Colombia: In Old Cartagena

I had not long to wait, after Eileen and I returned to Canada with our oldest grandson Ryan in November 2014, before I was off again. On December 8-9, 2014, the Parties to the Protocol on Specially Protected Areas and Wildlife in the Wider Caribbean Region (SPAW to its friends) met in Cartagena, Colombia. As an old SPAW hand (though I had missed the previous meeting, held in 2012 in the Dominican Republic) I had to be there, and as a birder I had planned to spend the days after the meeting exploring the surrounding areas. 

Best-laid plans, of course, gang oft agley, and for a number of reasons I was forced to cancel my birding excursions and head back to Fort Lauderdale (Eileen and Ryan having gone to my Mother’s house in Boca Raton in the meantime) on the 10th. I thereby accomplished the not inconsiderable feat of visiting Colombia, one of the most bird-laden countries in the world, for the first time without scoring a single lifer. 

All was not lost, however. The Cartagena region is not, in fact, the most bird-rich part of Colombia, but its chief attraction has nothing to do with nature.  Cities in South America, in my limited experience, are not the things one visits the continent for (though I confess I have never been to Rio or Buenos Aires). Cartagena, though, is an exception. 

At it heart lies an old walled city, the Ciudad Antigua, that has stood on the shores of the Caribbean since 1533. It is a World Heritage site, a major tourist draw, and a place filled with charm and beauty (plus, I'm afraid, the hustlers and salesmen that often go with that, though I have met far pushier ones elsewhere). It is also the oldest European city in the Americas. In short, it is well worth seeing, even for a naturalist whose normal interest would be focused on the green hills beyond. 

I had already spent an evening in the old city on the night of my arrival, but as my flight did not leave until late afternoon I took the opportunity to join two old friends and colleagues, Carole Carlson and Courtney Stark Vail, for a morning visit. I expected to enjoy myself (and I certainly did), but I did not expect that the experience would leave me much to write about in this blog (which is, or is supposed to be, about nature, not cities, however charming they may be). As you will see, I was pleasantly surprised.  Cartagena, besides being lovely in itself, proved surprisingly birdy. 

Before getting to its urban birdlife, though, let me depart from my usual theme to give you a taste of old Cartagena itself (after all, it is the habitat of the birds I will be talking a about). 

The city's name, by the way, is actually Cartagena de los Indios, to distinguish it from the older Cartagena in Spain (which in turn draws its name from the far older city of Carthage, which derived its name from the Phoenician words Qart Hadasht, meaning 'new city', a seemingly odd designation for a city distinguished today by its age. I am indebted for this bit of trivia to David Albulafia's book The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, which coincidentally I picked up at the airport to read on my trip to Colombia).

The old city has neither been preserved as ruin nor (like some of the 'ancient cities' in China) transmogrified into a glorified theme park. It is very much a living city, from its colourfully-painted walls painted to its balconies draped with blooming bougainvillea. 

Yes, it is full of tourist shops, but what did you expect?  And some of the merchandise on sale seems not, amazingly enough, to have been manufactured in China.  

The city is full of delights, its doors, balconies and window frames cheerfully painted in charming, eye-catching colours.

Even its door-knockers are whimsical.

Birds have taken to Cartyagena. While Courtney and Carole checked out a shop, I watched a Tropical Kingbird (Tyrannus melancholicus) drop to its nest in a wisp of bougainvillea, at the edge of a balcony across the street. You can see it - or, at least, its tail - in this photo. A few moments earlier, the same patch of vine attracted a Bananaquit (Coereba flaveola), though the bird did not linger for a photograph. 

Like every Latin American city of any vintage I have ever seen, old Cartagena is dotted with tree-lined plazas where people can relax, drink, dine and generally enjoy life in the shade.  A plaza can be an oasis for birds, too, drawn by the greenery and, often, by a supply of figs and other fruit. Yes, most of them are feral Rock Doves (Columba livia)...

...or Great-tailed Grackles (Cassidix mexicanus), by far the most ubiquitous of city bird (their upslurred whooping cries can be almost deafening). 

If you look closely, though, you may discover that not every large pigeon is a Rock Dove (the small pigeons are usually Eared Doves (Zenaida aurita), very common birds in Cartagena). In the plaza opposite the forbiddingly-named Museum of the Inquisition I found a single Pale-vented Pigeon (Patagioenas cayennensis), a subtly lovely bird (note the bluish wash on the head and the orange-red eye). 

Near the end of our walk, after Courtney had to go back to the hotel to catch an earlier flight, Carole and I (who were scheduled on the same late-afternoon flight) found another little plaza where the trees were not only shade-giving, but fruiting. A raised terrace in the centre of the plaza have me a chance to get almost eye-level with a variety of birds that were there, presumably, to feed on the fruit. 

The most abundant of these were, despite their name, flycatchers. Tyrant Flycatchers (Tyrannidae, very different from the various flycatchers of the Old World) can be particularly voracious fruit-eaters, and in this one tiny plaza I found four of them. One, a Yellow-bellied Elaenia (Elaenia flavogaster), refused to come out from behind the leaves for a decent portrait, but the other three posed reasonably nicely. Most numerous were Social Flycatchers (Myiozetetes similis), and they let me get far better pictures if them than I had managed a few months earlier in Veracruz.

Tropical Kingbirds, the common flycatcher of Cartagena's city streets, were here too.

So were Great Kiskadees (Pitangus sulfuratus), whose self-identifying cries of "kiskadee" (or, if you are in the French-speaking parts of their range, "qu'est qu'il dit") were as noisy (and almost as common a city sound) as the whoops of the grackles. 

A series of grating shrieks heralded the arrival, in the same plaza, of a party of Brown-throated Parakeets (Aratinga pertinax), common dry-forest parrots across the top of South America but a welcome sight in the middle of a city. After a few cooperative moments above me they were off again. Soon after, so (reluctantly) were we.   One day I may even get that birding trip in!