paging joyce kilmer

No myth is worth its bark without a good tree in its supporting cast.


Where would Lord of the Rings be without Treebeard and the Forest of Fangorn?  Or To Kill a Mockingbird without the hollow oak?  Or Macbeth without Birnam Wood?  (Come to think of it, Shakespeare seems to have had trouble getting out of the woods in a series of his plays.)


If Mexico had a mythological tree, it would probably be the guanacaste.  (It certainly made the cut as Costa Rica's national tree.)


Magnificent is a perfect adjective for this wonder.  If any political party ever needed an emblem for the "big tent" theory of inclusion, this would be the tree.


I saw my first guanacaste during my Yucatan tour with islagringo.  At Sayil, the guanacaste (called pich trees by the Maya) grew along the royal causeway.  Stealing the show from the ruins.  Tall with a very wide canopy.


I thought I would never see another guanacaste unless I made a return visit to Yucatan.  I was wrong.


Earlier this week I drove up to the mirador to see if the view was still there.  It was.


On the drive down, I caught a flash of blue.  What I thought was a lazuli bunting.  I have been trying to get a photograph of one for a year.  So, I stopped, pulled out my camera and binoculars, and started my stalk.


There were birds everywhere.  Some old stand-bys.  Grackles.  Common ground doves.  Yellow-winged caciques.  Hooded orioles.  And, of course, the ubiquitous house sparrows.


But there were also new sightings for me.  What I thought was a lazuli bunting wasn't.  If you enlarge the photograph at the top of the post by clicking on it, you will notice that bird is not simply blue.  It looks as if it flew through an airbrush test range. 


A painted bunting?  Naw.  Too close to the analogy.  But I have no idea what it is.


And then there was  a citreoline trogon.  They are a common bird around here.  But very shy.  Whenever I would try to focus either my camera or binoculars on it, it was awing.  I have some great back shots.  They may as well be Yeti photographs.
 

And then there were three white-throated magpie jays. 


I heard them before I saw them.  As loud as teen-age boys on motor scooters.  When I caught a glimpse of the first one in the tree branches, I thought I had discovered a chachalaca -- until I saw the odd crest on the head.  It could only be a magie jay. 


I watched them for well over an hour as they clowned their way through each of the surrounding trees.  Upsetting the other bird families -- knowing full well that jays, like Lenin, believe that a few eggs need to be cracked now and then.


It didn't take me long to figure out why they were there.  In the middle of the field below the road was a guanacaste.  Not quite as resplendent as a Maya pich.  But almost.

And the birds certainly did not know the difference.  To them, the tree was as deluxe as a Manhattan brownstone.


That evening I opened Marc Olson's blog only to discover he had composed a prose ode to the guanacaste.  It was a good tree day.


I have returned several times to the guanacaste in Melaque this past week.  I have lots of photographs to prove it.  Unfortunately, most of them are not very good.  Shooting into the shadows with plenty of light filtering through the branches is a photographer's nightmare.


I will keep trying.  I suspect some of you might be interested in what things my brain fancies.


One you already know.


Trees.