Our walk began in the late afternoon after a heavy tropical down pour. This is usually the rainy season but locals speak darkly of a draught. Non-irrigated corn looks a little more raggedy than last years. In Honduras, just to the south, there is talk of crop failures. Santa Elena usually receives more than 160 inches of rain a year. The people living in this village depend on what they grow for what they eat. Every home has a pile of dried corn, still in the husk, stacked in orderly rows, on display and honored. As we go from home to home I begin to notice even slight differences in the amount of corn each household has. It is as if an American could look into each of his neighbors’ savings accounts. Our walk was guided by two of the bird monitors in the Toledo Ecotourism Associations (TEA) bird monitoring project, supported in part by the Global Environmental Fund (GEF) and Plenty International. The TEA is developing a population baseline on the hundreds of species of birds in southern Belize. Each TEA village has at least two bird monitors. This is important work. Information the monitors are gathering will lead us to some of the critical elements of this rainforest. Participants in the TEA monitoring project are gaining familiarity with the scientific method, collecting data in a systematic fashion. The learning that comes out of working together on a valuable project is empowering.

In addition, indigenous people of eight villages are learning skills that have already translated into material gain. They are leading nature walks for bird watchers and environmentalists from Europe and the United States, who are only now discovering this Eden in southern Belize. At its best the interaction of visitors and the indigenous people enriches both and deepens our understanding of our shared planet. The legacy of this project will not only be the data collected, it must include changes in the lives of individuals associated with the project.

Eladio Chiac was the oldest of our guides, my age actually. When I first met him a couple of years ago he had just received Belize government training to be the village healthcare worker for Santa Elena. Santa Elena is a small settlement of thirty thatched roofed homes scattered over low hills. The houses are neat on the inside, sparse even. Women kneel to cook on low clay stoves molded on hardened earth floors. Villagers are direct descendants of the Mayas living in this land at least 4000 years. Santa Elena has no electricity, no phones, and no cars.

We were joined by Eladio’s son, Elisandro. Elisandro explained the monitoring technique. We go to each station for one hour. Every bird we hear and see is written down. Elisandro waved his hand towards the crystalline waters of the Rio Blanco. Lee Jones showed us. A dedicated ornithologist, Lee Jones, has helped each village select monitoring sights, and has given detailed instructions on bird identification in the field. Lee has just completed writing a field guide to the Birds of Belize being published by the University of Texas Press. In the TEA villages his work is already paying off.

Another trainee, an intense and quiet young man named Felicio stands with us, holding a copy of Peterson’s Field Guide to Mexican Birds. Every time we see a different species he flips through the pages and reads the names in a stage whisper, “scarlet-collared tanager,” and a moment later, when a small flock of ruddy ground doves passed, he points in the book and, using Belizean pronunciation, says, “roody ground dove.” Most Santa Elena residents speak a pleasant English as a language of commerce but at home the language is Mopan Maya and, for a dozen or so, Kek’chi. The earlier rainstorm ripped leaves and branches from the trees and melted the only road through town into a river of mud. Then the showers passed and the sun filled the air with steam. Clouds were rising at our feet and drifting down the Maya Mountains to the swamps and forests below.

Birds were hopping from the shelter of leaf clusters and perching on the most exposed branches to dry their feathers. Closely spaced trees hosted a congregation of melodious blackbirds, groove-billed anis, and the gorgeous scarlet-rumped tanager, all spreading their tail feathers and pruning their wings. The scarlet-rumped tanager is fairly abundant around here. Its silken black body contrasts with the exploding red brilliance of the rump. I have been peering through binoculars at a much rarer bird when a scarlet-rumped passed in front. My eyes naturally followed beauty and I pulled the tanager into focus. From a less flashy bird came a song, not unlike the song of the summer tanagers that breed in the eastern United States. What’s making that song? I ask. Eladio chuckles and points. See the yellow on the wings? Now I see it. Eladio speaks with some reverence, “It’s a yellow-winged warbler.”

Moments later a blue-grey tanager alights in a narrow leafed tree, its thin branches bent with marble-sized yellow fruit. The blue-grey, like all tanagers, loves fruit and feed wherever it ripens, from the tops of the mature canopy to the sun-hungry shrubs of second growth habitats. Tanagers perch in the branches on short powerful legs in order to reach for fruit. Their long narrow wings allow them to sally forth and grab fruit on the wing. Those same wings propel them rapidly through the high reaches of the rainforest and over brief clearings and fields. Nearly six million years ago, when the Isthmus of Panama rose to connect South and North America, tanagers from the north swarmed into South America. In our time, even tanagers that nest in the United States return to the south as winter comes on. Without moving from where we stood near the edge of the village we could see blue-black grassquits, white collared seedeaters, boat-tailed grackles, and bronzed cowbirds—red eyes of the adult males burning in their heads. A keel-billed toucan flew over, its colossal beak silhouetted against the retreating clouds.

Eladio said, “Come on, I’ll show you listening post 3-B.” Away we went through a riot of thin trees and thick vines that joined together above a path that swallowed our group the way a robin takes a worm. Eladio explained that this was a field nearly twenty years ago. Now the jungle comes back. This is the same jungle that took back the mighty pyramids and great cities of the ancient Maya. This is the jungle that waits for Western civilization to stumble. But it is a battle the jungle may loose. The tropical rainforests are being cut as fast as millions of chain saws can take them down. This is good wood. Cheap wood. Soul-less corporations take what they please. As the path narrows Felicio turns his baseball cap so the bill sticks out backwards, giving him a big-city hip-hop look, strangely at home in the green jungle.

We moved quickly down a green tunnel that wound like a maze. Animal trails cut across our path into a bewildering labyrinth of dripping leaves, wet vines, and buttressed roots fingering the soil. We were entering mature forest.

Above the hum of insects auming came a quick series of short whistles. Music of the tropics. Enchanting. With gesture I asked Elisandro what creature could make such a pure, heart-touching song. He smiled at me like I had a couple of screws loose. Dusky antbird, he said matter-of-factly. Some may say the dusky antbird is better heard than seen. The bird is not conventionally beautiful, but its plaintive cry draws you in with repeated weeping. You want to know more. The first time a person hears the dusky piping, the music is familiar. It can touch, I believe, a place in our hearts that we share with birds. We stood in silence and listened.

Just before we got back to the first cleared house sight in Santa Elena we saw an ant-tanager. Ant-tanagers are another of those birds that join mixed species flocks eating the critters stirred up by army ants. But that’s not the disturbing thing. There are two kinds of ant-tanagers that closely resemble one another. The red-crowned ant-tanager and the red-throated ant-tanager are both robin-sized birds with beautiful red throats and darker, rusty backs. The red-throated has darker cheeks and the red-crowned has, get this, a red crown. These details are not always easy to discern. It’s not quite cricket to add an ant-tanager to a bird list unless you can say it is one or the other. But who cares how many birds are on a bird list? Should exploring nature be a competitive enterprise? At the risk of appearing shallow, I do find it interesting, in a detached sort of way, to count the number of species seen or heard on a particular outing. We do it for science. We do it for ego. We do it to meet the ultimate, actual reality present in every moment.

Sometimes naming, identifying, birds can get in the way of experiencing them. An epiphany came in the Coxcomb Basin, when an understory, mixed-species feeding flock suddenly surrounded me. There were several birds that seemed unfamiliar, but the field guide dropped, binoculars hung like an old yoke, while all around was chittering, churning, brilliant life-force. Even familiar birds were new and jewel-like. Three billion years of evolution is giving birth in that instant—giving birth every instant. Nothing is between the observer and the observed. That is how it was before Adam named the animals, when the world was a garden, self-willed and wild.

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