return to my cabin, which is nestled between one house that sometime smells of burning excrement and another than perpetually reeks of something like burning vomit. Here awaits me the woman I have somehow managed to swoon…

Using the powers of peripheral vision, I discovered by the second day that her gaze never left me any time I was within her sight. Every afternoon and all afternoon she’s sitting at a table in the middle of the yard that I must cross, and she stares at me eagerly and indiscreetly every time I do. She’s tall and lanky like a flamingo, and has a voice strikingly similar to one as well, which she uses to blurt beautifully intelligent things like, “He just went swimming, hahahaha!” as I’m walking back to my cabin in a wet swimsuit. Let’s just say that she looks and behaves nothing like I imagine my next girlfriend will. So, on principle of course, I am obliged to resist her not-so-seductive stare whenever I return to or emerge from my shelter. In retrospect, it seems quite frivolous to write about now, but I believe her persistence merits some recognition.

Next, I get lunch at the town’s only restaurant, my only real meal of the day, consisting of grilled fish or chicken in corn tortillas. There is little you can do in LC in the afternoon heat and humidity, so I go back to my cabin and beat cool off for a couple hours more. At 4:30 I meet the kids outside to go for another bird walk. Friday’s walk was a particularly good one. This group of five loosened up more than usual and started joking around during the walk. We had great views of a perched Lesser Yellow-headed Vulture, a group of 20 Tropical Mockingbirds, and displaying Mexican Sheartails. I was thrilled to see that one girl, Asís, was becoming very enthusiastic and skilled at birding. Even after it rained on us as we ran back to town, Asís got the group to go back out and bird a little more. To my surprise, it has been the two oldest kids from the workshop who have shown the most enthusiasm towards birding. We continued our walk towards the beach, spending about 20 minutes climbing a sea grape tree like monkeys and eating the fruits. At the beach, the kids became fixated on showing me the shells and spent the next 15 minutes tirelessly bringing me every single type they could find. My hands overfilled with shells, the sun set, and we walked back to town.

Photoshoot on our Friday bird walk

Spending four nights in LC was one of the most wholesome experiences I’ve had in Latin America. I lived more simply than I have in years. I shared as much of my knowledge as I could, but of course learned far more. There is now a group of 10-15 kids in LC eager to keep birding. In a place like LC, who knows what kind of impact this interest could have on their community if they continue it? But as I have already mentioned, we will not get to find out unless the bird club can find some binoculars to use. We will be sending a request to the Birders’ Exchange soon, but I will conclude this blog post by asking, sincerely, if anyone can help provide binoculars to the kids in Las Coloradas. My email is emb326@cornell.edu.