Ocellated Turkey

Probably the bird I most wanted to see in Tikal NP in Guatemala was the ocellated turkey. It has a very limited range, confined to portions of the Yucatan Peninsula,  northern and western Belize and northern Guatemala. Our guide, Rony, spotted it quite a distance ahead, walking through an occupied section of Tikal with wooden buildings and people wandering around. I got near and started taking photos and pretty soon we had a group of about 30 people behind us watching and taking photos. 

"Ocellus," or the plural form "ocelli," means "simple eye" or "eyespot." The tail feathers of this turkey are bluish-gray with a bright gold tip, with an eye-shaped blue-bronze spot near the end. The spots give the turkey its name. I think of the ocelot, a wild cat that is covered with spots, and now understand how it got its name. 

Note the blue-bronze eye-shaped spot near the end of the tail with a bright gold tip. 

The body feathers of both males and females are a mixture of bronze and green iridescent color. Females can be duller with more green, but the breast feathers do not generally differ and can't be used to determine the sex. The upper, secondary wing coverts are iridescent copper. The primary and secondary wing feathers have barring similar to North American turkeys, but the secondaries have more white. They have blue heads with orange or red nodules which are more pronounced on males. Males have a fleshy blue crown covered with nodules. During breeding season the crown swells up and becomes brighter and more pronounced in its yellow-orange color. The eye is surrounded by bright red skin which is most visible on males during breeding season. The legs are red. Males over a year old have spurs on the legs which are longer and thinner than on North American turkeys. They are smaller than North American wild turkeys. 

The blue head, fleshy blue crown covered with nodule and red skin around the eye. 

Spurs on the legs reveal it to be a male. 

Illustration of a female from Birds of the World. 

Illustration of a male from Birds of the World. 

Range from Birds of the World.

Such a crazy looking cool bird! A favorite. 

Black-Headed Saltator

This continues our morning in Tikal NP in Guatemala on March 19, 2026. Rony, our guide, spotted some green jays and I was having real difficulty getting a clear photo. I ultimately got enough lousy photos to make an identification, but again was surprised at the result. When I got home and submitted my photos to iNaturalist it identified the bird as a black-headed saltator and the buff-throated saltator was the only other option given, no green jay. So far there has been one verification of my iNaturalist identification. This was not due to bad light as the sun was fully out, but it was moving around a lot in thick trees. 

This is by far the best photo. 

It is a member of the tanager family. It has a slate-gray head with a white supercilium; yellowish green upperparts; pale gray underparts; a white throat edged with black; and a black bill.  

Illustration of the nominate ssp. atriceps from Birds of the World. 

Range from Birds of the World. I saw the nominate ssp. atriceps which is found on the Caribbean slope of Mexico from southern Tamaulipas, south (except for southeastern Veracruz and north and central Yucatan Peninsula) to eastern Costa Rica. 

Yellow-Throated Vireo

Continuing on from my last post, what I thought was going to be a sulphur-bellied flycatcher was a yellow-throated vireo. 

They yellow throat and white belly. 

Adults are mainly olive on the head and upperparts with a yellow throat and white belly and they have dark eyes with yellow "spectacles." The tail and wings are dark with white wing bars. They have thick blue-gray legs and a stout bill. 

Illustration from Birds of the World. 

Range from Birds of the World. They breed in southern Canada and the eastern U.S. and migrate to the deep southern U.S., Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America (where I saw it).  

Masked Tityra

This is a continuation of a trip into Tikal NP in Guatemala with our guide, Rony, on March 19, 2026, which starts two posts back. Another bird we saw early in the morning, in poor light, was a masked tityra. Rony told me there was a dusky-capped flycatcher and a sulphur-bellied flycatcher in the tree. I was photographing what I could tell was a whitish bird, which I assumed was the dusky-capped flycatcher, and another bird with a yellow breast which I assumed was the sulphur-bellied flycatcher. When I got home and downloaded my digital photos, lightened them up in Lightroom, and then submitted them to iNaturalist, I discovered that the whitish bird I'd photographed was a masked tityra and the bird with the yellow breast was a yellow-throated vireo (subject of my next post). I was surprised and happy, as both were lifers, as the dusky-capped flycatcher and sulphur-bellied flycatcher would also have been. However, this highlights one of the major reasons I really like iNaturalist, as compared to eBird. On eBird you self-identify a bird and report, often not including a photo. On iNaturalist you must submit a photo, get help in identifying it from the computer program, and then also have identifiers weighing in on the identification. If I'd just been doing an eBird observation, I would already have had three wrong identifications for the morning (including the gartered violaceous trogon of my last post which I'd been told was a black-headed trogon). This is not to throw any shade on Rony: there are about 400 species of birds in Tikal NP, it was very dark (I couldn't see colors very well), and it was a very thick jungle setting. Rony obviously knew the national park and was extraordinarily good in locating birds. 

The masked tityra male has bare rosy skin from the bill to and around the eye. It has a black forecrown and the black wraps behind and under the red skin. The rest of the head and upper parts are pale grayish white with a heavy pearly gray cast. The wings are mostly black with grayish white tertials. The tail is grayish white with a wide black band near the end. The throat and upper parts are whitish. Adult females have the same bare red skin, but without any black on the head and the head is a smoker gray than the male's. There are 9 subspecies of the masked tityra. I saw ssp. personata, found in eastern Mexico, from southwestern Tamaulipas to Campeche, and south through Belize, both sides of Guatemala, central and western Honduras, El Salvador and into north-central Nicaragua. The male ssp. personata, compared to the nominate ssp. semifasciata, has a grayish brown head and upperparts and is darker on the head. My photos are only catching the under parts. 

Illustration of nominate ssp. semifasciata from Birds of the World. 

Range from Birds of the World.

Gartered Violaceous Trogon

In my last post I mentioned that Judy and I visited Tikal NP in Guatemala, on March 19, 2026, with a guide, Rony, who our travel company indicated was the top birder in northern Guatemala. When we got into the national park our driver, Rony's cousin, stopped along the side of the road and let us out. It was about 6:00 a.m. and still quite dark, particularly given the tall and thick trees and foliage that lined the two lane road. Rony indicated a black-headed trogon was above me in a tree. I could see an outline of the bird through my camera viewfinder, but I was not seeing color or any details. Rony had binoculars, in addition to his bare eyes, and he was apparently seeing colors, but it turned out he made quite a few identification mistakes as I've discovered since getting home and working on my digital photos in Lightroom. I'm sure many of the mistakes were related to the poor light. This was one of the first ones. When I downloaded the photo below it was all dark - I was not seeing color or any details. It was only when lightening up the photo that the colors jumped out. When I input the photo into iNaturalist it was identified as a gartered violaceous trogon. I thought it had to be a mistake. So I looked up a photo of it on Birds of the World and that looked like the correct identification.  

Then I looked up black-headed trogon and the difference was immediately noticed. See my photo of a later black-headed trogon, below, that Rony correctly identified and which was the subject of my last post. Looked at the tail feathers. The black-headed trogon has six large blocks of white covering most of the tail feathers while the gartered violaceous trogon has six smaller white blocks, but also many white lines between them. Another difference, not as noticeable, is the blue eye-ring on the black-headed and the yellow eye-ring (which does not stand out in my photo) on the gartered violaceous. The upper parts (on the back side) are also quite a bit different but those are not seen in the front-facing photos. You can just barely see the violet-blue on the upper breast (part of the lower parts) and the yellow eye-ring. 

The benefit is that I saw two different species of trogon, both lifers, instead of one, when I originally thought I'd seen the same species twice. An illustration of the gartered violaceous from Birds of the World (which does not show the underside of the tail), and a range map, are below. 

It is found in Mexico, all of Central America, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.

I would love to have seen both of these birds in better light and to have seen the upperparts of them as well. 

Black-Headed Trogon

On March 19, 2026 we took a trip into Tikal NP in northern Guatemala. Judy and I stayed the night before at the Hotel Villa Maya, on Laguna Petenchel, in Flores, 25.6 miles from the national park. We were picked up at 5:00 a.m. by Rony (pronounced "Ronny"), a guide identified by our tourist company, Columbus Guatemala Tours, as the best birder in northern Guatemala, so my expectations were great. We were in a van driven by Rony's cousin. 

One of the lifers I saw that morning was a black-headed trogon. It has a black back, neck and chest, a blue ring of bare skin around a dark eye; a thin white line separating the chest from the rest of the underparts which are yellow; with three out black tail feathers that are black with wide white tips. The adult male's upperparts are a bright bluish green to golden green with a blue to violet rump. Adult females are black in those same places. I didn't see the back of our bird, so I'm not sure if it was a male or female. 

Illustration of a female from Birds of the World. 

It is found in Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Nicaragua. 

Range from Birds of the World. 

Wilson's Plover

During a stay in Belize on Caye Caulker we had a bird watching trip with Rodriego on March 17, 2026. Rodriego picked us up in a small boat with an outboard motor at a dock right outside our hotel at 6:00 a.m. We were staying at La Isla Resort Hotel on the east side. We headed north a short distance then traveled west through the Split (a small waterway that intersects Caye Caulker into north and south islands) and then headed up the west side of the north island, very close to the north end. Along the way we passed a very sandy section of shoreline that had a number of shore species. I photographed what I thought was a semipalmated plover that turned out to be an unexpected lifer for me, a Wilson's plover, which I'd never heard of.  I took several photos, but they were all basically the same shot. 

There are four subspecies. I saw the nominate ssp. wilsonia, which breeds along the Atlantic, Gulf and Caribbean coast of Middle and Central America south to Belize, the Bahamas, the Greater Antilles and the Leeward Islands and overwinters along the Gulf Coast. The crown and breast band of the female are grayish brown (black on the male); the breast band is narrow; the auriculars (area below the eye, i.e. ear) are washed with rufous; the dark loral stripe is narrow, not extending to anterior portion of the forehead or malar region; the white band across the forehead is broad;  and the white line above the auriculars is distinct. It has a thick black bill, the thickest of all the plovers. 

Illustration of a male, ssp. wilsonia, from Birds of the World. 

Range from Birds of the World. It is strictly a coastal plover.