La Tovara National Park is for the Birds Chelsee Lowe - Travel Age West | |
go to original September 7, 2015 |
Riviera Nayarit’s La Tovara National Park might not look like much to a first-timer. The entry sign is a little worse for wear, and the parking lot is perfunctory and mostly empty. But this is probably how the birders prefer it.
Set some 100 miles north of Puerto Vallarta near the colonial town of San Blas, La Tovara is a premiere destination for bird-watching. The day I visited, I hopped out of a minivan with a gaggle of other journalists and made my way to the nearby thatch-roofed pier, where a handful of blue and white motorboats knocked gently against their docks, and a few guides mingled above them.
The average park guest pays around $8 for an hour-long boat tour, but it’s unlikely the gentleman at the helm will slow the boat to explain the cobweb-like moss growing on trees or to point out a well-hidden boat-billed heron warming its chick. For that kind of service, you need an expert bird-watcher such as Francisco Garcia of Safaris San Blas in your boat.
And boat-billed heron are only the beginning. Despite its understated entry point, La Tovara is a natural gem — a complex ecosystem in which multiple species of mangroves tangle together in still, swampy waters, and crocodiles swim stealthily. But it’s the birds that make La Tovara especially fascinating. The park is set on the Pacific Flyway, a major migration route for North American birds; as such, more than 250 species rest their wings here as they fly south and back again, avoiding the north's chilly winter months.
Once onboard our own vessel, we cruised along a dark and narrow waterway lined by dense foliage. I wasn’t thinking about birds just yet — the thought of crocodiles was rather consuming in our low-slung, weighed-down boat. But after a few minutes, our vessel rounded a bend, and the water and sky widened. We watched as multiple types of birds skittishly winged from one side of the waterway to the other — likely grabbing mosquitos and other insects as they came out in the twilight.
Most of us had little clue of what we were seeing, but identifying the birds was child’s play for Garcia. Within minutes, he’d pointed out myriad species I’d never heard of — purple gallinules, American coots, anhingas, snail kites, chachalacas and crested caracaras, among many others.
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